Book review: Port Hazard

For a 19th-century Deputy U.S. Marshal in what was then the Montana Territory, Page Murdock gets around. In Port Hazard, the seventh book of his Murdock series, novelist Loren Estleman throws his hero into old-time San Francisco. The result is an exhilarating read marred only in a few places by self-conscious reliance on the colorful criminal dialect of what was (before the earthquake of 1906) California's version of the Barbary Coast.

Although not as obviously movie-ready as Estleman's Nicotine Kiss, Port Hazard reads like a film noir version of Lawrence Kasdan's sunny western, Silverado. Kasdan worked with a cowboy, a little barkeep, and a racially integrated posse, just as Estleman does here, but Kasdan played his story in a major key, and Estleman writes in the literary equivalent of C sharp minor. Apart from Marshal Murdock and his reluctant sidekick, former Buffalo soldier Edward Beecher, Estleman's gallery includes a reformed prostitute, a one-armed dwarf, a professional gambler, a sinister politician, a self-ordained Christian preacher, and a Chinese gang leader whom Westerners call "Fat John" because most of them can't pronounce "F'an Chu'an."

Estleman draws each of these characters with loving attention to detail, and each has a memorable idiosyncracy. Murdock, for example, favors a five-shot revolver of British manufacture rather than the six-shot Colt more common on the frontier. Beecher has a saber scar that he didn't get from fighting Indians. F'an Chu'an has a cleft palate. Axel Hodge keeps the peace with a ball and chain where his right hand would be if he had one. The ribbon around Nan Feeny's neck is a plot point rather than a mere decoration, and the self-ordained minister hates ice cream parlors. You get the idea.

Murdock's assignment is to drive a wedge between the militant and moderate wings of an organization called the Sons of the Confederacy. Tellingly, the moderates are, for the most part, actual veterans of the Civil War who gather for reunions in Virginia, while the militants are wannabes who were too young to serve the lost cause that now makes them hot-eyed along the Barbary Coast. To accomplish his mission, Murdock must cross paths with the "baby Rebels," and also with gangs known as The Tong and The Hoodlums.

Estleman makes the violence in his story plausible rather than operatic. Unholstered pistols are often but not always fired. The author knows his way around library microfiche catalogs, so one gets the impression that poor sections of San Francisco in 1883 looked, smelled, and sounded exactly as described here, with homicide shrouded by fog and muttonchopped city fathers who either look the other way or rail against "bludgeoners, blacklegs, swindlers, gamblers, smugglers, and uncertified celestials."

Apart from the sometimes-stilted dialog that Estleman admits in an afterward was unchracteristically hard for him to write, Port Hazard wears its meticulous research lightly. Among other things, readers are treated to factoids about the origin of the word "dive" (as a slang derivative of the divans on which opium smokers would pass out), and the peculiar influence of Oscar Wilde on certain American criminals.

I enjoyed this book. If you like westerns, crime stories, or fiction written with zest, you probably will, too.

(this review is also posted to Amazon.com)