Cole & Hitch
Robert B Parker (1932 - 2010)
In 2001 he published Gunman’s Rhapsody, a tale of Wyatt Earp
in 1879, and in 2005 the first Cole & Hitch story came out, Appaloosa.
It was excellent. So good, in
fact, that it was rapidly made into a movie, Appaloosa (Groundswell, 2008) and that film is also extremely
good. It follows the book very closely.
Before his death in January
2010, Parker wrote three more, Resolution
(published 2008), Brimstone (2009)
and Blue-Eyed Devil (2010).
The main attraction of these novels
is of course the two central characters, Virgil Cole and his partner Everett
Hitch. They do gun work. Usually they act as town-tamers, cleaning up treed or
lawless communities, always strictly within the law – even if they do write the
laws themselves.
Virgil is the boss. He is
supremely good at what he does, apparently without fear, and like all good
Western heroes taciturn, tough, proficient with guns but always acting
according to his code of honor. He is uneducated, though he reads, carefully
and slowly, in an effort to better himself. There is an amusing piece of
‘business’ throughout the stories as he struggles to build his vocabulary and
slips unknowingly (though Everett knows) into malapropisms. The names Cole and Virgil (one could have added Morgan
or Clay) are extremely useful in
Westerns. They are redolent of Earps and Youngers. To the cognoscenti the names signify gunman,
tough-guy, lawman, possibly badman. Any combination will do, so the hero could have
been Morgan Cole, Clay Morgan, and so on. Parker chose Virgil Cole and it
works.
Everett (eight-gauge ready) waits as Virgil approaches
Everett, Virgil’s deputy, tells
the stories in the first person. He is a former West Point Army officer who
felt too constrained by military discipline and left to do scouting,
prospecting, be a Wells, Fargo shotgun messenger and finally do gun work. His
trademark is a long eight-gauge that sprays shot all over but he’s pretty handy
with a Colt too. Educated, loyal, modest, he is the ideal foil for Virgil and
ideal narrator.
The relationship between the
two is funny, dry and crisp. Parker does buddy stories really well and if
Spenser and Hawk had been around in the West they might have been just like
Cole and Hitch.
Appaloosa
In Appaloosa we are introduced to the pair and there follows a classic
story of a town (Appaloosa) treed by a brutal rancher, Randall Bragg, who has
murdered the local town marshal, tough Jack Bell, who had come to arrest some of Bragg's
hands for rape and murder. Said rape and murder in the town constitute a
prologue. Elmore Leonard warned us against prologues but I don’t mind them.
Actually, I use ‘em.
Vol 1
Cole and Hitch are hired on by
the aldermen as town-taming lawmen and duly bring a (very) tough form of law
‘n’ order to the rough little town. The arrival of Mrs. French, Allie, in
Appaloosa and Cole’s subsequent attraction to her (it’s almost an infatuation) complicates
the issue. Allie is a great creation: she is basically a clever slut who
inveigles her way into the heart (and bed) of whoever is the top dog at the
time, be it marshal, hired gun or saloon owner. Virgil becomes increasingly
aware of her shortcomings but still wants her as his wife.
Cole and Hitch arrest and imprison Bragg for
the murder of Marshal Bell but Bragg hires two top-notch gunnies, the lethal
Shelton brothers. Conflict is inevitable…
It’s a straight Western story,
very well told, and the movie Ed Harris made of it does it full justice. As
always, there are small changes in the film but nothing significant.
As with all the stories, much
of the plot is developed in dialogue. Descriptive passages are kept to a
minimum (it’s one of the reasons the books make such good films). The dialogue
is spare, authentic and very enjoyable. The only slight lapse might be the rather
heavy-handed symbolism of the appaloosa stallion, boss of the herd on the edge
of town. But it’s a fairly short aside and doesn’t really get in the way.
There’s little arty or literary
about these books. They are straight-down-the-line Western tales. But they are
very well told. Like his heroes’ gun work, Parker makes it look deceptively simple.
Can you have Quality Pulp as a genre? If you can, this is it.
Resolution
Resolution was the sequel to Appaloosa, a kind of episode 2. Everett
has left Virgil, who is settled with Allie in Appaloosa, and drifted. He
arrives in the town of Resolution and signs on as a shotgun lookout in a saloon.
