Working The Trapline — Pulpy Goodness

There’s some new material from the upcoming campaign to fund Fargo: Hell On Wheels. I’ll be in for the portfolio…

Chaykin said something that caught my ear: that Neal Fargo could have been an Elmore Leonard character if Leonard had created a transition between his Westerns and his crime novels. Thing is, he did — it just wasn’t in a transition period in his career arc. He sort of circled back to it. Talking about The Hot Kid.

Here’s the caper:

Carlos Webster was 15 the day he witnessed his first murder—but it wouldn’t be his last. It was also his first introduction to the notorious gunman, Emmet Long. By the time Carlos is 20, he’s being sworn in as a deputy United States marshal and now goes by the name Carl. As for Emmet, he’s robbing banks with his new partner, the no-good son of an oil millionaire.

Carl Webster and Emmet Long may be on opposite sides of the law but their long-time game of cat and mouse will turn them both into two of the most famous names in crime and punishment.

Hell, our man Raylan Givens counts for the same; he and Carlos Webster share DNA.

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Having run through the whole Terminal List Series by Jack Carr in one epic binge, I was feeling the need for some pulpy goodness to accompany the lawn mowing and newspaper chucking. Something weird and wild to give me a little respite from the Mexican Revolution podcast reading (not that THAT isn’t weird and wild in its own right). You know what I mean: a trek into the timbers of Fennario, where wolves are runnin’ round. So I turned to Jonathan Maberry’s Joe Ledger Series. Listening to Joe Ledger: Secret Missions, a collection of short stories.

Here’s the caper (courtesy of Monster Complex):

Horror writer Jonathan Maberry’s Joe Ledger is the star of series of bio-terrorism thrillers that started with 2009’s Patient Zero. The series—which includes novels, short stories, audio originals, and novellas follows Captain Joe Ledger, who fights terrorist threats that range from zombie pathogens to weaponized plagues to transgenic monsters. For much of the series, Ledger works for clandestine government agency the Department of Military Sciences (DMS)—which deals with the problems that Homeland Security can’t handle. In the Rogue Team spin-off series, the DMS has been dissolved, so Ledger joins the Rogue Team International.

The idea for the plausible zombie menace in Patient Zero came to Maberry while he was researching his nonfiction zombie book, Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead. “My intention had been to use science to (gently) knock down the backstory to most zombie movies and books,” Maberry said in an interview. “However during the research I discovered that there was a lot more scientific validity to those monsters. It creeped me out, and anytime something creeps me out that much I think: ‘Man, that would make a great story.’”

The Joe Ledger series is a mash-up of military thriller and horror. The horror elements are not supernatural — there is (mad) science at the root of all evil. And yet… at a certain point, technology becomes so sophisticated it is indistinguishable from magic, and the natural is mutated to the point of the supernatural.

Ledger is a classic dark American hero, which is to say, he is a Frontier Partisan. It’s not just that his combat call signs are first “Cowboy” and then “Outlaw”: Ledger’s work transgresses borders and engages dark elements — work that Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation identifies as the calling of the frontiersman:

“Through this transgression of the borders, through combat with the dark elements on the other side, the heroes reveal the meaning of the frontier line (that is, the distinctions of value it symbolizes) even as they break it down. In the process they evoke the elements in themselves (or in their society) that correspond to the ‘dark’; and by destroying the dark elements and colonizing the border, they purge darkness from themselves and the world.”

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That Department of Military Sciences stuff is just a couple of cranks over from chilling reality — but reality is catching up. I mean, we just went through a plague that looks increasingly likely to have come from gain-of-function work in Wuhan. And Skynet is here, people. My old buddies will tell you that I insisted back in 1984 that The Terminator was historical fiction set in the future. Welcome to the new frontier. We’re going to be very busy purging the darkness, I fear.

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Found this little gem of dark, gritty ambient badassery that pairs nicely with Western themes. And you know I dig the accompanying images…