Wednesday 7 February 2018

AUTHOR FAVOURITES: WRONG TOWN by MATTHEW P. MAYO

Matthew P. Mayo – who won the Spur Award for TUCKER'S RECKONING - tells me a favourite of his own books is WRONG TOWN, first of the ROAMER books.

Circumstance (not helped by his homely face) has made Matthew’s hero ROAMER into what his name suggests – a lone drifter. Roamer’s day begins with him being attacked by a grizzly bear – and then gets worse! With the zippy beginning and black humour characteristic of Matthew, WRONG TOWN takes Roamer from wrestling a grizzly for breakfast into a Rocky Mountain town where he’s locked up for a murder he didn’t commit. And then a lynch mob comes after him…

We authors are always being told our books need ‘grabby’ beginnings. WRONG TOWN certainly has an opening line that’s hard to beat: ‘My eyes snapped open in the strange gray light of early morning as a grizzly grunted hot breath in my face.’



There are plenty of instances of lynching in the real Old West, where official law and order officers were rare. Sometimes they had racial (not to say racist) motivations. Between 1848 and 1860, white Americans lynched at least 163 Mexicans in California alone. On July 5, 1851, a mob in Downieville, California, lynched a Mexican woman named Josefa Segovia. She was accused of killing a white man who had attempted to assault her after breaking into her home. On October 24, 1871, a mob rampaged through Old Chinatown in Los Angeles, killing at least 18 Chinese-Americans, after a white businessman had inadvertently been killed, caught in the crossfire of a Tong battle within the Chinese community.



Sometimes lynching’s were carried out when groups of individuals banded together to deal with outlawry in areas where there was no official law. Or, as in early 1860s in Montana, where the ‘official law’ turned out to law-breakers themselves. HENRY PLUMMER, Sheriff of Bannack, was suspected of being part of a gang of road agents plundering the area. He was dragged off to a hanging tree by The Vigilance Committee of Alder Gulch in 1864.


Henry Plummer
In 1884 cattlemen in Montana organised against rustlers operating in the Musselshell River region. Led by prominent rancher, GRANVILLE STUART, this group of vigilantes, known as "Stuart's Stranglers", were responsible for the deaths of at least 20 thieves in July 1884, by hanging, shootings or fire.


Granville Stuart
Many outlaws fell foul of ‘lynch law,’ particularly the gang led by the RENO BROTHERS. They robbed and killed across the Midwest in the years immediately after the American Civil War, and carried out the first train robbery in U.S. history at Seymour, Indiana on October 6th 1866. Later three of the gang were captured and taken by train to gaol. On July 10, 1868, three miles outside Seymour, the prisoners were taken off the train, and hanged from a nearby tree by a group of masked men calling itself the Scarlet Mask Society or the Jackson County Vigilance Committee. Three other gang members were captured shortly after. In a grisly repeat, they too fell into the hands of vigilantes and were hanged from the same tree. The site became known as ‘Hangman’s Crossing, Indiana.’


Frank Reno
Finally FRANK RENO and three more gang members were captured and held in the New Albany, Indiana gaol. On the night of December 11, about 65 hooded men forced their way into the gaol and dragged the prisoners from their cells and lynched them – making a total of 10 Reno gang members lynched in the course of 1868.
Grizzly bears deserve a blog all to themselves. Movies about grizzly attacks include THE REVENANT and MAN IN THE WILDERNESS, both about HUGH GLASS, a ‘mountain man’ mauled by a grizzly in 1823.


Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘The Revenant

Lynch law features in many a western including books/movies like THE OX BOW INCIDENT



and WARLOCK.



Reviews:
‘Mayo is a breezy yarn-spinner… steeped in authenticity and boiled in action’

‘Terrific’

‘An original piece of work’

‘In the great tradition of noirish Westerns’

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