The saloon is run by a tough customer named Amos Wolfson who owns most of the
town and aims to grab it all. After fifteen chapters, Virgil turns up. Allie
has run off with another man, Virgil has killed him and thereby broken his own
rule of always acting within the law. He is now a gunman like any other. He
says he’ll hang around and keep company with Everett, so we have a curious
situation in which Virgil is almost Everett’s sidekick rather than the other
way round. But of course that gradually changes as Virgil gradually,
imperceptibly assumes command.
Vol 2
The role of the Shelton
brothers in Appaloosa, the two professional gunmen
adversaries (adversities as Virgil calls them) who might be better even than
Cole and Hitch, is this time taken by the shootists Cato and Rose. They are
strong, distinct and memorable characters.
It’s a semi-Yojimbo plot, with two rival criminal
gangs vying for control of the town and Cole and Hitch in the middle, alongside
poor sodbuster settlers. The dumb Wolfson keeps on hiring gunmen who slip away
from him, to be replaced by other gunmen who do the same. Everett says he’s
like a rabbit hiring coyotes.
There’s quite an interesting
meditation on the morality of what these samurai-gunmen are doing, led by
Virgil who is feeling his way after losing his previous pretty straightforward
moral compass, the law. As Cole and Hitch seem to be drifting away from legal
peace-keeping towards freelance gun work, Cato and Rose appear to be going in
the opposite direction.
Well, I won’t tell you how it
pans out but I can reveal that the end of the book sets up Volume 3 as the
partners head down to Texas in search of, you guessed it, Allie.
Brimstone
Brimstone, which was published in 2009, is
another novel named after a town. Cole and Hitch head down to Texas and finally
find Allie in a ratty town's rattiest brothel. They then get work as
deputies in Brimstone, so they are lawing again. Of course it’s a rough town
with two rival powers, this time Pike, an ex-Army saloon owner and Brother
Percival, a crazed corrupt preacher. They are as obnoxious as each other. Allie
has promised to reform but of course dallies with both. It’s amazing Virgil
sticks with her but he does.
Vol 3
There’s a sub-plot of a
Comanche out for revenge on Pike for having massacred women and children in his
Army days. This Indian abducts a farmer woman and her daughter and sells them to Mexicans.
Cole and Hitch rescue them with the aid of another character, Pony Flores, who is
an Apache, well, half Apache anyway, a sympathetic type.
Of course the two would-be town
bosses, each with a private army of gunmen, come to blows…
The end of the third volume
brings Virgil, Everett and Allie back to Appaloosa, where the old gray stallion
still rules his herd of mares. The final story is set up.
Blue-Eyed Devil
In Blue-Eyed Devil the saga comes full circle: it is set in
Appaloosa. There is an Indian threat aspect of the story (the title refers to
the Apaches’ way of describing white men) as Pony Flores’s brother, Kah-to-nay,
leads a raiding party on the town to kill and rape its inhabitants and burn it
to the ground.
Vol 4 - but not, as it turns out, the last
But essentially it is the
mixture as before. This time the two rival powers are the new marshal, Amos
Callico, an ambitious and unscrupulous politician using the post just as a
stepping stone, and the retired Confederate General Laird, whose brattish son,
Nicholas, makes the mistake of thinking he can out-gun Virgil Cole.
It all builds up to an
excellent climax as Cole and Hitch side with a professional gunman, Chauncey Teagarden, whom the General
has hired to avenge the death of his son, against the
obnoxious Callico. Parker is good at these pro gunfighters who have their own
code of honor and respect each other, even if on opposite sides. Another pair,
from Resolution, join them in their fight: Cato and Rose join the party. With
Pony and the general they make up the Mystical Western Number of seven.
Have you noticed how many
Westerns feature the MWN of seven riders in a posse or gunmen or members of a gang?
The Magnificent Seven is only the
most famous example. There are many others. Next time you are watching a
Western and a group of riders gallop across the screen, count. The odds are on
there being seven. I think seven is the maximum number the average head can get
round and yet they still remain distinct and memorable individuals. But it’s big enough
to constitute a significant fighting force, a mini-army. It’s the goldilocks
number for a posse.
As with the other books, Blue-Eyed Devil gives us the terse, wisecracking
dialogue which advances the action. As with Elmore Leonard, pretty well the
only verb used to describe utterances is an unadorned, adverbless said. Descriptive passages are kept to a
minimum and there is no purple prose whatsoever. It’s tight as a drum.
The style has much in common
with Robert B Parker’s crime novels, of course. I have referred before in this
blog to the similarity between tough private-eye stories and Westerns. They both
deal in lead, friend.
