Customer Reviews

Ordeal of the Mountain Man (Mountain Man, No. 17)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Smoke Jensen gets a cripted letter. After interpreting it he gathers what he needs for the journy to San Fransico. Smoke finds his only acquaintance has been killed. Then he learns of a dangerous plot to take over all of the regions wealth. Smoke beats a trail back to the Sierras and gathers angry prospectors, ranchers, and farmers for the showdown in Frisco....

Power of the Mountain Man

Smoke Jensen got a letter from one of his buddies: now he's planning to go there and help him out. Sally Jensen, his wife, doesn't like him leaving the ranch with only her and a few guys's watching the ranch. Smoke and Sally make their living buying and selling mountain bred horses. The place they live is called Sugarloaf. He has built himself a reputation with a gun, and people say he draws like greased lighting. Now he is on his way, but he doesn't know what danger lies before him.

I like Smoke Jenson; he is strong and stands for good and right, but after reading other Last Mountain Man stories I could pretty much tell you what was going to happen around each bend in the trail. Smoke leaves his Wife on the ranch in the High Lonesome to save someone from bad guys. He kills many who don't backdown, lets the ones go who turn chicken, and turns very few over to the "Law". The same thing happens in other stories with different characters. This series needs some imagination and creativity or I may stop reading it.

I've read around 40 of WWJ's books and loved most of them but this (along with all the J.A. Johnstone books) is among the weakest. It doesn't have the feeling of many of the other books. It's set in San Fransisco, his opponents are Chinese workers, it just didn't work.

A friend of mine was reading Johnstone, and I decided to try one of his books. I don't think I'll be trying a second.

Power of the Mountain Man is about Smoke Jensen ("the last mountain man," as we are reminded ad nauseam) and his New Orleans buddy Louis Longmont, who easily dispose of some crooked businessmen trying to take over San Francisco, about the year 1880.

And right in that word "easily" is the key to the book's failure. Jensen and Longmont are so far superior to their opponents with gun, tomahawk, and trailsmanship, that I never felt any suspense or excitement over the outcome of their constant fights with the Forces of Evil. By page 50, when yet another chapter ends with Jensen's opponents filling their hands with guns or knives, I had stopped mentally crying out to Jensen, "Watch out!" and instead found myself addressing his enemies: "Oh God, you poor suckers are in for it now."

Alfred Hitchcock once said that a movie is only as good as its villain. Johnstone misses that lesson. Cyrus Murchison is apparently based on corrupt Central Pacific railroad baron Collis Huntingdon, even down to the sound of his name, but he lacks Huntingdon's criminal genius. With a spark of intelligence, Murchison could easily have defeated Jensen in the second half of the book; he finds himself fleeing in a train from Jensen, who is following in another train more than 45 minutes behind. All Murchison needs to do is stop and disconnect the rails behind him, and the Last Mountain Man will be road pizza. But no, Murchison stupidly insists he will beat Jensen "at his own game," and predictably doesn't even come close.

The hero has several points in his favor. To start with, he has a great name: "Smoke Jensen" is a ringing, almost poetic moniker for a gunfighter. He has several appealing character attributes: he is faithful to his wife, loves nature, stays cool under fire, and has compassion for his animals. His best moment occurs (in a flashback, oddly enough), when Jensen is trying to evade some Snake Indians in a storm. His faithful horse breaks its leg, and Jensen, at great risk to himself, stays with the animal until the rain stops, so he can put dry powder in his gun and kill the horse humanely. It's a nice vignette, more revealing of Jensen's character than anything that happens in the actual narrative.

One of Jensen's character flaws, his poor judgment of people, is an appealing one, humanizing him without making him dislikeable. He demonstrates it in this book by hiring two saddle tramps whose motives he should have suspected. But Jensen has a far worse drawback: he's a bully. He has no compunction about pushing people weaker than himself (which is just about everybody) around to get what he wants. Worse yet, Johnstone doesn't seem to realize that Jensen is a bully; none of the other characters resent or even question Jensen's behavior, and he never pays any price for it.

The book is crowded with action scenes, which get tedious quickly. Although I mentioned the main problem above, the lack of suspense, that's not all. The violent passages are also cluttered with the make, model and caliber of just about every firearm that comes into play. If Smith & Wesson and Colt's Manufacturing Company weren't paying product placement fees to Johnstone, they certainly should have been. In the heat of combat, it's ridiculous to focus the reader's (and by implication, the characters') attention on whether the opponent's six-gun is a 10mm Mauser or a .44 Dance, rather than on more pressing matters such as where it is pointed at the moment and how many shots it has left. Worse, unless you're intimately familiar with the firearms of the period, the gun names won't even help you visualize the scene. I finally took to reading the book while seated at the computer, so I could look up the firearms as I read their names.

The last problem with the action scenes is that they never convey the awful arbitrariness and unpredictability of real violence, the feeling that nobody is in full control of the situation. The best battle scenes have a sense of Clausewitzian friction, the difficulty of doing even the simplest thing under conditions of tremendous stress, fear, and urgency. Johnstone's scenes have more of the flavor of a boy's fantasy of what we would like violence to be: a simple, low-cost, triumphant assertion of our superiority and power over our enemies.

Johnstone does appear to have a good grasp of American Western history. Egregious anachronisms are avoided, and the flavor of rawhide seeps through the everyday scenes. You get a good sense of the ethnic mishmash and tensions that pervaded a young nation. The one place where Johnstone goes wrong is in his adventure into San Francisco's Chinatown; he imports pinyin spellings from the 1950s, like "Xiang" and cluelessly mashes them together with old Wade-Giles transliterations like "Lee" and "kung fu," and even throws in Japanese weapon names like "bo." Anyone familiar with Chinese culture will find this jarring, but I don't want to be too hard on Johnstone. Becoming an expert on American Western history must be difficult enough; it would be too much to ask him to become an expert on a four thousand year old civilization too.

So overall, despite a fairly appealing hero and a reasonable grasp of history, Johnstone is disappointingly shallow and juvenile. I would recommend old hands like Louis L'Amour, or even Zane Grey, over him.