RonFranscell's Full Review: C. J. Box - Open Season
Mystery writers need a closed room. Not for writing privacy, but to regulate the flow of suspects in and out of a murder scene.
Odd as it sounds, Wyoming is just a big closed room, a boundless place where nobody come or goes without being noticed. That quality -- plus its peculiarities of landscape, attitude and history -- makes it a perfect place for murder. Margaret Coel is the doyenne of contemporary Wyoming mysteries (although a Colorado writer) with her Wind River intrigues, the Agatha Christie of the Big Empty.
Author C.J. Box has thrown one more Wyoming mystery on the stack, but with a difference: He knows Wyoming the way a lifelong native knows it. His debut, “Open Season,” rings true as it gallops over the rugged terrain of environmentalism, small-town politics, outlander greed and exploitation so common to Wyoming. And when Box describes the real landscape of this almost-mythical state, you can rest assured it’s dead on.
Speaking of dead, that would be Ote Keeley, a poacher who favors T-shirts that say stuff like, “Happiness is a Warm Gut Pile.” He’s the first casualty in “Open Season,” although not the most important one. The investigation falls in the lap of Joe Pickett, the new game warden in Saddlestring, Wyo., a wholesome family man who bridles at wearing a gun and has a penchant for bonehead blunders.
He’s joined by Wacey Hedeman (just one of Box’s fictional characters whose name is filched from a professional rodeo cowboy), a fellow game warden and former bull rider who shares none of Pickett’s pleasant habits. Together they wade into a mounting body that seems to be related to gas pipelines, a rare weasel and a cast of very odd characters ... OK, everything in Wyoming might be related to things like those, but in this case, they form the basis of an entertaining country-crime fiction.
Box’s prose is most trenchant, of course, when he’s writing about Wyoming. Landscape is not just the territory of the West’s literary prose, but it can be found in the region’s category fiction, too, proving just as important to genre tales as mainstream. Box nails the taste and smell of the place, and in the process, creates a sensory experience that can be rare in fast-paced, plot-driven crime fiction -- without stalling the plot. He finds a way to weave the mysteries of landscape into the larger mystery at hand:
“It was dusk and Pickett drove north, bathed in the brilliant copper light of the mid-September sun. ... In a few minutes, the light would change and the pronghorns, their particular illumination extinguished, would meld back into the mottled texture of the country as if they had never really been there at all.”
But for the truly intransigent mystery buff who seeks only the rough-and-tumble, Box can also blend the bloody with the sublime, such as the novel’s splattery opening:
“When a high-powered rifle bullet hits living flesh it makes a distinctive -- pow-WHOP -- sound that is unmistakable even at tremendous distance.”
By the same token, the book’s inclusion of excerpts from the Endangered Species Act probably doesn’t warm anybody’s cockles, except very perverse enviro-lawyers. But those deadly segments tend to serve as frontispieces for chapters and are not critical to the narrative, so are easily skipped.
It’s obvious why “Open Season” has such an easy grasp of the Cowboy State: Box has been a Wyoming ranch hand, fishing guide, survey crewman, small-town newspaper reporter, and a high-level tourism executive -- all before becoming CEO of a Cheyenne corporation that promotes Rocky Mountain tourism in Europe. When he describes the sound of a bullet slamming into meat, he knows how it sounds. And when he describes a claustrophobic high-country canyon where it’s possible to touch both walls, it’s because he’s been there.
The dust jacket on “Open Season” is festooned with giddy blurbs from mighty western- and environmental-crime novelists like Tony Hillerman, Margaret Coel, Randy Wayne White and Loren Estleman -- and they might have raised readers’ expectations a little too high for the first-timer. But Box’s yarn is full of the kind of grittiness a reader can expect from a place where blood and bone are not just the stuff of crime fiction, but of sport and survival, too.
With the shot of a rifle, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett is thrust into a race to save not only an endangered species, but to unravel a mystery that ...More at HotBookSale
With the shot of a rifle, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett is thrust into a race to save not only an endangered species, but to unravel a mystery that ...More at HotBookSale
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