Hunter's Trap - Hardcover

Smith, C. W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0875651623 ISBN 13: 9780875651620

Publisher: TCU Press, 1996

Synopsis

In Hunter’s Trap, Smith’s fifth novel, he creates a brooding tale of psychological suspense set on the film noir landscape of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. On the night of the vernal equniox 1930, Wilbur Smythe (a.k.a. Will Hunter) embarks on a plan to avenge the deaths of his wife and his employer, a wealthy Kiowa, both murdered by a banker greedy for the Kiowa’s oil money.

A twentieth-century “western” blended with elements of Greek tragedy, Hunter’s Trap explores the textures of place and time, collision of cultures, and the thin margin between good and evil in members of the human family. Hunter’s Trap is a literary page turner that repays its readers from the first page to the last.

About this title

About the Author

C. W. Smith is the author of the novels Thin Men of Haddam, Country Music, The Vestal Virgin Room, and Buffalo Nickel as well as a collection of short stories—Letters from the Horse Latitudes—and the memoir, Uncle Dad. He is professor of English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

From the Back Cover

On the night of the vernal equinox in 1930, the novel's protagonist, Wilbur Smythe, puts in motion his plan to avenge the deaths of his wife and his employer, a wealthy Kiowa, both murdered by a banker greedy for the Kiowa's oil money. Smythe intends to kidnap the banker's seventeen-year-old daughter, Sissy, and hold her hostage to torment her father before killing him. Hunter's Trap further explores the clash of values and cultures that formed the core of Smith's earlier novel based on historical events, Buffalo Nickel. In this new novel, he has written a blend of early twentieth-century "western" with Greek tragedy and has given the tension-filled story a sophisticated gloss of 1930s determinism and pre-Christian paganism, so that the horrific outcome of Smythe's plan to use the daughter of his nemesis has a fateful inevitability and a gruesome but implacable logic. Set largely in El Paso and its Mexican neighbor, Juarez, the story weaves together the strong political and social undercurrents of the Depression. Beneath its texture of place and time, however, the story reasserts the age-old wisdom of how thin the margin is between good and evil in members of the human "family".

Reviews

Beautifully bitter Depression-era revenge melodrama in which good guys lose, good women die, and virtue's reward is unreasonable tragedy. More a retelling of Smith's fourth novel (Buffalo Nickel, 1989) than a sequel to it, the story here examines the misguided destiny of Wilbur Smythe, a fatherless man who becomes an amanuensis to David Copperfield, the oil-rich Kiowa Indian hero of Buffalo Nickel. Sensitive to abuses of trust and faith, Wilbur zealously protects Copperfield's business interests but is incapable of keeping Copperfield's femme fatale wife, Laura, from having affairs with Hollywood ne'er-do-wells. Wilbur survives an apparent boating accident that kills his own pregnant wife, Bobette, as well as Copperfield. He suspects foul play when Laura contests her dead husband's will with help from a new business partner, shifty Oklahoma land speculator Bill Kale. Wilbur knows Kale as a sneering swell who made Wilbur's mother his mistress while double-crossing Wilbur's drunken stepfather. Could Kale, who hates Indians, and his loathsome henchman John Bliss, be responsible for additional ``accidents'' that deprived other well- to-do Indians of their wealth? Without obtaining any proof of their culpability, Wilbur becomes morbidly obsessed with revenge. He gives himself a new name, Will Hunter, and persuades Kale, now living the good life in El Paso, to hire him as a secretary. He then romances Kale's ingenuous daughter, Sissy, who imagines herself eloping with her husband-to-be as Will uses her to entrap her father. Veering between despairing glimpses of empty prairies and gruesome south-of-the-border sex scenes, Smith pushes Faulkner's technique of ``portraying the heart in conflict with itself'' to gritty excess. Wilbur is a tormented victim and tortured victimizer, and it's his sense of decency that brings on the final catastrophe. A dark, festering, erotic, Jim Thompsonesque dead-ender that simmers into a brooding bildungsroman, reminiscent of Thomas McGuane's macho head-butting duels but without his loopy humor or wry insights. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

It's an eye for an eye?obsessive hatred, relentless pursuit and coldblooded revenge for irrevocable loss?in this hypnotic sequel to Smith's highly praised 1989 western, Buffalo Nickel. That novel was enhanced by insight into the halting assimilation of Native Americans into modern society in the early 20th century. Here, Smith constructs a neo-western psychodrama as he revisits secondary characters from Buffalo Nickel to bring full circle an unscrupulous banker's murderous scheme to rob an oil-rich Native American of his birthright. Just months after the death of David Copperfield, the young Kiowa oil baron turned "Hollywood movie Indian," his assistant, Wilbur Smyth (aka Will Hunter), comes to El Paso to avenge the loss of his wife, Babette, who also died in the explosion of Copperfield's sailboat. Hunter locates the banker's hired assassin, then begins to stalk and seduce the banker's 17-year-old daughter, Sissy, planning to take her hostage, torture and kill her in retribution. The complex plot gradually unfolds against the divergent cultures of Oklahoma and Texas oil country, the Mexican border town of Juarez and Hollywood. during the Roaring Twenties. Shadowy images of good and evil, undercurrents of bigotry, greed and betrayal emerge from the loosely linked vignettes that make up the narrative. Hunter's rage contrasts with Sissy Kale's childlike vulnerability, even as she is determined to be treated as a mature woman. Smith falls somewhat short of his ambitions. He sometimes fumbles control of the narrative voice and the fractured timeline. Once the plot comes into focus, however, it moves inexorably to a stunning irony on the final page.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Jim Thompson meets Zane Grey in this sequel to Smith's Buffalo Nickel (S. & S., 1989). In 1930, Will Hunter, desolate after the violent deaths of his wife, Bobette, and Copperfield, his Kiowa employer, comes to El Paso, Texas, to avenge them. He intends to kill both men responsible: John Bliss, who carried out the murders, and Kale, a wealthy banker who was greedy to acquire the oil-rich Kiowa's assets. Hunter's plans to kidnap Sissy, Kale's 18-year-old daughter, and hold her hostage before shooting her father go horribly awry in a midnight confrontation at Kale's mansion. Although sections of the novel are intensely moving, they, and the most interesting and fully developed characters (Bobette and Copperfield), appear only in flashbacks. Hunter's responses to Sissy's behavior seem barely credible. In addition, a writing style that locates the novel uneasily between literary and genre fiction makes this a secondary purchase for all but the most comprehensive collections.?Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A young man who grows up poor and rootless in hardscrabble 1920s Oklahoma drifts to California where he is reacquainted with an oil-rich Kiowa Indian who gives him a good job. He also marries a delightful woman and finds his life's fulfillment in work, marriage, and fatherhood. Then his wife and his employer are killed in an accident that later proves to be no accident at all. The young man then sets off to gain revenge. Somewhat reminiscent of the stories of Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall, for example, Smith's novel offers an evocative exploration of the values and character of a time, a place, and a man. It's also a novel that would grace the lists of fine trade publishers, but refreshingly, it comes to us from a university press. Here's hoping that many readers come to know this skillfully wrought tale and that its success encourages TCU Press to bring us more such books. Thomas Gaughan

Edition details

• Publisher: TCU Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0875651623
• ISBN 13: 9780875651620
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216