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COTTONWOOD
Published January 19, 2004
Another brilliant novel from Scott Phillips, who I think is the most
"important" new writer on the scene in the past 10 years. Certainly
the closest in spirit, and even style, to the late master, Charles Willeford,
which is a very high recommendation, in my book, to read anything
Scott writes. Cottonwood goes back two generations from his last
novel, The Walkaway (which I also published in a limited first
edition), which novel "book-ended" his first tome, The
Ice Harvest (ditto), so there's a connection, of sorts, between the
three books that he's produced—so far, anyway. The protagonist of
Cottonwood, Bill Ogden, is the grandfather of the Willefordian
psychopathic Supply Sergeant from Occupied Japan in the 1952-section of
The Walkaway, Wayne Ogden (who was also featured as a teenager
in the short story that Scott wrote for my 20th anniversary anthology,
Measures of Poison, which was "cherry-picked" by the
wags at Houghton-Mifflin [instead, I suppose, of reprinting the entire
anthology, which they should have done, in my opinion], along with
three other stories [by Pelecanos, Crumley, and Christopher Cook] for
their annual trade paperback Best Mystery Stories 2003). The Ogden
family gets around, folks. Not to give too much away here, but farmer-turned-saloon
keeper and occasional stereophotographer Bill Ogden gets entangled with
the infamous "Bloody Benders," a nice German farm family who
were in the habit of waylaying the odd travellers, bashing in the backs
of their heads, slitting their throats and bleeding them out underneath
the dinner table, finally to plant them in the fruit orchard out behind
their farmhouse. Their apples were famous for miles around for their blood-red
color, you know. Anyway, Scott serves up an ingenious solution to the
Bloody Bender mystery (they were never caught in reality, but escaped
as the vigilante posse was on its way out to their farm for a little impromptu
instant justice—someone apparently tipped them off that their time
in Kansas was up, and that they'd better hit it on down the road if they
didn't want to end up in the same ultimate shape as all those guests they'd
so keenly entertained and relieved of their worldly goods and lives).
But the real story is of self-educated semi-rogue Bill Ogden, and
how he gets through a pretty rough frontier life, with a modicum of intelligence
and no illusions as to the nature of his world and the people in it. It's
a hell of a story, too.
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