Winfred Blevins (1938–2023)

Give me a historical mystery set in the American Southwest and I am a happy reader. Add in real folks like Frank Lloyd Wright and John Wayne and I am over the moon. Of course it helps that the writers know the area and the customs of the Navajo and Ute nations know how to write well.

Yazzie Goldman is three-quarters Navajo and one-quarter Jewish. He works as security on the railroad but when the book starts he and his wife have been vacationing in Chicago. Even though he is off duty when he show more sees a tough guy hassling an old man he intervenes. Turns out the old man is Frank Lloyd Wright and he is on his way to Taliesin West in Scottsdale with the plans for the Guggenheim Museum on his person. The tough guy hassling him is muscle for a gangster to whom Wright owes twenty thousand dollars. Yazzie agrees to protect Wright all the way to Scottsdale but little does he know that will bring not just gangsters but the FBI (who think Wright is unAmerican) and unscrupulous architects after the Guggenheim plans into his life. Trying to get away from all these interests Yazzie takes Wright on a road trip up to Monument Valley where John Ford is shooting Fort Apache. John Wayne is one of the stars and he is interested in Wright. That comes in handy when all those people after Wright show up on the movie set.

I am a big fan of Frank Lloyd Wright although I have never been in any of his buildings. I hope to rectify that soon by touring Taliesin West when we are next in Arizona. Meantime I have another book about Wright, Loving Frank, on my bookshelf and I am looking forward to reading that soon. I also really liked this detective. There is an earlier book, The Darkness Rolling, which I want to read and then I will be seeking out more books I suspect. show less

Part fiction, part history, Win Blevins' book shines in one of the rare, unimpeachable periods of American history. The American rawland of the West is evoked beautifully ("God's finest sculpturin's to roam in" (pg. 166)) and its characters, the larger-than-life mountain men, were, as Blevins notes on page 291, quite often white men who adopted Indian ways rather than enforcing the reverse. The vitality of the land breathes through the pages of the book.

Give Your Heart to the Hawks works show more better as fiction than as history; as history, it is often dry in the telling, despite some fascinating interludes regarding mountain craft and sexual relations with squaws, among other things. But Blevins is open-hearted about this, stating from the off that he is primarily concerned with history "as a rendering of felt experience" rather than dates and abstract causes (pp17-18). In this, he is very effective, particularly early on in the book, and the reader gets the dirt of the West under their fingernails, and feels the cool of a mountain stream and the warmth of a buffalo skin and the thwack of a Blackfoot arrow.

Having established its literary quality, the book loses its way in the middle before returning with a brief flourish at the end. But it never loses its sense of immersion, and Blevins buys into it completely. For example, on page 71 one mountain man wants to make a map of the West and "have it published back in the States"; the reader realises with a start that this land is not yet considered a part of the USA. It is unexplored territory. If you accept the book's inherent eccentricity, Blevins will take you on a journey. show less

Although Crazy Horse is considered one of the greatest warriors of the Lakota Nation, I knew very little of his actual life. In Stone Song: A Novel of the Life of Crazy Horse, Win Blevins attempts to shed some light on the life of this man. Authentically detailed, this intimate look at such a fascinating figure of history tackles both his personal life and how his legend developed.

As a young boy, Curley, as he was called, was always different. An inward looking, quiet child he held himself show more separately, causing some to resent him and others to expect great things of him. His vision was one of isolation and sacrifice. Unfortunately this vision both raised him to a prominent position in the tribe but also wreaked havoc in his personal life. Although shunning the spotlight, “Our Strange Man’ as his people called him, grew to be a person of great influence and people often followed his choices. While the author examines the many sides of this complex man, he also never forgets to supply the historical details of the time and place that Crazy Horse lived in. We are totally immersed in culture of these people, their social customs, warring factions, and the rising anger at the broken promises of the white people that will eventually lead Crazy Horse and his people to the banks of the Little Big Horn River.

I now feel I have a greater understanding of this well known historical character. The author manages to take the facts that are known and bring them richly to life, breathing emotion and spirit into his story. I would highly recommend Stone Song: A Novel of the Life of Crazy Horse to those who would like to read about a genuine Native American hero. show less

Good account of the mountain men during the heyday of the fur trade in the American West. More of a character study of several men and of the time. Not an exact history.