Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Book Review: Preacher's Justice

Title: Preacher's Justice (“The First Mountain Man”)


Author: William W. Johnstone

Date: 2004

Publisher: Kensington

ISBN: 0-7860-1548-9

Length: 272 pages

Quote: “Preacher, who was twenty-seven years old, had been trapping in these mountains since he was fourteen.”

Not especially evangelical or devout, Preacher was called “Art” before he was kidnapped by some “Indians” to whom he preached a sufficiently long and fervent sermon that they decided he was an inspired lunatic and let him go. He has had an adventurous life—there are several volumes in this series.

He's never felt sure enough of his ability to live “in love” to want to settle down, but he has a girlfriend, an enslaved prostitute called Jennie. Horrid though Jennie's life story is, in real history many women's stories were even worse; the 1840s and 1850s were the period when idealization of Pure and Innocent Ladies reached literally sickening levels (tuberculosis was actually fashionable among people who scorned exercise, wholesome food, and “rude health”) while poor and enslaved women, whom nobody believed to be “innocent,” had no rights at all. If the best Johnstone can do for Jennie is to write her off with a good clean murder rather than a slow horrible death from a loathsome disease, which it is, Jennie has been one lucky little victim. Preacher, of course, doesn't see it that way. He feels obliged to be detective, judge, and executioner—and, this being a classic “shoot-'em-up Western novel,” he'll take out a lot of people, all nasty characters who'll never be missed, before page 272.

Racists, rapists, land grabbers, and busybodies get killed. Other baddies get a nice healthy dose of humiliation; Preacher buys a sackful of rusty “washers” to hand over to baddies who want to steal his money, a trick that actually worked, in the 1850s, because relatively few people (or horses) had the energy to carry around sacks of junk metal as well as sacks of gold coins. Johnstone has written novels with higher body counts, but “Western” publishers, and presumably readers, expect levels of violence that would be unacceptable in fiction set in their own century.

The real explorers who trapped and traded in the Rocky Mountains in the 1850s led lives of high adventure all right, though their life-and-death combat was more often against weather, infections, and animals than against other White men. An honest, detailed memoir would be much more interesting than the “shoot-'em-up Western” genre, invented by writers who had never been in the Rockies but had been in a fight somewhere. Perhaps especially valuable for our time, when stupid people sentimentalize about wanting to “protect” animals that eat humans, might be accurate accounts of how our more sensible ancestors dealt with bears and cougars. Nevertheless, among living writers in this genre, Johnstone rates high.

A glance at Amazon shows that "for people who like this kind of book, this is a book they like." "Good series...great read...good adventure...very good book...excellent...very well done...kept me interested all the way...a mighty fine job...hard to believe they wouldn't have a script in Hollywood for the Preacher." Lots of people have read Preacher's Justice and the majority of them have liked it. 


The bad news? It's not a Fair Trade Book; William W. Johnstone has a nephew who's promoting his series, but Preacher's creator is dead.  This web site's minimum price for gently used books is $5 per book plus $5 per package; the best deal we can offer would be a total of $45 for eight Mountain Men novels, which might be competitive with the prices offered by sellers who don't send a percentage of the price to the author if the author is alive. Add $1 to send e-payments to the Paypal address you get by e-mailing salolianigodagewi, or send a U.S. postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, at the addresses at the very bottom of the screen.

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