Deadwood

As the title says, this is gritty and melancholy. Many moving passages and words of wisdom in a dark tale of the Wild West. Good story from beginning to end.

Pete Dexter may be the best living American writer. I am truly a fan. DEADWOOD is not one of his best books but it is still entertaining literature. My main complaint is the lack of an over-arching plot. It is more a collection of stories about various fascinating characters who populate Deadwood, Dakota Territories, in 1876, than a traditional novel. Some of the characters are obviously historical like Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane and maybe Mr. Dexter's research has brought to life lesser known actual personages as well. My guess is that Mr. Dexter's DEADWOOD is the basis for the hit HBO series of the same name. I have seen no credit to Mr. Dexter yet but the tone, style of dialogue and general similarity of the two works is striking. In the book Al Swearingen is not the strong character that he is in the series. And Seth Bullock takes a lesser role as well in the book, while Charley Utter and Calamity Jane step to the fore. My favorite Dexter book is TRAIN with THE PAPER BOY a close second. Still, DEADWOOD shows off Mr. Dexter's writing quite well and may be one of the best western novels ever written. He can definitely claim company with Larry McMurtry.

i love those writers who expect their readers to think, to fill in, to keep a running score of what people say about the same events & how to go about judging them. Helps keeping score as to liars & facts. Great characters, & detail down to the period clothing, toilet, body odor, bath availability, costs, & the ease a man or woman could die. Dexter has some outright dynamite passages where his collection of philosophies are enjoined into the fabric of these lives that spend most of their time drinking, fighting, whoring, & dealing with weather & mud that should kill most. Some absolutely brilliant phrasing & technique where it's written so gracefully & lightly, that it could have been a butterfly assigned the duty to kiss you with the words. Much like the series, but it has its own story. A great book, well enjoyed. Now to go back & find those gold phrases for posterity.

This was published in 1986 - there seems to be some confusion about it being connected to the TV series (which I love). Dexter uses real Deadwood residents of the time as a framework to fictionalize his novel, but the plot bears no resemblance to the tv show, and many of the characters are very different from how they were written for tv.Charley Utter is the main thread throughout the book. The story is told from various viewpoints in small vignettes. Dexter sets a scene and establishes characters in such a solid sense that I found this book engrossing and I will gladly read it again at some point, as well as reading some of his other books.This is a great book, masterfully written. I didn't want it to end.

