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Incident at Twenty-Mile (1998)

The year is 1898 and Matthew Dubchek (aka, Mattthew Chumms, aka, The Ringo Kid) comes drifting into Twenty-Mile, Wyoming (so called because it's twenty miles from some place twenty miles away). Eighteen year old Matthew, all of whose ideas about life come from the Ringo Kid series of books, has just lost his parents & has come to town looking for work, which is scarce because the town is nearly deserted and the few remaining townsfolk serve only to take care of periodic visits from workers at the local mine. But Matthew is a natural con man & soon talks his way into a half dozen part-time
jobs & takes over the abandoned Town Marshall's quarters.

Meanwhile, Hamilton Adams Leider has escaped from prison with two psychotic henchman & he too is headed to Twenty-Mile where he plans to rob the next silver shipment from the mine to fund his American Freedom Militia. Seems Leider has been captivated by the lunatic writings of a man known as The Warrior, whose magnum opus The Revelation of Forbidden Truth reveals the fact that immigrants are being dumped into America by the International Conspiracy. Leider plans to take up The Warriors cause and lead an army against these "scum of the Earth."

This is Trevanian's first book in 15 years and it's a shame he's been inactive. He's taken the standard elements of the Western given them a vigorous shake & added an ironic modernist twist (the local stable is run by two gay men, one black, one white & the town's three whores are a black, a
white & an Asian) to produce an idiosyncratic Western for the '90's.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (B+)