MONTANA NOIR: Gary J. Cook

According to the blog called “Coldlessons.blogspot.com” (subtitled “Montana Noir”) which is written by either Michael McCulloch, author of the novel called “Cold Lessons” or by Keir Graff, Booklist Online’s Senior Editor, the “Great Montana Crime Novels” are:
Black Cherry Blues, by James Lee Burke
Blood Trail, by Gary J. Cook
Deadman, by Jon A. Jackson
Death and the Good Life, by Richard Hugo
Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett
Stick Game, by Peter Bowen
The Last Good Kiss, by James Crumley
The Nature of Midnight, by Robert Rice
Winter Range, by Claire Davis

I don’t usually read “noir,” so the only ones I’ve read are “Winter Range,” “Death and the Good Life” and “The Last Good Kiss.” But this is a set of writers who aren’t in the usual Missoula rhapsodic Montana ranchlife sort of context. Burke and Crumley, the “Old Bulls,” are occasionally interviewed at the Montana Festival of the Book.

I’m thinking about this because Gary Cook just come over my horizon recently in the form of an inquiry about what a Blackfeet warrior might wear in 1800. He’d found me via Google, that strange trickster and introduction artist. By now, I’m at least a reader of his. This is an open (rather edited) letter to him that I just sent:

First, it's a grim chilly day and I'd planned to go to GF, but decided to put it off. Now I'm glad because I just found out that the GF Book Festival is on Saturday -- a well-kept secret (why are writers and book aficionadoes so secretive?). Then they wonder why no one but the already initiated ever comes. The heroes (and they ARE that in GF minds) will be Jamie Ford, Aaron Parrett and Pete Fromm who will read Friday night.

On Saturday will be jr. hi kids -- I heard them last year and they were pretty good -- and a panel including Jamie Ford, Liz Larcom and Carleen Milburn. They're going to tell how to make a living from writing. I thought that might be pretty useful!

Then Carleen Milburn, Elsie Pankowski, Beatrix Jenness, Gerianne Poulsen and Carl Jensen, who are " a well-established GF group" it says, it will read. Then Anne Bauer (Helena) and Frederick Bridger tell about how to have a writing group. Then another group reads: Larry Bauer, Lowell Jaeger, Brady Robinson, Kelly Egleine, Mark Gibbons, Dave Thomas and Henrietta Goodman.

I've never read ANYTHING by any of these guys. Someone referred me to Jamie Ford's website and I've been watching it. The only other person I ever heard of is Lowell Jaeger (maybe Carl Jensen) but I can't remember what I heard. I doubt that any of them have heard of me either. My experience is that writing (and all the other arts) in Montana are bunched up into little enclaves, self-protective, unknown to the public until they hit the Manhattan NY scene where the publicity lives. The Montana Festival of the Book usually just rounds up the usual suspects: i.e. the people the organizers know.

Second, Last night I fumbled around on the Internet until I found the beginning of Cook’s "Blood Trail" which is still supposed to be coming through Inter-library loan. Very cinematic. Easy to imagine Brad Pitt and some new version of Tom Berenger. Dunno if any Hollywood wranglers have cobra snakes on hand. I look forward to the rest, but I'm NOT fond of snakes, though I can tolerate big squeezers rather than little vipers. (I used to impound escaped boas when I did animal control stuff. Amazing to hold.)

Third, "Wounded Moon" came in the mail this morning and I just finished reading it. Won't finish thinking about it for quite a while. On one level it's the usual ranger romance ("I'm initiated and therefore competent, but you aren't, so you'd better treat me nice!”) Sort of an Appalachian Western. (Ed Abbey claimed that Westerns CAME FROM the Appalachians, which means -- I suppose -- that they really come from the Scots/English borderlands. Or at least their mindset: defiant exceptionalism.)

On another level, the story (a killer grizz is after a little girl) is real and easily absorbed because of small accurate details. The mysticism, when it begins to creep in, is almost "Annie Dillard" style at first -- a cloud of singing birds. The rage in the grizz is as much a natural infection as a response to a transponder in the hands of evil men. And I like the angels being horsemen (no wings). (We've had enough of Apocalyptic Evil Horsemen as in "Lord of the Rings.") The man in this story who buries dolls was real, but connected to the mystic, which is on the line between life and death. I did begin to feel as though All the Men were Heroic, All the Women were Competent, and all the Children were Angels. Except for a few local thugs from under rocks.

I'm a practical and scientific person with an anthropological itch and a love of animals. At the moment I'm trying to write about liturgy, how to shape it so it calls the spirit. My conviction is that there IS a world out there, but we only have our mind/bodies as instruments to interface with it -- faulty and untrained. Words won't suffice. I'm very interested in the "felt concepts" that psychoanalysts and some mind-theory people consider. Pre-, sub-, alternate -- whatever: what we dream, what inspires poetry, song and art, what is at the heart of religious systems. It is possible to learn a kind of discipline, a way of managing one's own consciousness, calling people -- entirely leaving aside whether it's "true" or not. NO magic.

This is where I thought Gary shone, never quite picking up the usual dogma about what is what, but never brushing the whole thing off with some glib explanation either. He spoke of the True without trying to impose it. He respects the mystery.

Who can draw the lines?

Anyway, it was a good thriller besides -- all the best heroes get martyred. All the best lovers escape having to live happily ever after, washing the dishes and fixing the car. And there was a dog named "History." I suspect it was a catahouya hound.

I’m very pleased at “discovering” Gary J. Cook. Maybe day after tomorrow I’ll discover other compelling Montana writers in GF.