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Loading... .44by H. A. DeRosso
None No current Talk conversations about this book.  Broadwater43 | Sep 1, 2010 | 
 DeRosso is satisfying because his work is so mythic. Westerns, after all, are suppose to be mythic. To quote Maxwell Scott in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” .44 begins with one of those great first paragraphs that hook you and then lives up to all that first paragraph promises. Everything that is classic DeRosso, that is western noir is here: menace, fate, and myth. "The two riders working up the mountain towards the pass travelled about a mile apart. There was not hurry in their progress. The first rider made no effort to quicken his horse’s pace and thus draw farther ahead. The second rider, too, seemed content with the rate he was travelling. He kept his distance, not trying at all to overtake the other, even though he had been hired to kill this first rider and intended to do so before nightfall."
Dan Harland was a legend. A hired gun, Harland had earned a reputation as one of the fastest gunslingers in the West. He didn't like to kill, but he did it with deadly accuracy. The money wasn't too bad, either. However, when he is hired to kill a man who is seemingly all too ready to die, Harland begins to have second thoughts about his occupation and seeks out the shadowy figure who hired him. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.33)
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Wikipedia in English
1
The status that westerns have in American culture is much diminished these days. Great westerns are still being written – see Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, and Elmer Kelton. But the greatest practioners of the classic western are long gone.
H.A. DeRosso wrote hard-boiled stories for the pulps in the 1940s and 1950s. He wrote a number of great western short-stories and a few novels. His westerns have been described by Bill Pronzini as western noir. Pronzini has edited a number of collections of his short stories. Each collection is great.
Of DeRosso’s novels, .44 is my favorite. It epitomizes DeRosso’s style: austere, hard-boiled, grim, lonely and yet,… poetic at times. The characters have an archetypal quality that transcends the merely conventional. The desert landscape they inhabit is mythological– ethereal and bleak.
There are, admittedly, more realistic western writers and much more historically accurate ones. And yet besides Cormac McCarthy there are no western writers that are as satisfying as DeRosso in the end.
DeRosso is satisfying because his work is so mythic. Westerns, after all, are suppose to be mythic. To quote Maxwell Scott in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
.44 begins with one of those great first paragraphs that hook you and then lives up to all that first paragraph promises. Everything that is classic DeRosso, that is western noir is here: menace, fate, and myth.
The two riders working up the mountain towards the pass travelled about a mile apart. There was not hurry in their progress. The first rider made no effort to quicken his horse’s pace and thus draw farther ahead. The second rider, too, seemed content with the rate he was travelling. He kept his distance, not trying at all to overtake the other, even though he had been hired to kill this first rider and intended to do so before nightfall.
(This review has also been published at www.montanawriter.com) (