Doubtless, had Mr. Parker
lived, we would have enjoyed further Cole and Hitch stories from his pen. But
it was not to be. In fact, though, these four books, by chance or design, do
make up an entity, a tetralogy. In any case, they are four excellent Westerns,
a must for any fan of the genre.
The future
There’s a new novel out,
marketed as Robert B. Parker's Ironhorse
(Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch #5) by Robert Knott. I haven’t read it yet. Not
sure I want to but I guess I probably will. Mr. Knott is described thus: “Chosen
by the Estate of author Robert B. Parker to carry on the Cole and Hitch series
of western novels, Robert Knott is an actor, writer, and producer. His list of
stage, television, and film credits include the feature film Appaloosa based on
the Robert B. Parker novel.”
We'll see...
The blurb tells us:
For years, Virgil Cole and
Everett Hitch have ridden roughshod over rabble-rousers and gun hands in
troubled towns like Appaloosa, Resolution, and Brimstone. Now, newly
appointed as Territorial Marshalls [sic], they find themselves traveling by train
through the Indian Territories. Their first marshaling duty starts out as
a simple mission to escort Mexican prisoners to the border, but when the
Governor of Texas, his wife and daughters climb aboard with their bodyguards
and $500,000 in tow, their journey suddenly becomes a lot more complicated.
The problem is Bloody Bob Brandice. He and Virgil have had it out before, an encounter that left Brandice face-down in the street with two .44 slugs lodged in him. Now, twelve years later on a night train struggling uphill in a thunderstorm, Brandice is back – and he’s not alone. Cole and Hitch find themselves in the midst of a heist with a horde of very bad men, two beautiful young hostages, and a man with a vendetta he’s determined to carry out.
The problem is Bloody Bob Brandice. He and Virgil have had it out before, an encounter that left Brandice face-down in the street with two .44 slugs lodged in him. Now, twelve years later on a night train struggling uphill in a thunderstorm, Brandice is back – and he’s not alone. Cole and Hitch find themselves in the midst of a heist with a horde of very bad men, two beautiful young hostages, and a man with a vendetta he’s determined to carry out.
Well, we’ll see. Maybe we are
in for a long series. Might not be a bad thing, though some of the reviews of Ironhorse have been less than glowing.
But why hasn’t Ed Harris made
any more Cole and Hitch movies after Appaloosa?
It’s most remixed of him, as Virgil might say. “He means remiss,” I said. “That’s
right, remiss,” Virgil said.
The Hitch/Cole novels are very fine, and the first is especially good.
ReplyDeleteI had the good fortune of meeting Parker at a mystery weekend event many years ago, and can say that he was friendly, engaging and outgoing. It's always nice when writers one likes turn out to be real gents.
I bet he was. It shines through his books.
DeleteJeff
Thanks for this post, Jeff - I love the Jesse Stone books (and the movies) but I was unaware of Parker's westerns. I'll definitely give them a go, and track down "Appaloosa" on video.
ReplyDeleteYou won't be disappointed!
DeleteJeff
Such a shame Mr. Parker only completed four of these classics before he left us. Having just discovered the series, and currently reading the last one of the four, I, like the writer, probably will read the Robert Knott ones at some time. If I don't get wrapped up in the "Parker would have never written it like that" attitude, and I may just enjoy them as well.
ReplyDeleteHi there
DeleteI haven't read the Knott ones yet - not sure why!
Best wishes,
Jeff
I'd read all his other series and inadvertently picked up the final Cole Hitch novel first, not realizing it hadn't even been written by Parker. I couldn't tell the difference. I just read Appaloosa and Resolution, and I still can't tell the difference. Knott's done a very good job, and I would be one of those people who would snort in disgust and hurl the novel to the floor if not, so I get your point! No transgressions that I could tell. Am now set to read my way through 10 and will yes, reread #10 because...they're that good.
DeleteI love the Cole/Everret books, but grew very tired of the Allie character. Cole has his act together is so many ways, that I find it unrealistic that he would continue his relationship with her after all of the ways she has let him down (and clearly always will based upon her personality).
ReplyDeleteShe is hard to like, certainly!
DeleteJeff
well....what did he say in Appaloosa? She's like no one he's ever me. He's been with a few whores, some squaws...she speaks real good...and she takes a bath every night before she goes to bed. Me? I'm over there with Katie and Hitch and the both of you - after reading book #1. But per my comment above - I inadvertently read #10 first and had no idea this was how Cole & Allie began.
DeleteI wonder if the character of Ally relates to someone in Mr. Parker's life?
ReplyDelete