Book Review: Cunning of the Mountain Man

Title: Cunning of the Mountain Man

Author: William W. Johnstone

Date: 1996

Publisher: Kensington

ISBN: none

Length: 315 pages

Quote: “‘Smoke Jensen camped here last night...Then he rode out to the west early this morning.’ He was wrong, but he didn’t know it yet.”

Ah, the code of the Old West as enshrined in paperback novels, where nice guys are always having to shoot it out with bad guys and somehow the nice guys always win.

In this installment of the Mountain Man series, a whole gang of evil land speculators want to blame the improbable Smoke Jensen for the murders of as many as possible of some ranchers who just happened to have signed deeds transferring property rights to them. To get those signatures the baddies think nothing of torturing or killing children; one sub-gang of them are pedophiles as well. Jensen has found it necessary to kill enough evildoers, in earlier books, that he doesn’t even bother carving notches on his .44, although he likes being kind when he can. Many baddies will bite the dust in this story. Jensen will even personally beat up an especially despicable baddie before killing him. However this book differs from some other books in the series by featuring more pranks Jensen plays to stall for time, improve the odds, and give readers a laugh at his enemies’ expense.

Whether he vents another sort of feelings is left to the reader’s imagination. A young, pretty widow, who just happens to have enough sense of justice to challenge the claim that Jensen killed her husband, frankly lusts after his body. Jensen heads her off with a very proper speech about his love for his wife. An ideal nineteenth century hero would have actually slept alone and remained faithful to his wife. Far too many real nineteenth century people slept together, in situations like this, and never mentioned it. The novel can be read either way.

Few women ever liked this kind of thing. I’m not among the few. I’m too conscious that The West Was Won by an unjust, immoral war. Never mind that several Cherokee and Iroquois people agreed with European immigrants that the native population of the West were inferior, degenerate barbarians. Never mind that some aspects of some of all of the cultures involved were degenerate. And never mind that, in Cunning of the Mountain Man, Johnstone tries to ameliorate the ugly facts by confiding to us that Jensen privately admires the Apaches’ “harmony with the land.” Jensen is an anachronism anyway, but warbling about “harmony with the land” was a twentieth century thing. I enjoy the scenery in "western" movies and TV shows, but the stories? Strictly for guys.

However, those who like paperback “westerns” agree that Johnstone writes them well. If you’re willing to suspend disbelief in Jensen’s luck and grant Jensen a right to kill about twenty (I’m not inclined to go back and count) bad guys, in this book, you’ll probably enjoy Cunning of the Mountain Man.

This book has gone into the collector price zone. To buy it here, send $10 per copy + $5 per package + $1 if paying online to the appropriate address at the very bottom of the screen. (The post office collects its own "surcharge" on U.S. postal money orders and envelopes; Paypal makes online sellers do it.) You can get copies cheaper on Amazon, or (maybe) at a charity sale organized by people who don't look up the market value of "westerns," but if you buy it here you could probably add seven more paperbacks of this size to one $5 package, which might make our price more competitive.