Frontier Partisans

The Adventurers, Rangers and Scouts Who Fought the Battles of Empire

Western Noir & Political Despair

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If you run across a tale spun by a total enigma of an author — who may not actually exist — a tale steeped in borderland noir, exploring some of the darkest aspects of American history, evoking what one critic calls “political despair,” and you say to yourself, “Man, I want some of THAT!” … well, you’re in the right place, ain’t you?

 

Years ago, I stumbled on The Creed of Violence at the local library.

Mexico, 1910. The landscape pulses with the force of the upcoming revolution, an atmosphere rich in opportunity for a criminal such as Rawbone. His fortune arrives across the haze of the Sierra Blanca in the form of a truck loaded with weapons.

But Rawbone’s plan spins against him, and he soon finds himself at the Mexican-American border and in the hands of the Bureau of Investigation. He is offered a chance for immunity, but only if he agrees to proceed with his scheme to deliver the truck and its goods to the Mexican oil fields while under the command of Agent John Lourdes. Rawbone sees no other option and agrees to the deal — but he fails to recognize the true identity of Agent Lourdes, a man from deep within his past.

Set against a backdrop of intrigue and corruption, The Creed of Violence is a saga about the scars of abandonment, the greed of war, and America’s history of foreign intervention for the sake of oil.

Leonardo DiCaprio optioned the book, and then it was consigned to development hell. As of last year, it looks like maybe it’s gonna happen — in the hands of the guy who directed Blood Diamond, which bodes well.

Anyways…

I just downloaded it on Audible to listen to while I cut the grass. I need to revisit it because Boston Teran came out with a sequel last year, which I somehow missed.

Dig the caper…

Set in 1911, a time when Texas is rife with racism and unrest, The White Country follows John Lourdes, the first minority-born agent of the Texas Bureau of Investigation. As Mexico is ravaged by famine and political corruption, thousands of desperate people cross into Texas, igniting a wave of hatred and violence that would echo for generations. The border becomes a lawless land, plagued by bandits, drug smugglers, and hooded vigilantes led by a figure known only as “The Whiteman.” Tasked with uncovering this mysterious leader, John Lourdes is sent on a dangerous mission to Laredo. With only a member of the clergy and a Spanish newspaper editor and his daughter as his allies, Lourdes must navigate a landscape of corruption and terror. His journey takes him through a leper colony in the desert, an assassination attempt during a performance of The Wizard of Oz, and into the heart of a destructive movement, threatening the soul of the nation. Torn between justice and revenge, Lourdes faces not only external enemies but the demons of his own past, in a story of survival, identity, and the enduring battle against hate.

*

I read Teran’s debut mind-bender of a desert noir crime thriller God Is A Bullet a long time ago. After a couple of tomes in that bailiwick, Teran moved into historical thrillers, many of them with frontier settings. I haven’t read many of them, which is a matter of neglect on my part. I need to catch up, because they all cover terrain that intersects with FP work — Pinkertons and labor wars; the Knights of the Golden Circle, etc.

Teran himself is a deliberately constructed enigma. Supposedly, “Boston Teran” is a pseudonym. OK, fine. Boston Teran gives one interview per book. Cool. Boston Teran may not be an actual person, but a collective of writers. Whut? That’s a theory. And it is given credence by an answer — or non-answer — given in an interview for A Child Went Forth. An interview that was obviously conducted via e-mail, in which Teran basically said a lot of very little.

You make no secret of the fact that Boston Teran is a pseudonym. Why do you write under a pseudonym, and what is its significance? Why do you like to keep a relatively low profile as an author?

Low profile…? Boston Teran has no profile. And that doesn’t just happen. We had to work damn hard to achieve it. And it’s meant facing a lot of negativity along the way and promises of failure.

Dig that “we”? Huh.

I am entirely for this, by the way. It’s an antidote to social media over-exposure, and it brings back the notion that a book should stand on its own merit — who cares about the writer?

