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   Book Info

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Port Hazard  
Author: Loren D. Estleman
ISBN: 0765301903
Format: Handover
Publish Date: June, 2005
 
     
     
   Book Review


From Publishers Weekly
Western writer and crime novelist Estleman (White Desert, etc.), winner of both Shamus and Spur Awards, is at the top of his game in this latest installment in a series featuring Page Murdock, deputy U.S. marshal. Murdock may be a peace officer, but there's little real peace when the cynical, crusty deputy is around. Together with his boss, Judge Harlan Blackthorne, a hardcase jurist who never met an outlaw he wouldn't hang, he serves up swift justice in the Montana Territory in the 1880s. Murdock is puzzled by assassins repeatedly trying to kill him when he is minding his own business, but the judge discovers the motive. A shady conspiracy called the Sons of the Confederacy is plotting to renew the Civil War, and their first step is to murder prominent lawmen and other public officials. The judge, unconcerned about jurisdictional niceties, sends Murdock to San Francisco, the home of the conspirators, to root them out before their aim improves. Murdock deputizes his own backup by hiring a black ex-soldier named Beecher, who is armed with a fearsome Le Mat pistol that fires shotgun shells. Murdock and Beecher find themselves awash in the filth and corruption of San Francisco's Barbary Coast, surrounded by gamblers, drunks, vigilantes, whores, petty thugs, crooked politicians and the deadly Chinese gangs called tongs. Their investigation reveals much more than they expected, including an undercover Pinkerton detective, a dwarf with an iron ball on a chain attached to the stump of his arm and a dead man who isn't really dead. Snappy dialogue, fast-paced action, colorful characters and plenty of bullets, booze and blood make this western crime drama a wicked romp through the legendary gutters of the Barbary Coast.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock usually roams the open trails and cow towns of the West in his dead-or-alive search for outlaws and miscreants. Federal judge Harlan Blackthorne has a different venue for Murdock's next assignment: California's Barbary Coast. A militant wing of the Sons of the Confederacy, located in San Francisco, is assassinating anyone who impedes its efforts to revive interest in secession from the union. Murdock is chosen to cut off the splinter group's head by eliminating its leadership. With former slave and ex-Union soldier Edward Anderson Beecher as his right hand, Murdock settles into San Francisco, where he discovers that it isn't the whores, drug addicts, and Chinese gangs of the Barbary Coast who hold the most significant threat to his mission and his life; rather, it's the politicians, captains of industry, and other "respectable" citizens. Murdock has survived because he's tough; this time he'll have to be as cunning as his prey. Estleman, at home in many genres, here mixes noir and the Old West, as Murdock literally walks off the trail and onto the mean streets. A wildly entertaining read with great period atmosphere and dialogue. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
Hired killers, sent one by one to Montana Territory after Page Murdock. Murdock doesn't know why someone wants him out of the way, but he knows where they're coming from.

Thus begins Murdock's descent into a hell more decadent, corrupt, and dangerous than even he has ever seen---San Francisco's Barbary Coast. With an unwilling backup man, Murdock takes up temporary residence among the whores, gamblers, dope addicts, and cutthroats of the continent's foulest district. No man here is trustworthy. The enemies he's really worried about, though, are the men who run things, the politicians.

Murdock's quest also takes him into Chinatown, into opium dens, and into league with a man of an alien culture who controls vices that make respectable people quail. But perhaps the men who seem respectable are the most insidious of all.

Loren D. Estleman's latest tale of Page Murdock takes the deputy to the federal marshal into danger and evil appalling even for him, and delivers excitement and satisfaction as only Estleman can.



About the Author
Loren D. Estleman was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and graduated from Eastern Michigan University with a BA degree in English Literature and Journalism in 1974. In 2002, the university awarded him an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters for his contribution to American literature.