I went back and forth while reading this book. I couldn't decide if I liked it or was indifferent but, in the end, affinity won out. This is the tale of the rough boom town of Deadwood in the Black Hills of the Dakotas in its earliest days -- and it's the tale of Wild Bill Hickock's legendary demise and the people who surrounded him and remained there in the wake of his death. The first part of the novel is devoted to Wild Bill and long time pal and hunting companion Charley Utter. They ride into town in a wagon after Charley Utter's kid brother-in-law (both Utter and Wild Bill are recently married though away from their respective spouses) has shot Hickock's horse in a moment of righteous anger over a breach of sexual etiquette by the "whore man" Al Swearingen who is in the wagon train with them. Wild Bill is apparently syphillitic and slowly going blind, though in good light he can still shoot a shot glass off the head of a tough old bull dog. And his reputation scatters people in his path while drawing liquor, poker partners and admirers by the hundreds.Wild Bill's entry into Deadwood is a cause of much eager rumor and some unpleasant rumblings, especially from the likes of a big ugly bounty hunter named Boone May who's got the head of a local outlaw in a sack that he's trying to get paid for. The problem is, the outlaw's not wanted in Deadwood and Boone doesn't want to ride all the way to Cheyenne to collect the bounty and while he dawdles in Deadwood the head rots until it becomes unrecognizable and Boone looks to be out the money he'd hoped to claim. Sheriff Seth Bullock's no help for the poor aggrieved and not overly bright but somewhat intimidating bounty hunter because Bullock's got a business to run with partner Solomon Star and no cash to spare for the decapitated head Boone's toting all over town. Boone has to find another way to earn the cash he figures he'll be out if he can't hawk the head.Meanwhile Wild Bill and Charley Utter set up camp by one of the town's creeks and spend their days drinking, playing cards and listening to the boasts of the locals while Hickock performs his fabled shooting feats, sometimes using a mirror to shoot targets behind his own back to the general applause of the saloon denizens. When not carousing aimlessly, Utter is looking into business opportunities and looking after Hickock who spends his days trying desperately to urinate and coating his body in mercury in hopes of curing what ails him. Nothing is helping though and the two pals manage to find a bath house where they befriend its "soft brain" proprietor, the Bottle Fiend (so-called because of his passion for collecting empty bottles when he isn't trying to kill himself). Utter has a soft place in his heart for cases like the "soft brain" and for the filthy, hell-raising Calamity Jane who fancies herself hitched to Wild Bill. But Wild Bill has only the worries of slowly encroaching blindness and his separation from the circus acrobat Agnes Lake, whom he had recently married and left in St. Louis, on his mind. He avoids Calamity whenever he can while Charley makes the acquaintance of a local acting troupe and the stately lady, Mrs. Langrishe, who is its co-proprietor. The lady's flirtatiousness distracts old Charley though it never moves Bill, who has enough trouble figuring out how he's going to pass water each day, to think of other indulgences.It's an unconventional Western without gunfights (albeit with some gunplay) and little in the way of insight or intelligence on the part of the denizens of Deadwood. Or real heroism. The narrative carries us in and out of the minds of the different participants, from Charley, whose point of view we mainly share, to that of his youthful brother-in-law Malcolm Nash, to the lady actress, to Lurilene the whore, to Al Swearingen, a most reprehensible character (as we soon discover), to the China Doll (a lovely Chinese lady named Ci-An who has been brought to America by Swearingen's Chinese equivalent, a businessman named Mr. Tan, to serve as his personal concubine). And then there's Sheriff Bullock and Solomon Star, the latter of whom is soon drawn into the malestrom of passion and misunderstandings that is endemic among Deadwood's residents.Boone May finally figures out a way to get the cash he thinks his due for the rotted head, Charley cultivates his friend the Bottle Fiend, and Bill plays cards, gets drunk and coats himself with mercury each morning while steadily losing more and more of his vision in the dim light of dusk when the contrasts between objects become hardest to distinguish. Wild Bill also cultivates a friendship with Pink Buford's fighting bulldog and acquiesces to another with a silly boaster named Captain Jack who fancies himself an Indian fighter which leads to yet more drinking and an abortive moose hunt and, finally, Bill's assassination at the hands of a no-account stumble bum named Jack McCall while Utter's away in Cheyenne trying to set up a pony express business. Bill goes down with a shot to the back of his head while playing cards, never having had a fighting chance and one is left with the sense that that's what he came to Deadwood for. Knowing he was dying, he was marking time until he found his end.But the story doesn't end there by any means. In Bill's wake, his reputation remains to awe the townspeople, both in the good part of town and in its Badlands section, and the people who remain continue their machinations in a strange and intricate dance of life in which no one really understands anyone else and they're all acting and interacting at cross purposes with one another -- until the final denouement, that is, and the fire that famously burned the old wooden town down and cleared the way for a new city of bricks.Charley never figures out who was behind the killing of his pal though he hangs around in Deadwood in close proximity to the culprits, finding sexual satisfaction with Lurilene, Boone May's girl, and the randy if finicky Mrs. Langrishe while Calamity Jane, also out of town when Bill is shot, comes roaring back on a half-healed broken leg, claiming herself Bill's "widder". But she doesn't count on Agnes Lake who, notified by Charley of the death of Wild Bill, journeys to Deadwood herself to see his grave and help wrap up his affairs -- assuming, of course, that he had any which, it turns out, he didn't as he had spent his final days doing hardly anything of substance at all. There are several interesting sub-plots including Charley's brother-in-law Malcolm's feeble attempts at placer mining and his second disastrous run-in with Swearingen and through it all Charley stumbles along, taking more baths than anyone else in Deadwood and enjoying the sexual favors, at least for a time, of his two lady friends. The information about who conspired to kill Wild Bill is right under his nose all the time but with liquor never more than a bottle away he fails to sniff it out repeatedly. But the dynamics of the dysfunctional Deadwoodians sort it all out in the end. Life, it seems, pays everyone back eventually. Justice and revenge are only incidental.The story, finally, is Charley Utter's, who sees it all and understands at least a part of it, which is a hell of a lot more than most of the other denizens of Deadwood ever manage to do. Charley hangs on for a while, until he sets himself up in another business which keeps him in the chips for a time and then the now diseased and drastically weakened Boone May comes calling. Still, Charley, not a big man himself, though trail hardened and well able to take care of himself, proves the better man, getting the upper hand on old Boone in a surprising way.In the end the story follows Charley into exile and old age -- a kind old coot who finds a few, whom he befriended when he could, to look after him -- repaying them with a few interesting stories from his past, none of which, in Charley's telling, ever reflect the bigger picture of the life he had lived, either in Deadwood or before when he was pals with Wild Bill.This novel is strangely compelling in its emphasis on human incapacity to comprehend the world or other humans as the people of Deadwood stumble aimlessly along in the slow decay of their wasted lives. Sometimes harsh pain and slow death are the only payback, and sometimes it's dishonor such as Captain Jack finally earns when he shows his true colors during an Indian raid. But Agnes Lake moves on -- as does Calamity Jane, when the town's saloon keepers figure out a way to send her packing. Only Charley seems to manage a gentle and relatively untroubled end. And maybe Wild Bill who gets the sudden bullet in his head to send him out without any warning, still a legend and hero to his fellow men, rather than remaining alive to face the slow syphillitic decline that had otherwise been his fate.Stuart W. Mirskyauthor of  The King of Vinland's Saga

