Review: "Front Sight: Three Swagger Novellas" by Stephen Hunter

 

Front Sight Three Swagger Novellas by Stephen Hunter Atria Books, 2024     I read Stephen Hunter’s first Bob Lee Swagger thriller, Point of Impact (1993), sometime during the Spring of 1994. And holy wow, it knocked me off my feet with its disturbingly realistic violence—the realism due as much to the emotional impact on the characters as the action itself—and the dizzying large screen conspiracy plot with a former Vietnam sniper, turned Arkansas drunk, nicknamed Bob the Nailer, at its core. I read the next two—Black Light (1996) and Time to Hunt (1998)—as they were released with the same satisfying awe as I’d had while reading the first. Frankly, all three are among the best thrillers published in the 1990s. After that, Hunter switched to telling the story of Bob Lee’s father, Earl. A rugged former Marine and legendary Arkansas lawman gunned down in 1954 by the nasty Lamar Pye—you should read the fantastic Dirty White Boys (1994) for Lamar’s tale. Hot Springs, which was the first of three books featuring Earl—the other two are Pale Horse Coming (2001) and Havana (2003)—hit bookstores in 2000. And then in 2007 Hunter returned to Bob Lee with the disappointing The 47th Samurai and again in 2008 with the so-so Night of Thunder. Which is when I lost interest in Hunter’s new releases and the Swaggers both. I mention all this because I recently read Hunter’s Front Sight (2024), a collection of three Swagger novellas—one each for Earl and Bob Lee, and another featuring Bob Lee’s grandad, Charles Swagger—and found myself wondering if I’d been too hasty in writing-off Hunter and the Swaggers. The first, “City of Meat,” featuring Charles Swagger, is a hard-as-nails story about an elusive drug syndicate working Chicago’s predominately Black 7th District in 1934. Charles is a former Arkansas sheriff and renowned gunfighter turned G-Man on an FBI team looking for the notorious bank robber, Baby Face Nelson. While investigating a possible sighting of Nelson at the Chicago Stockyards, Charles is confronted by a knife-wielding man soaring high on an unknown narcotic. Charles teams-up with the real-life depression-era Black lawman, Slyvester Washington, nicknamed Two-Gun Pete—rumored to be the source material for “Dirty Harry” Callahan in the Dirty Harry movies—and follows the trail of the narcotics gang into unexpected places. “City of Meat” is action-packed and violent, but its real-world setting, the plight of Blacks on Chicago’s Southside—nobody really cared what happened there so long as it stayed there—give it a panache and a depth unusual for anything published in the thriller category. As Hunter says in his intro, “City of Meat” is his attempt at writing the equivalent of “the message picture,” where the story is accompanied by a portrayal of a societal ill. And it worked well. “Johnny Tuesday,” which began life as an unproduced screenplay, is a hardboiled film noir in novella format. It is hardboiled in a Carroll John Daly way: fast-paced but at times frustratingly indecipherable with a black and white morality and, especially in the case of Earl, cartoonish characters. It’s 1945 and Earl Swagger is fresh from the South Pacific and now fighting a personal war in the small fictional city of Chesterfield, Maryland. He hits town using the name Johnny Tuesday to investigate a lethal bank robbery and finds pretty much everyone in town is a scoundrel. The style of this one is cool—it feels like one of those “complete novel” tales published in the pulps of the 1930s. A category I like, but the writing (as good as it is) felt a little too self-aware and the plot a little too busy. And even worse, Earl seemed like an altogether different man than he is in his novels. “Johnny Tuesday” would have worked better if the hero hadn’t been Earl Swagger, or if I hadn’t read any of Hunter’s excellent Earl Swagger novels before reading it. “Five Dolls for the Gut Hook,” which is my favorite of the stories, is a serial killer tale set in Hot Springs, Arkansas. It’s 1979 and Bob Lee is drowning his dark Vietnam memories—“whiskey dreams were the best, and this one was fine”—in his tiny Polk County, Arkansas trailer. But his slow suicide gets shunted aside when his old friend Sam Vincent comes asking for a favor. A killer is targeting young transient women working Hot Springs’ sex trade and the local force is out of ideas of how to catch the monster. They won’t go to the staties or the FBI because it would bring unwanted publicity as Hot Springs is trying to transition from a rough and tumble crime town into a family destination resort. And everyone is sure Bob Lee can bring something new to the investigation since he comes from lawman stock. And, of course, they’re right. In Hunter’s intro to “Five Dolls for the Gut Hook,” he says it is his attempt at writing a “notorious genre of bloody Italian mystery-horror films of the seventies,” called “Giallo.” A film style I’m unfamiliar with, but if any of the films are as good as this tale, I need to make amends and get acquainted with it quick-like. Besides the great title, “Five Dolls of the Gut Hook,” has that grand dusty feeling of the 1970s: pickup trucks, sweat, cowboy shirts, brutality, dark deeds, and corrupt cops all wrapped into a honky-tonk town darkened by its many secrets. And there’s Bob Lee, being Bob Lee, too. This one alone is worth the price of admission.

Check out Front Sight on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.