BLACK POWDER, WHITE SMOKE

Stylist extraordinaire Estleman (The Master Executioner, 2001, etc.) deserves wider regard and a larger audience than he receives. (Hint to publisher: reprint Estleman’s epic Detroit quintet in a single hardbound volume that would demand major reviews.)

Here, a freed slave known as “Honey” (Honore Philippe Toussant L’Overture Boutrille) is so black that his cheekbones glow with a blue flame like blue coal. When a New Orleans whorehouse is closed down and ripped apart, Honey buys the remains for $50 and reopens the House of Rest. Dressed to dapper perfection, he pounds the piano (though he can’t read music and has a tin ear) and carries a Bulldog in his shoulder holster to protect his girls. One night he’s forced to kill a white customer who has severely mauled one of them. That not only puts him on the run but also starts his legend, first as the Blacksnake of New Orleans, then as the legendary gunman the Dark Angel of New Orleans. And he does become a terrific marksman. Meanwhile, in California, laughably inept train-robber Emerson Emerson, known as Twice Emerson, deserts the Union Army at Gettysburg, then gets taken in by a Confederate guerrilla band who mistake him for a Swede from Missouri, and then joins one marauding guerrilla band after another. Later, in Frisco, he kills a Chinese and must go on the run—and eventually he becomes as legendary a gunfighter as Honey. So journalist/failed novelist Ernest Torbert of Jupiter Press in Chicago is sent out to get the story on Honey and winds up helping promoter Casper Box arrange a face-off of the legends and shooting demonstration or contest on stage in Denver, neither criminal being wanted by the law in Colorado.

Estleman writes about master craftsmen, whatever his theme, either hangmen, automakers, or gunfighters, and then shapes sentences like prose poems to the craft at hand, his details sharp as metal shavings, in a voice all his own.