The Cowboy With the Tiffany Gun

Rating:
Summary: A Man Called Pyg
Review: Anyone who thinks this book is well-written hasn't read many books.

It's full of sentences so awkward that the reader has to stop and stare. This one, for example: "Like Big Sal's foot, a worry kept growing inside Pyg." Now, I'm not a medical person, but I'd say that if you had someone else's foot growing inside you, being worried would pretty much go without saying.

"He was as heavy, as motionless, as death, but he was still breathing." Was death really heavy back then? And how clever those cowboys must have been-breathing while being motionless is a tough act. No one can do that today.

The hero of this tale is a prancing Bostonian who yells "Mumsy! Mumsy help!" when anything goes wrong. Although he has never fired a gun before, within a few months he is the greatest marksman the world has ever known. When a badman aims a rifle at him from 75 yards away, our hero shoots first, sending his bullet right straight down the barrel of the other man's gun, disabling it. It was no fluke shot, either-our hero is that darn good. Right.

The story is packed with other events so unlikely as to be laughable. The hero and friends sneak up on the evil-doer's camp, planning to kidnap one of them to bring him to justice. The badmen are sleeping on the ground around a smoldering fire. The very man they're after, a cold-blooded killer, gets up to urinate. Does he just take a few steps away from the group to do his business in the tall grass? Oh, no. He wanders around until he's far from camp, searching for "the perfect place to take a leak." This moonlight quest, presumably for a rock formation in the shape of a urinal, makes him really easy to kidnap. Right.

The hero and friends come to a town to ask about the badmen they are chasing. That night, a terrible flood destroys the town. The hero is trapped in a hotel room! He barely escapes with his life! The cowboys stay and help rebuild the town, because that's their code. As soon as it's done, a terrible fire destroys the town. Oh no! The hero is trapped in a hotel room! He barely escapes with his life! Then the cowboys ride away, figuring they'd spent enough time in that town (so much for the code).

I believe a good writer could convey a sense of the haunting isolation one feels when alone on a great plain, without flogging the whole idea until it begs for mercy. Listen to Latham try to do it:

"Pyg was lonesome. He had insisted on going alone, but now he was lonely. He looked ahead of him and saw nothing but flat nothing. This landscape of rippling grass reminded him of Boston's rippling ocean, but this sea bore no ships. Lonesome. Once this land would have offered herds of buffalo to keep Pyg company, but no more. This sea was fished out. Anyway all the big fish were gone. The only life left was small and creeping and hidden from sight. He couldn't even find a prairie dog or a horned frog to keep him company. Lonely."

Save your money.