“No good deed goes unpunished” (Oscar Wilde)
Those
who think that Craig Johnson’s Longmire series, about Sheriff Walter Longmire
of Absaroka County, Wyoming, are not Westerns are going to have their views
confirmed by volume 3 of the saga, Kindness
Goes Unpunished (Viking Penguin, 2007), because in it Walt, Henry Standing
Bear and Vic Moretti (and even Dog) all decamp to the City of slightly less than Brotherly
Love and the book is really a hard-boiled urban crime drama.
Still,
if I tell you that the final pages have Walt and Henry mounted on paint horses chasing
down the villain with forty-fives, like some overweight Lone Ranger and a rather
bossy Tonto, you will agree that Walt manages to bring just a bit of the West
to Philadelphia. There is a cowboy-and-Indian theme running through it and Walt
has to decipher Indian clues to solve the mystery.
For
daughter Cady – a lawyer in Philly; that’s why Walt went there – has been
attacked and lies in a coma at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
and having no jurisdiction there will not stop her dad finding out who did it.
Henry is there to exhibit those Mennonite photographs from volume 2, and he and
Walt drive there from Wyoming in Lola, the powder-blue 1950s Ford Thunderbird
(which gets, er, slightly damaged in a car chase).
New
characters are Vic’s family, the Moretti clan, 99% of whom seem to be police,
and Walt dallies with Vic’s mother – though finally consummates his interest in
Vic as well. At least Vic isn’t married to the Philadelphia police chief, so it’s
probably safer.
Well, The Wire it ain’t but there are plenty
of drug-related lowlifes to combat and mucho shootin’ to match the rootin' and the tootin’.
I like
these books and Walt in his cowboy boots and Stetson give me hope that the West
is not dead and gone but alive and well, even if living (temporarily) in
Pennsylvania.
There’s
slightly more Native American mumbo-jumbo than I like but I can live with it.
Western
fans will pick up references to Have Gun,
Will Travel (page 36), Audie Murphy (page 83) and The Lone Ranger (page
275).
Kindness Goes Unpunished is a must-read if you are into the
series but moderately missable if you are just a hopeless dyed-in-the-wool
Westernista. If, like me, you appreciate hard-boiled detective drama and police
procedurals as well as Westerns, this would definitely repay a visit to your
local bookstore. Writers like Elmore Leonard and Robert B Parker understood very
well the similarities between the two genres, and Craig Johnson does too.
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