Anyways…

I may delve further into Teran’s work this summer. I don’t read much fiction at all anymore, and what I do consume tends to be in audio format. But a novel can be a nice break from the research reading, and I dig the territory Teran works. I will definitely read The White Country, but there are a couple of other Agent Lourdes-connected yarns that are intriguing. In Gardens of Grief, Lourdes finds himself in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the Great War and embroiled in the Armenian genocide. In The Country I Lived In, Lourdes’s son returns to Mexico in 1955 — and falls afoul of Cold War covert ops.

That’s just my game, as Doc Holliday would say.

Comments

  1. John M. says

    Jim–I’ve got a trip coming up in a couple of days and could use a page-turning Kindle novel for downtime. Got a few recommendations? I’m not widely read in Frontier Partisan fiction, so even a top 3 or 5 Frontier Partisan Novels list would probably do me nicely. Thanks!

    Reply

    • JimC says

      The Frontiersmen — Allan W. Eckert (Simon Kenton, Kentucky Frontier)
      Tom Mix & Pancho Villa — Clifford Irving (Mexican Revolution)
      Mountain Man — Vardis Fisher (inspiration for Jeremiah Johnson)
      Men of Men — Wilbur Smith (pioneering of Rhodesia)
      Lonesome Dove — Larry McMurtry (trail drive to Montana)
      These are all long-time favorites.

      Reply

    • Quixotic Mainer says

      I love any of the Louis L’Amour’s “Sackett” series as travel reads. Treasure Mountain, Skyliners, Galloway, or Ride the Dark Trail are the best traditional westerns. While Warrior’s Path is both a frontier and a piratical tale in the 17th century.

      Louis salts his fiction with enough factoids and historical references that I always find side characters and events to read up on after the spun tale is concluded.

      Robert Parker’s Appaloosa is pretty phenomenal too, as a gunslinger tale with great dialogue. Happy trails!

      Reply

    • David Wrolson says

      I recommend (for any time) -Robert Ruark’s “Something of Value” about the Mau-Mau in Kenya. One of my top 5 novels and the book that threw gasoline on the flames of my desire to do the Africa thing.

      Reply

  2. Paul McNamee says

    Speaking of books that might or might not be in the X-ring;

    Did you see that Daniel Kraus’ ANGEL DOWN won the Pulitzer?

    That is getting buzz in the horror circles because it is a horror novel – and it is set in No Man’s Land, WWI.

    I have not read it. Apparently, it is one “sentence” technically. (I imagine commas are good enough to pretend they are periods.)

    I’m sure it stands beyond the gimmick–but I hesitate.

    Then again, Cormac McCarthy had something against quotation marks, so…

    Reply

    • Matthew says

      McCarthy got away with his punctuation because he was a genius. Even then it took me a while to get use to it.

      The one sentence thing seems pointless to me, but I haven’t read the book so I can’t really judge.

      The problem with such “experimentalism” is that like most scientific experiments they tend to end if failure. There are exceptions of course, but a lot of “experimental literature” is just pretentious. Joyce, for example, used stream of conscious prose to good effect because it fitted what he was doing. Ulysses was an attempt to reproduce the thoughts of normal people during a single day. He didn’t just do it just because. He had a specific reason for doing it. He also had a natural gift for the rhythms of language.

      Reply

  3. Brian H. says

    I just scored a mint hardback copy of Tom Mix and Pancho Villa! My daydreams have been south of the border as of late.

    Reply

  5. Quixotic Mainer says

    Mr. Paisley Vest is going to have to be very careful not to get his hammer hung up on that shoulder strap when he tries skinning that belly gun!

    I’ll add the Teran tales to the list. Though this month’s audible credit is reserved for the newest installation in the Longmire saga. In reference to the Ottoman Empire set tale, I saw a strange quasi western called “Dust” a long while ago that had a very similar premise.

    Reply

  6. Aaron says

    Boston Teran sounds like B.Traven, the author of Treasure of the Sierra Madre (among other things). It was known at the time that “B. Traven” was a pseudonym, but the writer’s true identity has never been known. (And as I write this comment, the two names even sound alike…)

    Reply

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