>> archiveLansdale wild west novel gets off to a fast start

My favorite journalism professor used to say that if you had an hour to write a story, spend the first fifty minutes on the lead, or opening paragraph. He was exaggerating, of course, but his point was that if you don’t hook the reader in the first paragraph, it doesn’t much matter what else you write.

Nacogdoches novelist Joe R. Lansdale must subscribe to that theory as well. In his novels, he has a knack for writing an opening paragraph that grabs the reader and pulls him or her into the book with almost magnetic force.

Here is how Lansdale, writer-in-residence at Stephen F. Austin University and author of more than three dozen novels, begins his latest, Paradise Sky (Mulholland Books, $26 hardcover):

“Now, in the living of my life, I’ve killed deadly men and dangerous animals and made love to four Chinese women, all of them on the same night and in the same wagon bed, and one of them with a wooden leg, which made things a mite difficult from time to time. I even ate some of a dead fellow once when I was crossing the plains, though I want to rush right in here and make it clear I didn’t know him all that well, and we damned sure wasn’t kinfolks, and it all come about by a misunderstanding.”

If it isn’t obvious already, let me hasten to note that Lansdale’s novels (at least the five I have read) tend to be raw, violent, profane — and quite entertaining! If you tend to be offended by strong language, however, Lansdale is probably not for you.

Paradise Sky follows the exploits and adventures of a young black man, Willie Jackson, who was born into slavery and now at age twenty in the mid-1870s finds himself being hunted by a posse of vigilantes because he let his eyes linger on a white woman’s clothed backside while she was hanging out the wash. The woman’s husband feels personally wronged by this and sets out to have Willie lynched.

Willie escapes from East Texas, changes his name to Nat Love, becomes a buffalo soldier on the West Texas frontier, fights Indians, and makes his way to Deadwood, South Dakota Territory, where he befriends Wild Bill Hickok, acquires the nickname Deadwood Dick, and becomes a mythical literary figure — all the while pondering the possibility that his dogged adversary is still pursuing him.

It all makes for a rip-roaring tale from the wild west — rowdy but also insightful — told in the fictional Nat Love’s own words.

There was, in fact, a real Nat Love (1854–1921) whose published account of his own adventurous life bears only a slight resemblance to Lansdale’s version. Lansdale acknowledges that the real Nat Love “inspired so much of this story, at least in spirit.”

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Glenn Dromgoole is co-author, with Carlton Stowers, of 101 Essential Texas Books (Their list includes an earlier Lansdale novel, The Bottoms.) Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Lit

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