Gritty western a frontier epic with wickedly witty voice
Strother Purcell goes missing in 1870s British Columbia while searching for his outlawed half-brother. He’s rediscovered sixteen years later. What happened in between? Failed journalist Barrington Weaver sets on a journey to find out in award-winning author Ian Weir’s third novel. Here’s a sneak peek from Weir’s very funny The Death and Life of Strother Purcell. One — Near Hell’s Gate — Winter, 1876 They were passing into myth before the snow had commenced to fall in earnest on that bleak midwinter afternoon, blurring the hard distinctions of this world. So it is not possible with confidence to say where certainties begin and end.
There were three of them; this much at least is beyond dispute. Three men on horseback, ghosting their way north through the trees along the river. They had been glimpsed on two occasions earlier that day by separate witnesses, but did not seek out human interaction. A Cornishman, however, named T.E. Spurlock would in later years recall with increasing clarity that the men had stopped at his shack near Hill’s Bar some time before noon, and asked him did he have whiskey. No, replied T.E. Spurlock, he did not, this being a Christian abode. T.E. Spurlock was a drunkard and known confabulist who kept chickens and a desultory pig, but he swore till the day he died that the remainder of this account was Bible truth.
They were U.S. Americans, he said, but not from Washington Territory; he knew this by the manner of their speaking. They came from somewhere deeper in the South. The one who mostly spoke was a man in the early prime of life, not tall but powerfully built, with black hair and a sullen satyr’s face and way of staring that prompted T.E. Spurlock to recollect that he did possess a jug of whiskey after all. He fetched it out and told the man no payment was required.
“That is where you are mistaken,” the man replied. He reached one hand inside his coat and T.E. Spurlock saw the glint of metal. “Payment is always required.”
There was an instant of deadly hush, in which the great globe itself stood frozen. The moment grew more protracted with each successive telling, until by 1898 T.E. Spurlock—now a resident of Kamloops, where he maintained a position as town drunk—would recollect the world’s standing still for an entire four minutes and a half, while God gazed grimly down. At last the stranger drew out his hand. The glint between his fingers was a silver coin, which he tossed into the snow at T.E. Spurlock’s feet with an infinitesimal twisting of his lip.
“And I never knew,” T.E. Spurlock would say, marvelling anew at each retelling of the tale. “Not once did I begin to dream who it was, standing there before me…” Two —From The Roadhouse Chronicles of Thomas Skiffings — Near Hell’s Gate — Winter, 1876
The three men arrived with darkness at John McCutcheon’s roadhouse. The night had grown vengeful. Wind bansheed from the north, flinging the snow before it in slanting volleys. The man with black hair signed the Register, giving his name as Lightburn. Mr. Lightburn, he wrote, from Decatur. He scratched it with effort, his fingers clumsy as blocks of wood from the cold.
“Decatur, Georgia?” John McCutcheon said this in a friendly manner, to indicate an interest.
“No,” the stranger said. “The other one.”
John McCutcheon blinked, as if having it briefly in mind to ask further clarification. On mature reflection, he did not. “Well,” he said. “Well, indeed. The far-flung places people come from.” John McCutcheon was himself from far-flung Nova Scotia. He had come West three years previous, buoyed by a modest inheritance and brimming with resolve, and had purchased the roadhouse from a man who saw him coming.
The house was some miles east of Yale, alongside the fabled and perilous Cariboo Wagon Road, which crept past Hell’s Gate in the Fraser River Canyon and thence for 350 miles to Barkerville and the gold fields in the north. A sprawling ramshackle structure, as gaunt as a haunted grange in a penny-dreadful tale, with outbuildings in the trees behind and a foothold on a low bluff looking down upon the river, on which it baked all summer and was buffeted by the winds come November. It stood guestless as often as not, being scarcely the thriving hostelry of its proprietor’s fond imaginings, for John McCutcheon was a man out of step with Time. The Cariboo gold rush was a decade in the past, and the traffic along the road had dwindled to a trickle. But John McCutcheon remained an optimist on principle and planted the tattered banner of his hopes upon the certainty that the railway must come. On clear nights when the moon shone down on John McCutcheon drunk on his own bad whiskey, he could see in his mind’s starry eye a refurbished hotel with a dining room and a mahogany bar and a chef named Jean-Pierre imported from Montreal. At present he made do with Gimp Tom and the girl. Excerpted from The Life and Death of Strother Purcell, copyright © 2018 by Ian Weir. Published and reprinted with permission by Goose Lane Editions.