Torn cover. Very disappointed.

This book is an easy read that gives an excellent insight into the life of Buffalo Bill in the town of Deadwood

The star of Pete Dexter's book is not Wild Bill Hickock, or even Calamity Jane, but Charley Utter, Wild Bill's friend and partner towards the end of his life. It is through Charley we experience the events of the novel, the vast majority of which are based on real lives and actual events. Calamity Jane Cannery is real, as is China Doll the Chinese whore, and Bill's wife Agnes Lake, Mrs Langrishe the actress, Captain Jack Crawford and Wild Bill's assassin Jack McCall. Sheriff Seth Bullock and his business partner Solomon Star are real as are the Methodist Minister Henry Hiram Winston Smith and Pink Buford and his fighting bulldog. All of the characters bar one (a younger brother of Charley's wife) were in Deadwood at the time. Dexter's original research has been prodigious, but Dexter's real talent lies in what he has made of the facts. He has brought them alive on the page in a feat of marvellous creative imagination. Forget all the cowboy and Indian stuff - this is a story about real people doing real things in a time when it really was a struggle just to survive.This is a tremendous book, packed with action from beginning to end and replete with a deeply realistic flavour of the times. There were still Indians in the Black Hills in 1876, when this novel begins, and Deadwood was a town of two halves - the respectable quarter and the low dives and whorehouses, along with prospecting miners, muleteers and Chinese labourers. The novel takes real incidents and fleshes them out with names and characters from the newspapers and record books of the times, giving their lives colour, energy and wild-west grit, blood and bones. It's a wonderful read from Pete Dexter, winner of America's National Book Award for Fiction for his earlier book,  Paris Trout . Bleak, fatalistic, riotously funny, deeply engaging and poignantly unforgettable. Paris Trout

Good book

One of a kind, but then it’s a strange read too me. I wished the story to be more compact - Many interesting characters, many fascinating relations and happenings among them and then… leading to nowhere.Still I really liked to read this book. Many weird, even funny moments and some great sayings are put into the mouth of the main characters. You get a touch of the time and the place; you get a touch of the life in the early days of what made itself a “great nation” during the last two centuries.