Longarm And The Nevada Belly Dancer

Cover

Title Longarm And The Nevada Belly Dancer

Author Tabor Evans

ISBN 0-515-12790-6

Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc.

Category Fiction -- Old West

Shira's Rating

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What It's About

Sometime in the 1800's, a robber, dying from a gunshot wound, told the posse that Happy Jack Henderson, the leader of his band, was en route to Cairo, Nevada to leave the loot from the robbery with a belly dancer. In his quest to apprehend Happy Jack, Longarm, a Deputy Marshal for the U.S. government, headed there looking for this alleged person. The rest of the book is essentially a detective story, in which Longarm follows up leads, and eventually gets his man.

Its Good Points

So far as detective stories go, this one was okay. The author offered a number of clues, some that were real and others that were red herrings. At the end, when the time came to present the solution, the clues were consistent with that solution.

On The Negative Side....

Don't bother with this book if you're hoping to read a book about a belly dancer. In this particular story, the fact that the woman was a belly dancer really didn't have anything to do with the plot. The story would have worked just as well if she had had any other career that would have been unlikely for a woman, such as grave-digging. There are no episodes whatsoever in this book in which the character actually does any belly dancing.

The entire book was written in jargon intended to sound like the style of speech used in the Old West. I found it tedious to read, especially when I first started the book. For example:

Longarm finished his schooner and signaled the barkeep for a refill as he said, "Lord, you keep it hot and dry enough around here! I'd best start at the beginning, up the line to the east where they jerk engine water at the seat of Elko County. This quartet of owlhoot riders hit the Elko Post Office at dusk, making it federal in the first when they gunned an innocent bystander on government property as they were on their way out."

I could have done without the assorted gratuitous sex scenes in the book. They didn't really have anything to do with the plot developments, and they jarred me out of the flow of the story. It seemed as though every time Longarm wanted to question a woman about the case, he did so while getting it on with her.

In the interests of historical accuracy, I should probably also point out that "belly dancers" didn't exist in the U.S. yet during the era in which this story took place. The events of this story occurred in the latter half of the 1800's, shortly after the Civil War. "Belly dancing" first arrived on American shores in 1893. Of course, anyone who reads this sort of book hoping to acquire historical knowledge of any kind is severely misguided, but it seemed like something I should mention.

In Conclusion

If you like reading stories set in the Old West of the U.S., particularly stories that involve solving crimes and arresting the bad guys, then you might like this one. Otherwise, don't let the mention of "belly dancer" in the title lure you into reading it in hopes of reading about the exploits of a belly dancer in the Old West.