“Eli and Charlie are infamous gunslingers in the employ of a powerful man, known only as the Commodore. This time the job takes them to California, which is full of fools following the Gold Rush, to find a man who has crossed their employer (or so the Commodore says). Sounds simple enough; they are professionals after all. And so they set off from Oregon City to San Francisco, encountering on their way a witch, a couple of bears, a dead Indian, a house full of drunken “ladies,” a murderous gang of fur trappers, and a frontier dentist who introduces them to the wonders of dental hygiene (with a toothbrush and some mint-flavored tooth powder).
DeWitt has written a wonderful take on the traditional Western. I am by no means an expert on the genre, but I really enjoyed this book. The book reminded me a little of the comic crime capers of Donald Westlake. The main reason I don’t give it more stars is the narration by Eli. He admits that he’s never really shared his older brother’s appetite for drinking and killing, but he’s never known anything else and he is devoted to Charlie. He relates the story with a nearly flat affect, if that’s possible to do in writing. In some places this device works wonderfully to lend humor to the tale (as in the aforementioned encounter with the dentist), but much of the time I found myself just wondering when I was going to really get engaged in the story. I was curious about what was going to happen, but I didn’t really care what was going to happen. Still, I’m glad I read it and I might recommend it, especially to my brother and others who love Westerns.
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