Friday, May 28, 2010
Longarm and the Deadly Flood
This one just came out, and if you're interested in how writers' minds work and where ideas come from . . . LONGARM AND THE SAND PIRATES had a lot of sand in it. A very dry book, at least as far as the setting goes. LONGARM AND THE DEADLY FLOOD . . . well, you can do the math.
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12 comments:
Hum, maybe water? Cool. I'll check it out.
Looking forward to reading this. My copy arrived Monday.
Deadly Flood, eh? Must take place in Nashville. No? Des Moines? New Orleans? Um,um, let me think here... I got it. It MUST be in the jungles of Borneo, when the Kgula River floods and the costal village is flooded with crocodiles, requiring the services of a gunman. Right? Did I get it?
Crider told me to put in that part about the crocodiles... Well, he would have if he'd thought to.
First sand, then water. Can Longarm and the Deadly Mud Pies be far behind?
Good going. That's one series that's not going to die out.
Popular marshal who is an ex outlaw .. I guess there is SOME twist in the tale from all the other previous western books and movies :) I'll pick it up once it hits the kindle.
You or anybody else at Jove considered a reboot? Maybe a rookie longarm just out of the civil war and joining the US Marshals Service under Billy Vail (he'd still be in his early 30s that way). And done in typical Lou Cameron style ..
One thing about the newer books is that there isn't any longer a supporting cast of familiar characters.
I don't really recall any supporting characters in the series other than Billy Vail and Henry, who still turn up in some of the books. One of the authors has given Longarm a semi-regular girlfriend, which is one way of easily identifying the books he writes. There may well have been some other supporting characters early on, but I don't remember them.
I've never heard anything about a reboot. I suspect that's not in the cards. But you never know.
Lou Cameron had a massive supporting cast, and that's one thing that made his books fun for a long standing reader of the canon.
Tell me if any of these names sound familiar. All of them play significant bit parts in multiple books.. and they aren't there just for local color either.
1. Fellow deputies - particularly Smiley and Dutch
2. The "firm but fair" Judge Dickerson, who seems to try a lot of the federal cases Cameron's longarm and other Vail deputies hunt down.
3. Multiple girlfriends - consistent from story to story. "Red Robin" - a saloon pianist who always plays out of tune, a rich young widow who is a neighbor of Billy Vail's on Capitol Hill, one (or maybe two) girl reporters he meets on various cases. And the ever present ghost of Roping Sally from 'Longarm and the Wendigo'. 2..3 scenes in later books where Longarm goes back to the scene of that book - wyoming - and lays flowers on her grave, multiple scenes where he's making love to "some other woman entire" .. as cameron would put it - and gets inspired to come once more because he remembers the widow, or roping sally, or someone else among his current and past girlfriends.
4. Speaking of reporters, there's this guy called reporter crawford of the denver post, and longarm often uses the alias 'buck crawford', to remember reporter crawford, as well as 'dr. crawford long, who invented ether anesthesia just in time for that war he was invited to' <- the civil war, in which he "disremembers which side he was in" given that many people still feel strongly about it almost 20 years after the war - cameron's longarm is in the early to mid 1880s.
Oh yeah, and LOTS of historical characters he runs into.
1. There's a scene where he meets a very young Butch Cassidy, who gets shooed away by a barman because he's only 15 and can't drink just yet.
2. Calamity Jane / Martha Jane Canary - one or two books. Certainly not as the sexy young blonde JT Edson portrayed her as in multiple books. More like she actually was .. fat, drunk and ugly. And with Cameron explaining the name 'Calamity' as because she gave the clap to everybody she had sex with [now, that's a thought.. never seen Longarm use a condom in most of his books except for two or three that I can't remember now. Sure no AIDS back then but damn]
3. Another Edson regular - Belle Starr, only Longarm busts an outlaw hideout she's running on a cherokee reservation in the Indian Nations (that'd be Oklahoma now)
4, Some other Edson regulars (peripherally) .. John Wesley Hardin in jail, someone masquerading as Clay Allison years after Allison got drunk and bust his neck in a waggon accident etc. Refers to those two as 'mean drunks' - and that's the mildest term he uses.
JT Edson would not have liked Lou Cameron's books at all, I think :)
Suresh,
No, to be honest, I don't remember any of those supporting characters. But it's been a lot of years since I read the early Longarms. Did Will Knott and Mel Marshall use them, too, or did they appear only in Cameron's entries?
I think the characters were all lou cameron's
Oh yeah, another regular was crown sergeant foster of the canadian mounties who appeared in the very first longarm
Dig out any cameron longarm from 1..300 and you'll find these people
Sorry - just one more comment. Cameron seems to have made a conscious effort to maintain continuity by importing characters from the other authors books.
Jessie Starbuck with her japanese servant Ki is one of your creations I think, I've seen her turn up, but only as a peripheral mention - as a past lover - in some late 200 longarm series, which sound like Cameron.
Longarm and the Avenging Angels (a very early one, I think a Mel Marshall, with the rogue mormons) keeps getting referred to, with that used to build up good relations he has with the Salt Lake temple, for several future cases that take him into Utah / where he has to hunt down mormon crook.
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