Title: Ambush of the Mountain Man
Author: William W.
Johnstone
Date: 2003
Publisher: Kensington /
Pinnacle
ISBN: 0-7860-1439-3
Length: 242 pages
Quote: “Uh, by the
way, was that man I just saw getting on the train named Smoke Jensen?”
Uh, actually, he
wasn’t. Even in the fictive reality of William W. Johnstone’s “Mountain Man”
novels, “Smoke” is a nickname. Smoke Jensen is one big anachronism; people with names like
“Jensen” came to the United States after the Civil War and clustered in the
north-central plains, but this black-haired hero comes from Missouri, where his
father (Emmitt Jensen) was a Confederate soldier, and his given name was Kirby.
After an adventure that
qualified as a “baptism by fire,” young Smoke went to the Rocky Mountains and
lived by his wits. He never wanted to kill anybody. He just had to kill—oh dozens of baddies,
sometimes in one single novel!
He has, by this point
in the series, outlived one wife and married another one, Sarah. She believes
he’s as kind and gentle as he can be. Let us leave the poor girl her illusions.
Smoke Jensen is a fictional hero intended to appeal to readers who like a good
fight. Though satisfied with boxing, wrestling, and football in real life, they
quietly enjoy reading how Jensen finds it necessary to kill all those people.
He may regret all the notches on all his guns but he’s not about to move to a
less violent part of the world.
People who like
“westerns” rate the Mountain Man stories high. They’re schoolboys’ adventure
stories. The plot is that a lot of baddies want to kill Jensen,
and Jensen has to kill a few of them. As the blurb on the back say, “One man has
a knife. Twenty men have guns. And the odds are just about even.” Actually fan
knew the odds were still in Jensen’s favor, because Johnstone was making money
on these books. But if you like that kind of adventure, even printed on a page
where your mind’s eye has to fill in the beautiful Rocky Mountain landscapes
without help from a screen, then the odds
are that you’ll enjoy this book.
Johnstone was sometimes
acclaimed as the true heir to Zane Grey and Louis Lamour who might have
revived “westerns” as a genre. I don’t know to what extent that’s possible. True
baby-boomers, who came along while Rogers & Evans & Trigger &
Buttermilk were making “western” movies, loved “westerns.” Late baby-boomers
remember “westerns” as a fad that was so over. If “westerns” don’t become a fad
again, though, it won’t be because Johnstone didn’t try, or because his son’s
not still trying. In 2003 thirty more books about Smoke Jensen, and several
books in two additional “western” series by William W. Johnstone, were in print.
This one is rising in value, but still available under this web site's usual terms: Buy it online for $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment. If you add the ten or eleven more books of this size that could fit into the $5 package, it's a better deal than buying the books directly from Amazon.
No comments:
Post a Comment