Country: USA
Genre: Western
Pages: 412 KB
The Western is a genre you have to handle with care. It's easy to fall into historical masturbation and put your readers to sleep with stories that sound "real" more than they sound "good". Fortunately, Edward A. Grainger* does the job properly with the stories of his two men of justice, Laramie and Miles. Well engineered in its presentation also, Grainger's eBook offer seven short, action packed stories of a wild time in American history. The seven stories offer a portrait intimate enough to drag you in, yet Grainger knows when to pull out and end his tales before it drags on. You can count The Adventures Of Cash Laramie And Gideon Miles as one of the highway robberies you can get at the Kindle Store, for ninety-nine cents.
The story who seemed to captivate every reader (and sure as hell captivated me) is Kid Eddie, where Cash Laramie has to escort a young, charming and extremely dangerous prisoner to justice. Eddie's a fine talker and he finds a way to make sense out of the worse atrocities he committed. You want to believe Eddie. Cash Laramie himself can't help but smile and his hackneyed, yet plausible explanations. It COULD always make sense. There are universal undertones to this story. Eddie's a violent criminal and yet he's just another soul aiming to create a legacy for himself in the land of a million opportunities. But unlike Laramie, his sense of right and wrong doesn't go farther than what's right and wrong for him. Kid Eddie is a son of his time as Cash Laramie seems to have lived many lives prior to the one of a marshal.
There isn't a single story I disliked in The Adventures Of Cash Laramie And Gideon Miles. Some were stronger than the others though. Miles To Go and Melanie are both memorable stories. Melanie in particular will stay in the back of your mind, since it's addressing issues of childhood, faith and innocence. It's difficult to make good crime/noir/western stories involving children without making them an obvious plot device and yet Grainger makes it work beautifully. Other stories like The Wind Scorpion and The Bone Orchard Mystery had amazing plots, but in these case they would have benefited longer stories. The sense of time passing is a little crunched. There is a lot happening in a little time and stretching it over more pages and not delivering everything right away would have transformed them in stories probably better than Kid Eddie even. They are both good premises for novella or even novels.
The success of Edward A. Grainger's short story collection relies on the fact it walks a fine line in between many genres and manages to keep its balance. It's a Western, yet it has noir/hardboiled elements and it treats of some issues the way literary novels do. The Adventures Of Cash Laramie And Gideon Miles is the fruit of the imagination of a man who loves the far-west and gives it every bit of seriousness and attention it deserves. Grainger dissects this cornerstone era of American history with passion and a strong personal style. I would have paid fifteen dollars for a paperback and would have been very happy with my purchase, so at ninety-nine cents, this is a surefire bet. Hopefully there will be sequels to the adventures of Laramie and Miles, in paperback, eBook, short stories or in a novel. I don't care the format, but I want to read some more.
*The pen name for David Cranmer, editor of Beat To A Pulp