Country: USA
Genre: Western
Pages: 344 Kb (eOriginal)
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Writing a Western (or any form of historical fiction, really) in 2011 is something really hard to do. It's all about perspective. There is over a century of historical perspective that you can't deny, so acknowledging it without being judgmental and turning your characters into caricatures of the era. David Cranmer, also known as Edward A. Grainger (please, read the story behind his alias, it's really cool) writes westerns that are both smart and candid enough to feel real. The first volume of the adventures of Cash and Miles re-examined the far west with going through the some of the issues that were not discussed in literature until fairly recently and it worked beautifully. I have good news for my fellow Western lovers out there, the second volume picks up where the first has left off and goes even deeper in the re-examination of the Old West issues. The Amazon best-selling writer has done it again!
The first story (co-written by Chuck Tyrell, a few stories in this anthology are), ORIGINS OF WHITE DEER takes about half of the collection. It's one of those stories that start quietly, but who keeps making more sense as you turn the pages and start seeing the bigger picture. It's a story that retraces the origins of Cash Laramie, which is, "pardon-my-french", pretty ballsy. Writing a Western story about fragmented identity is standing on slippery ground and yet, Grainger and Tyrell make it work remarkably well. It's by patiently piecing up the pieces of Cash Laramie that you come to understand his vision on the racial problems in between white people and natives. He's not taking sides (even if the white people are often the ones fucking up), but this paralyzing dilemma will make him turn to law enforcement for a living, so that he can have the power to do the right thing.
Once again though, it's Cash Laramie's occasional partner, Gideon Miles that charmed me the most. I'm not sure why. I feel he's a little less of a hero archetype, but it might just be my natural inclination to root for the underdog. Both characters are great, but I just like Gideon a tiny bit better. In MILES IN BETWEEN, he's given a task that would challenge the ethics of anybody. He's escorting a criminal to a trial that seems like anything but fair to him. He's often caught in those situations that demand a lot more out of a man than good shooting skills and a knowledge of the law. Once again, Miles will have to dig himself out of a conflict where he can't really win, being a black man in the far west. This one hit home big time.
Usually he felt empty after killing a man, like taking a life took a little part of his own. Sometimes, Cash thought, justice comes from a gun
I'll say it, I liked volume two better than volume one. While in the first volume, he still figured some things out and had stories that read more like a conventional western, here he found his approach, the right way to tell the stories of Cash and Miles. It's a lot more personal and a visceral. I would even say it's darker because in this volume, you get a better understanding about how the two heroes feel about the world they live in. THE ADVENTURES OF CASH LARAMIE AND GIDEON MILES VOL. II is a great, quick read that suits the eReader format perfectly. There is a reason why Edward A. Grainger is so successful on Amazon. He doesn't write just great westerns. This is great fiction.