And, in kind of the oddest and coolest news I got, if you listen right here, you can hear Bob Dylan introducing the Louvin Brothers song “Satan Is Real” on his radio show. Which is very cool, of course. But even cooler is that Mr. Dylan has requested a copy of the book Satan Is Real. I don’t know what that means, but I love that he has a copy in his hands.

Also, in Pike news, it looks like the French edition from Editions Gallmeister will be available in September. I won’t pretend I’m not blown away by joining an author list that includes Ed Abbey, Craig Johnson, Larry McMurtry, Tim O’Brien, and Tom Robbins.

We’ve also got some details on Noir at the Bar, which I’ll be attending in about three weeks. This from Mr. Bar, Jedidiah Ayres:

Oky-doke kiddos, here’s the official lineup for the N@B double header coming your way late in February. Two nights of walking on the dark side in St. Louis. First up, February 21st, Robert Randisi has been added to the the lineup alongside Benjamin Whitmer, Sonia Coney and Jason Makansi, so that’s fantastic. How many people do you know who’ve read over five hundred books, let alone written that many, let alone published that many? Sure, somebody in the near future will probably take a big ol’ dump all over the internets with their self-published titles and get up into the hundreds like that, but Randisi has done it the hard way, the ultimate pulp writer kids. That cat goes through keyboards faster than I go through underwear, and tossing ‘em when he’s worn the letters off the keys. Take that, James Patterson.

As I understand it, we’ll be meeting at the Meshuggah Cafe in St. Louis. Again, cannot wait.

And I think that brings me up to date on my doings. At least for the most part.

On the non-career related side, I’ve been getting back to doing a little shooting. 3×5 cards up at Left Hand Canyon. And I know I keep saying this, but I can’t get over how solid my 1911 has been since I put in the Ed Brown Hardcore extractor and tensioned it. I haven’t had a problem of any kind, not one, and it’s been well north of 1,000 rounds. (Probably more than 2,000.) I clean it about every 300-400 rounds, keep it oiled, and it just keeps banging along. I’m having so much fun.

And, of course, I’m reading and writing. I finally read Johnny Shaw’s Dove Season and highly recommend it. This is crime fiction the way I dig crime fiction: a strong, individual voice rooted in place and character. I loved it. And I gotta post the cover, because it’s just as great as the writing inside:

I also want to give a huge shout out to Matthew McBride, whose Frank Sinatra in a Blender was picked up by New Pulp Press this week. He gives the lowdown here in a wonderfully titled post, “How To Get A Book Deal In 3,285 Days.”

That’s all I got.

Larry McMurtry’s Oh, What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846-1890 is an odd little book.  Weighing in at 192 pages, it’s reminiscent of the gift books that line the shelves of big box bookstores — books for people who don’t really like books — only aimed at the aspiring comparative genocide scholar as opposed to the amateur cocktail mixologist or political humorist.  It is exactly what its size and title suggest: a brief overview of six massacres tied together by a couple of common themes, including one that should be fairly recognizable in our own era:

President George W. Bush has recently revived the doctrine of the preemptive strike, a doctrine far from new in military or quasi-military practice. Most of the massacres I want to consider were thought by their perpetrators to be preemptive strikes, justified by the claim that the attacks were punishment for past harassments by the native tribes.

It’s not the first time that point has been made, not even for the massacres McMurtry describes.  In his criminally neglected Sand Creek and the Rhetoric of Extermination, David Svaldi pursues the same thread, detailing the campaign by territorial governor John Evans and Rocky Mountain News founder William Byers to drum up an extermination campaign against the local Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians.  Byers lead the charge with editorials entitled “Exterminate Them!” and the like, and between the two of them, they managed to work the Denver public into a frenzy with conspiracy theories of a pan-Indian uprising.  By the time all was said and done, the Third Colorado Volunteer Cavalry Regiment had butchered hundreds of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians at Sand Creek, and then returned to Denver, their saddle pommels, hats, and weapons adorned with the trophies they’d taken from the Indians – trophies that included scalps, hacked up genitalia, and at least one fetus.  These trophies were displayed to an adoring Denver public in a parade, a tour of the local saloons, and at Denver’s premiere opera house, The Apollo Theater.

It’s one hell of a story, and, as laid out by David Svaldi, a case study in the application of carefully coordinated hysteria in the service of genocide.  In McMurtry’s hands, however, it’s barely even interesting.  From the first paragraph of his closing remarks in the section on the Sand Creek Massacre:

I am not sure that Sand Creek admits of any conclusion.  Two peoples with widely differing cultures were rubbing against each other, constantly and insistently.  The Indians were trying to defend their cherished way of life, the whites to make that way of life vanish so they could go on with their settling, farming, townbuilding, etc.

That seems anemic, to put it mildly, as if McMurtry just ran out of steam somewhere along the way. Likewise, his choice to close the section with a comparison of the Sand Creek massacre to the mutilation visited upon Captain William Fetterman’s men at Fort Kearney by Lakota and Cheyenne warriors is disappointing.  Besides corpse mutilation, the two events have nothing in common, the most glaring difference being that all of Fettermen’s men were soldiers – soldiers who had, not incidentally, attacked the warriors who ended up decimating them— not the women, children, and elders overwhelmingly representing the victims of the Sand Creek Massacre.

I’m probably not being entirely fair to Oh What a Slaughter by reading too closely, however.  Nor by measuring it against the likes of Svaldi’s book.  I’m a long-time fan of McMurtry’s, but as a fan, I’ve noticed that some of his works are better considered as, say, conversations, or diversions.  This one definitely falls into that category.  It is a slight thing, not always as considered as it could be, but it is also erudite and entertaining — at least for those of us who are entertained by massacre.  And if Hollywood is any indication, that’s a number that includes most of us.