He is the author of more than fifty novels in the categories of mystery, historical western, and mainstream, and has received four Western Writers of American Golden Spur Awards, three Western Heritage Awards, and three Shamus Awards. He has been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Britain's Silver Dagger, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2003, the mammoth Encyclopedia of Detective Fiction named him the most critically acclaimed writer of U.S. detective





Port Hazard

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Hired killers, sent one by one to Montana Territory after Page Murdock. Murdock doesn't know why someone wants him out of the way, but he knows where they're coming from.
Thus begins Murdock's descent into a hell more decadent, corrupt, and dangerous than even he has ever seen--San Francisco's Barbary Coast. With an unwilling backup man, Murdock takes up temporary residence among the whores, gamblers, dope addicts, and cutthroats of the continent's foulest district. No man here is trustworthy. The enemies he's really worried about, though, are the men who run things, the politicians.
Murdock's quest also takes him into Chinatown, into opium dens, and into league with a man of an alien culture who controls vices that make respectable people quail. But perhaps the men who seem respectable are the most insidious of all.
Loren D. Estleman's latest tale of Page Murdock takes the deputy to the federal marshal into danger and evil appalling even for him, and delivers excitement and satisfaction as only Estleman can.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Western writer and crime novelist Estleman (White Desert, etc.), winner of both Shamus and Spur Awards, is at the top of his game in this latest installment in a series featuring Page Murdock, deputy U.S. marshal. Murdock may be a peace officer, but there's little real peace when the cynical, crusty deputy is around. Together with his boss, Judge Harlan Blackthorne, a hardcase jurist who never met an outlaw he wouldn't hang, he serves up swift justice in the Montana Territory in the 1880s. Murdock is puzzled by assassins repeatedly trying to kill him when he is minding his own business, but the judge discovers the motive. A shady conspiracy called the Sons of the Confederacy is plotting to renew the Civil War, and their first step is to murder prominent lawmen and other public officials. The judge, unconcerned about jurisdictional niceties, sends Murdock to San Francisco, the home of the conspirators, to root them out before their aim improves. Murdock deputizes his own backup by hiring a black ex-soldier named Beecher, who is armed with a fearsome Le Mat pistol that fires shotgun shells. Murdock and Beecher find themselves awash in the filth and corruption of San Francisco's Barbary Coast, surrounded by gamblers, drunks, vigilantes, whores, petty thugs, crooked politicians and the deadly Chinese gangs called tongs. Their investigation reveals much more than they expected, including an undercover Pinkerton detective, a dwarf with an iron ball on a chain attached to the stump of his arm and a dead man who isn't really dead. Snappy dialogue, fast-paced action, colorful characters and plenty of bullets, booze and blood make this western crime drama a wicked romp through the legendary gutters of the Barbary Coast. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Having shut down the whiskey, music, and fast cars of his superb industrial Detroit quintet with 1999's Thunder City, stylist Estleman returns with a historical western in mirror-smooth mahogany prose. This seventh deputy US marshal Page Murdock installment picks up where 2000's White Desert left off. With a more densely ambitious style and dialogue that rings tones from the overblown bittersweet rhetoric of the day, it opens in Montana, then sinks into the opium-beclouded, bullet-zinging sinfest of San Francisco's Barbary Coast with pages indebted to Herbert Asbury's 1933 classic, The Barbary Coast. This federal lawman, working out of Helena, is seen by many as a killer hired by Washington to shrink the ranks of desperadoes. It's now 20 years since the Civil War, but legions following the Sons of the Confederacy (led perhaps by the Honorable D.W. Wheelock, city alderman and captain in the San Francisco fire brigade) still plan on secession for the 13 Confederate states. Bound for Frisco on a train also bearing General US Grant, Murdock hires Edward Anderson Beecher-a railroad porter and ex-black cavalryman-as deputy to guard his back. When two assassins, each bearing a 20-dollar gold double eagle, attempt to kill Murdock, Beecher saves him. Here, the amusing dialogue turns dizzy with thieves' jargon in Port Hazard (San Francisco), talk that demands subtitles. But it's with the descent into Chinatown that unthinking evil turns thick as liquid opium, with blood geysering from beheaded bad guys. As for Bella Union's melodeon section: "Cabbage roses exploded on burgundy runners in the aisles. Laurels of gold leaf encircled a coffered ceiling with a Greek Bacchanal enshrined in stained glassin the center, lighted from above so that the chubby nymphs' nipples and the blubbery lips of the bloated male gods and demigods glittered like rubies." Louis L'Amour looks down with envy.

     



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