Here We Go Again
Strong From The Heart
by Jon Land.
New York: Forge, 2020.
368pp. $29.99 hardcover, $14.99 kindle.
Reviewed by
Jim Sanderson
Readers should pity thriller writers. Contemporary thriller novelists need to include not just their protagonists but all their protagonists’ friends, relations, and associates (living and in some cases dead) and work them into the next novel. On top of that, the author needs new antagonists, dire situations, monstrous conspiracies, and crazier and more dangerous psychopaths than the last book, not to mention bigger explosions, more tension, and a more complicated connection of events to close the novel. But thriller writers should pity their readers, who need to remember and connect while being thrilled.
In order to get more boom and gravitas in the novels, contemporary thriller novels don’t follow fictional form so much as try to copy the effect and scene arrangement of a contemporary film or—now that everyone is staying at home and streaming—film series. They don’t copy the paranoid and thus deeply personal thrillers from Hitchcock or the “New Hollywood” directors of the ’70s, which depended on a more limited (and thus literary) point of view. North by Northwest and The Parralax View depended upon the viewers not fully knowing what forces were aiming at the protagonists. But contemporary readers see everything and everyone aiming at everyone else. The words come from a narrator, but these narrators want to be cameras, with the editing already done, with jumps from location to location or scene to scene in order to set the plot and set the effect. The most obvious example of this urge is the introduction of a character, letting that character move, talk, or think throughout a scene, and then killing at the end of the scene. So character serves the scene and the effect.
With his Catlin Strong Texas Ranger series, Jon Land proves himself wonderfully adept at moving the plot, the characters, the conceits, and, ultimately, his readers through his contemporary thriller series while meeting the demands or expectations of the genre. In Strong from the Heart, Catlin Strong is still a tough, ready, and determined Texas Ranger. She is still making a life and a home with ex-criminal Cort Wesley Masters and his boys. She is circled by a reformed psychopath, Colonel Paz, whom Land has teaching gym to elementary students, and an unreformed psychopath and half-sister, Nola Delgado. And she relies on the good graces and help of her Ranger Captain and a self-serving, name changing schemer, who is in and out of federal government employment. The plot involves a senator’s plan to break big pharma companies’ creation of an opioid epidemic in order to create his own world-wide opioid distribution system; a town in which everyone suddenly dies; Cort Wesley’s younger son’s overdose and near death; and (as told in flashbacks) an 1898 border partnership between a young Pancho Villa and Caitlin’s great grandfather, Texas Ranger William Ray Strong. New to this novel is an insane Comanche who can’t feel pain but learns to absorb and enjoy the pain of others, a bureaucrat who is evil because he is so banal, and a ninety-year-old ex-Ranger now working for Homeland Security. All of these characters and plot lines work out, but I can’t really tell you how. Jon Land can ingeniously link all of the incidents and characters, and in doing so, he proves himself to know a lot about a lot: opioid profit and production, gold mining, all sorts of armaments and explosives, Houston, San Antonio, and the border.
Obviously, a lot happens. The plot hops from location to location and from character to character. As I was holding on, not that I wanted this to be a novel of manners, I began wishing that the novel would slow down and let me catch my breath, to let the characters slow down and have lunch or a cup of coffee. And at exactly that point, Doyle Lodge (the ninety-year-old ex-Ranger, destined to be everyone’s favorite character) takes Cort Wesley to breakfast after Doyle bails Cort Wesley out of a Humble, Texas jail. I delighted at their conversation, which was mostly explaining plot to Cort Wesley.
Then I realized that Land, in approximating a filmed thriller with a camera licensed to go everywhere, was also recording manners. Specifically, he has short scenes, composed with mostly dialog, revealing plot, background, and character. George V. Higgins went full tilt in this direction with The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Scenes end at a climatic point—cliff hangers with varying degrees of danger, and then the results show up later. With this construction, the novel, with some cutting or CGI, could become a relatively cheap and filmable film or even a series.
Land’s Texas Rangers support the view of the Texas Rangers from those who opposed taking down the stylized statue of the modern Ranger at Luv Field: a tough, resourceful, "one riot, one ranger" Texas Ranger. To enforce that view, Land quotes short vignettes of or tributes to historical Rangers. Land’s Rangers stretch the law, sometimes even righting corrupt laws, but they are not the Texas Rangers in Doug J. Swanson’s Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers—or of the Texans supporting the removal of the Luv Field statue.
Finally, Jon Land presents convincing characters in outlandish situations. And this is the form of a lot of popular entertainment. And to present his Texas characters, he uses whatever form is necessary, but the result is a presentation that is peculiarly Land’s. I’ll let Doyle Lodge, the ninety-year old ranger, explain the tone and attitude of the novel:
“Used to be a bad guy was a bad guy. He didn’t need to be fronting for anybody else at the time, like some straw man. We got us a world now where the food chain’s so high up you can’t see the top, new and more powerful links sprouting up all the time.”
And so thank God, there’s Caitlin and her friends and rangers, Texas or not.
Jim Sanderson has published seven novels—literary, historical, and mystery., including El Camino del Rio and La Mordida. He is currently the Chair of the Department of English and Modern Language at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.