Month: July 2023

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Overlooked classics of American literature: Deadwood by Pete Dexter

Unlike the TV series of the same name, this is a sadly underrated story about the men of the old West

From The Guardian

Did the American TV producer David Milch read Pete Dexter’s Deadwood before creating the 2004 HBO drama of the same name? Milch claims he didn’t, but readers of Dexter’s 1986 novel might find that hard to believe. Both Deadwoods begin in the frontier town of the same name, in the Dakota Territory’s Black Hills, in 1876, with the shooting of the Wild West gunfighter Wild Bill Hicock, and choose to find the bulk of their narrative in the aftershocks that vibrate through the town after his murder. Most of their principal characters – Sheriff Seth Bullock and his friend Solomon Star, Calamity Jane, saloon owner Al Swearengen – were real-life historical figures, and Dexter and Milch portray them very differently, but Dexter sees some of Milch’s more left-field ideas – chiefly that of turning Hicock’s historically insignificant friend Charley Utter into a major character – as a little too similar to his own. He has also criticised the TV Deadwood – a show that once featured 63 “F” words in one episode – for its unrealistic overuse of swearing.

This must all be very frustrating for Dexter, who remains terribly underrated novelist. For lovers of historically-themed entertainment, however, it’s a win-win situation. The best way to see the relationship between Dexter’s Deadwood and HBO’s Deadwood is by way of comparison to the relationship between a raw, 1930s blues song and a giant, addictive 70s rock anthem deriving from it: one probably wouldn’t have existed without the other, but they’re both great in entirely different ways.

That said, if you’ve only witnessed the Deadwood of Ian McShane and Timothy Olyphant, Dexter’s stripped down version might take a little getting used to – just as a collection of Robert Johnson songs might, if the only blues music you’d ever heard was The Rolling Stones’s Exile On Main Street. Unlike Milch, Dexter is not so interested in the intricate big-picture politics of a rapidly growing Gold Rush town. His storytelling is on a smaller scale, exploring the small foibles of masculine temper and sexuality, and getting inside the character of Utter: a flawed but well-meaning frontiersman he seems to find more interesting than Hicock. There’s warmth in his characters, but it’s not the same kind you find in their TV equivalents, which is a hyper-real warmth that perhaps has no place in a novel, especially set in a cruel, lawless place where a winter will “take the life out of your face”.

What Dexter and the TV Deadwood do have in common is a mordant, masculine wit, and a flair for casual violence. “He was carrying a leather bag, and smelled like everything he’d touched or eaten in two months,” he writes of a bounty hunter. Hicock’s killer, Jack McCall, is “a weak-looking Irishman with no butt end and a face like a rodent.” When McCall commits his infamous deed, there’s something unexcitable about the scene: it’s no Gunfight at the OK Corral but, perhaps more crucially, you feel like you can smell the spilt liquor, dirty waistcoats and wood shavings.

Of any modern novelist, perhaps only Cormac McCarthy writes more like a man whose spiritual home is the old West. By about page 50, you forgive Dexter for writing “would of” instead of “would have” because by then you’re convinced he was actually there while all this stuff was happening: a wry, taciturn presence in the corner, who stayed out of things, mostly, but could throw a doughty punch or two when necessary.

Yet oddly, this remains Dexter’s only Western novel. His other books have restlessly roamed from the newspaper business (The Paperboy) to a malevolent, bigoted small town (Paris Trout) to the life of a proto-Tiger Woods in noirish 1950s Los Angeles (Train). What links all these novels is a raw, phlegmatic view of the world and a hard-boiled voice that tells you more than any voice in actual hard-boiled fiction probably ever could.

Before Dexter embarked on a career as a novelist, in the early 80s, he was nearly killed in a bar-room brawl, and this perhaps enables him to relate so well to unadorned characters such as Utter, who’ve clearly had the crud kicked out of them a few times, and whose humour “grows an edge” when they drink. Despite what Dexter does to disguise it by putting it in a macho, life or death setting, there’s a beautifully angled, humble comic tone in lines such as (about Sheriff Bullock) “his hat went on his head as carefully as you’d set dynamite” or (about a prostitute reluctant to give a frontiersman a more tender kind of love) “If Lurline needed to cradle something, she would of borrowed Pink Buford’s bulldog” that makes it no surprise that Dexter’s favourite novel of the last 25 years is Richard Russo’s Straight Man or that his latest novel, Spooner, is the kind of epic romp John Irving might have written if he was a fan of boxing instead of wrestling. In the end, it’s perhaps that tone that Milch can thank him most for: something that – maybe accidentally, maybe intentionally – carried over into the TV Deadwood and made for a new, more mischievous and human kind of old West storytelling.