Coyote Revenge

The only thing I could possibly fault Coyote Revenge for is its title, which is just a tetch slick and a might superficial, possibly making an unneeded plea for the Hillerman crowd. The author, Fred Harris, is clearly a polished writer and though this is his first mystery novel, he has ten non-fiction books to his credit. He is also a past senator from Oklahoma, the setting of the book, and is currently a professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Up front I have to concede that the mystery, as such, isn't the most impressive aspect of Coyote Revenge. The single greatest achievement of the novel is a compelling, marvelously accurate, pervasive sense of time and place-depression era Oklahoma boondocks. Harris can hardly be old enough to remember 1935, but in places like rural Oklahoma things probably hadn't changed much by the Fifties.

One of the things I've been known to argue both ways in fiction is authentic detail and textual accuracy. Ed McBain notwithstanding, a mystery writer should know his guns-they are part of the furnishings, functioning the way a skeleton supports the vision of the figure artist. On the other hand, it is fiction, after all; the central obligation of the novelist is to tell a tale, to entertain. What difference does it make if Tony Hillerman puts one too many floors on the Indian hospital in Gallup?

Personally, however, I give high marks to authentic detail-second only to originality on my points list. When a guy writes about rodeo I want to know he's smelled the sweat of man and beast, felt the eye-crossing jar of a stiff-legged landing and savored the delicate taste of the dung dust. One of Paretsky's fatal flaws for me is letting her research hang out.

I'm an old farm boy, and I can tell you Harris really knows his stuff. Many, if not all, the arcane details will be lost on the average reader I suspect; the scene at a small-town auction ring, the workings of brands of farm machinery that are distant memories. The good-ole-boy speech idiom is near perfect, if the nicknames do get just a little tedious.

I hate comparing one writer to another, but sometimes it gives the prospective reader a bit of anchor. Because of time and place Harris reads something like Harold Adams who writes about rounder Carl Wilcox in Depression era Dakota, a brawler and jack-of-all-trades who rolls his own smokes. About all he has in common with Harris' Okie Dunn is that he's a scrapper who comes back to his hometown something of a failure with a bad reputation to live down-or up to as the case may be.

"Okie" Dunn is only a decade out of high school; a failed prizefighter who has just flunked out of law school. He comes back to little Vernon. Oklahoma, to lick his wounds, taking up cattle trading for a living, following in his ne'er-do-well father's footsteps. "Hudge" Dunn and his pal "Stud" buy and sell cattle on a thin margin.

Okie immediately runs into his old high school runnin' buddy "Dub" Ready, who, not yet thirty, is High Sheriff. He loves the perks of the job, that's obvious. His sister Juanita (only the men get nicknames) obviously has a past with Okie and it must have been pretty steamy and intense. There doesn't seem to be any hard feeling.

The story hardly has time to get it's boots comfortable on the porch railing when Okie finds out his old pal Dub may be crooked. That fact hardly has time to sink in when Okie is holding Dub's bleeding corpse in his arms, puzzling over his dying words and promising to avenge his murder. He and Dub's widow know each other from way back too.

Coyote Revenge is busting out with colorful characters like Okie's two bachelor uncles who were shell shocked in the Big War, a Comanche chief who may or may not hold some priceless oil leases. Then there's the sheriff's office girl who is literally living on starvation wages and the colored man "Poss" Tatum, black club owner and bootlegger, who might have been working a scam with the late sheriff. This is all wonderful stuff.

Juanita is undeniably sexy, but an unlikely femme fatale from Podunk, Oklahoma. Okie has a hard time resisting her wiles. She's also pretty liberated for the Thirties. There's a scene right out of Oklahoma the musical where the menfolks bid on box lunches at a school fundraiser.

Papa Hudge is a sure-enough character too, boozing and womanizing. Even though he's pretty much a failure he calls no man boss. Though he only in his early fifties he's used up and run down, too much fighting and drinking and not enough vegetables in his diet. His lungs are about destroyed by heavy smoking and he doesn't have long to live.

Of course Okie solves the murder, but it isn't too much of a surprise. What lingers is a great and colorful cast of characters, a folksy visit to the past, and a tremendously engaging sense of time and place. I'd like to see more of these characters, though I'm not sure the outcome of Coyote Revenge allows for much of a sequel. Though I have no doubts Fred Harris is up to the task.