Amazon.com Review
What is it about single-monikered artists that inclines them toward constantly remaking themselves? Trevanian, for instance, changes fictional genres about as often as Madonna changes hair styles. In
Shibumi he wrote a classic early-'80s paranoid thriller à la Robert Ludlum, complete with a Zen-trained assassin protagonist who, in addition to being the world's most accomplished killer, is also so gifted tantrically speaking that he can give a woman multiple mind-blowing orgasms from three states away. Then came
The Summer of Katya, a tender romance set in Basque country in 1917.
The Main was yet another switch--a profound exploration of character masquerading as a police procedural set in Montreal. In
Incident at Twenty-Mile Trevanian changes hats yet again and produces a remarkable novel set in the Old West.
The year is 1898 and the place is Twenty-Mile, a dying silver-mining town in the hills of Wyoming. Matthew, a young drifter who models himself after the Ringo Kid, a character in a dime-store novel, arrives and soon manages to ingratiate himself with the citizenry. Though given to fabricating tales about his past (one skeptical citizen tells him, "You know what you are young man? You're a natural born con. That was pretty slick, the way you picked up on one of my girls singing upstairs and parlayed it into telling me that your ma was religious, that your folds were dead, and that you were all alone in this cruel, cruel world."), Matthew seems a harmless enough fellow to the folk who employ him in various odd jobs. Then one day, escaped murderer Hamilton Leider concocts a crazy plan to rob the silver mine and young Matthew becomes the lynchpin in the town's struggle for survival. Gritty, violent, and resolutely unromantic when it comes to the romance of the West, Incident at Twenty-Mile is a harrowing and memorable foray into the past. --Margaret Prior
From Publishers Weekly
The mysterious, pseudonymous Trevanian, who scored several bestselling hits in the 1970s and early '80s with The Main, The Eiger Sanction and Shibumi, is back after a long silence?and turns out to be as unpredictable as ever. This time, he has written a kind of archetypal western set at the turn of the century in a God-forsaken little town that supports a silver mine in the wilds of Wyoming. A racist and violently psychotic killer, Lieder, breaks out of jail and descends on the community with two subhuman sidekicks. Matthew Dubchek is a friendly, cheerful young drifter who has lugged his dead father's weighty old rifle into town and is looking for a job among Twenty-mile's assorted misfits. They are a crew any moviegoer would recognize: the sullen, dying gambler; the decent Jewish merchant; the black soldier of fortune; the bedraggled crew of whores at the Traveller's Welcome saloon; the tightfisted Swedish hotelkeeper; the storekeeper's beautiful daughter. Still, they are rendered with uncommon skill, and Matthew's efforts, simultaneously heartfelt and wily, to ingratiate himself with them are sharply drawn. From the moment Lieder and his gang arrive, the outcome is never in doubt, but Trevanian creates considerable tension, even if some of the scenes seem to have a pruriently violent edge. If the book had ended some 20 pages earlier than it does, it would have been a solid, well-crafted and often exciting western. In a penultimate section, however, Trevanian chooses to introduce himself as author, offering a seemingly spurious account of how he found his story, replete with old newspaper cuttings, and even winding up with a cast list and an indication of what became of his characters in later years. It's a pointless exercise that adds nothing to what has preceded it.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
