Longarm And The Cursed Corpse

 

Before reading this book I didn't know that "adult" western was an ongoing genre in books. I thought I had purchased a good old fashioned western shot 'em up story. I was in for a bit of a shock. I'm no prude, but boy, this book was vulgar. And seemed to revel wallowing in it. It makes sense for the time period for many of the characters to be racist (excpet the title character who seems to be the only non-racist in the west), but there are times when it seems like the author was trying to win a bet about how many times he coulod include the "n word" in his book. And not only is Longarm, the protagonist, not racist, he is a superhuman sex machine as shown by his ability to bed every woman who crosses his path and spend hours pleasuring them over and over again in every position known. Less explicit, and only slightly more believable, Longarm also can read multiple books while spending an afternoon in court watching proceedings, and knows all the real dirt on every well known and notorious personage in the western territories. 

Longarm is the nickname of lead character Custis Long, federal deputy in Denver Colorado. Longarm is saved from being shot in the back for reasons that no one knows. His savior rides for a bail bonding company out of Dallas Texas, and he eventually requests Longarm's help in looking for a bail jumper he's after. The rider uses some voodoo "goofer dust" to scare a black whore into giving him information, before shooting the bail jumper. The events don't add up to Longarm, since the bailjuumper wasn't wanted on a serious charge, and sending arider after him would have been a loss for the company. It gets even more tangled for him when he discovers that soon after the rider dies in a shootout with another jumper, who just before also dying says he was not wanted in Texas. Of course now Longarm has to investigate what's going on with this bail bonding company, and to figure out the voodoo connection as well. 

The book is credited to Tabor Evans (and there is a Tabor cameo in the story) but that is a pseudonym used by several writers at Jove books who worked on the series. They churned out about 1 a month for many years, this particular book being #246 in a series of 436, not including the special "giant" editions that had longer stories. This being my first book in the series to read, I don't know if there is consistency of style, but I know this writer reminded me a bit og Robert Heinlein, in that he seemed to see Longarm as a proxy for himself, which is why longarm is smarter, luckier, and sexier than anyone else in the immediate vicinity. He also relishes what he thinks of as clever twists of phrase, making everyone speak in little word games regardless of their level of education and/or intellect. He also likes showing off his knowledge of trivia of the era, shoehorning it in where it sometimes didn't even fit and seemed glaringly extraneous. Oddly, considering his previously mentioned joy in dropping the n bomb, he seemed reticent to call slavery by name, having everyone who mentioned it use the term "peculiar institution" for it instead.

All this may sound like I am building a case for how bad the book was, and I will admit that for the first few chapters I thought it was going to be truly awful. But while it was written in a style that could be grating, the story itself was actually pretty good. I do think they could have spent a few more pages wrapping up the climactic part of actually catching the bad guy instead of summarizing how it happened after the fact, but they were obviously more invested in the mystery the book unfolds than in shootouts and such. And the mystery is pretty good, and the resolution actually sort of clever. I started to figure out bits of it, but I'll admit there were twists I didn't see before hand. It reads like someone came up with a good story then handed it over to a fanfic writing, horny, old west history buff to flesh it out, which may be exactly how it happened in this case. I don't want to spoil the mystery, so I'll just say it involves a bail bonding company and a voodoo cult, and how the two are in league. If you can get over the cornier aspects of the writing it's worth it to enjoy the story. And with so many stories to mine, I'm shocked there hasn't been a t.v. series. Apparently a t.v. movie was made with the intent of spinning off a series, but it failed. I can see this being a decent success on streaming, where they can include the more explicit and salacious parts. I just hope if they make it they devise better dialogue than the line uttered by one of the many women who enjoy his sexual prowess: "I love it when you hit bottom with every stroke, you astounding stallion!"