Incident at Twenty Mile

The mysterious, pseudonymous Trevanian, who scored several bestselling hits in the 1970s and early '80s with The Main, The Eiger Sanction and Shibumi, is back after a long silence--and turns out to be as unpredictable as ever. This time, he has written a kind of archetypal western set at the turn of the century in a God-forsaken little town that supports a silver mine in the wilds of Wyoming. A racist and violently psychotic killer, Lieder, breaks out of jail and descends on the community with two subhuman sidekicks. Matthew Dubchek is a friendly, cheerful young drifter who has lugged his dead father's weighty old rifle into town and is looking for a job among Twenty-mile's assorted misfits. They are a crew any moviegoer would recognize: the sullen, dying gambler; the decent Jewish merchant; the black soldier of fortune; the bedraggled crew of whores at the Traveller's Welcome saloon; the tightfisted Swedish hotelkeeper; the storekeeper's beautiful daughter. Still, they are rendered with uncommon skill, and Matthew's efforts, simultaneously heartfelt and wily, to ingratiate himself with them are sharply drawn. From the moment Lieder and his gang arrive, the outcome is never in doubt, but Trevanian creates considerable tension, even if some of the scenes seem to have a pruriently violent edge. If the book had ended some 20 pages earlier than it does, it would have been a solid, well-crafted and often exciting western. In a penultimate section, however, Trevanian chooses to introduce himself as author, offering a seemingly spurious account of how he found his story, replete with old newspaper cuttings, and even winding up with a cast list and an indication of what became of his characters in later years. It's a pointless exercise that adds nothing to what has preceded it. (Oct.)