William Kittredge (1932–2020)

William Kittredge, a famed author who is lauded in The Oregon Encyclopedia as a “preeminent voice of the American West,” reflects back on his life growing up on his family’s ranch in eastern Oregon.

I picked this up while my husband and I were staying in Oregon for six months with his job. I like to read books set in the state we’re currently in and Hole in the Sky showed up as a nonfiction pick on the lists I work from (Literary Hub and Book Riot, if you’re curious).

I just couldn’t click with this book.

Kittredge does write beautifully and he writes of a way of life that seems to be disappearing. He writes fondly of the hands who worked the ranch, some of them for years and years for little more than room and board. He describes the difficult land in the salt flats of eastern Oregon and northern Nevada. Readers share in the stark beauty of the harsh land even as his family is bending it to their will with irrigation pipes and heavy equipment.

The rest of this review doesn’t feel fair, but it’s how I feel. The toxic masculinity put me right off. Kittredge himself acknowledges that he grew up on a hard land that made the people hard. He recognizes that his own extended adolescence lasted at least into his 30s. He liked to throw his weight around when he had authority and he was unreasonably hard on his men even while he was trying to get away with his own drunken workdays. He neglected his children and cheated on his wife shamelessly. And he acknowledges in the book that none of this was right or good. I applaud him for admitting his own faults and putting them out there for anyone to read but I disliked the young man in these pages and, rightly or wrongly, that colored my perception of the entire book.

Readers who are better able to separate the author from the work and the older, wiser man from the younger, more foolish one will enjoy this more than I did. It is at its heart a reflection on a way of life that has all but disappeared.… (more)

Kittredge uses the essay form to explore his ideas about home, our place in the West, and his personal history. Essays like "Owning it All," "White People in Paradise," or his tribute to Raymond Carver "Bulletproof" are worth the price of the collection alone (and my rationale for rating). Yet, amid the nuance and detail Kittredge sees in his own life and other westerners there is a lot of repetition in the writing and read together it gets a bit tedious. I would say this is a problem with the format of selected essays rather than his writing but there is a stark contrast between the essays for the book and the essays that made it to publication but it's worth it to judge for yourself the merit of each.… (more)

The editors do a generally fine job of tracing the detective's history as an iconic figure in American fiction. Because it addresses a broader phenomenon than most books of this type that I've reviewed, The Great American Detective touches on a number of characters--both male and female (Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, Mignon Eberhart's Susan Dare)--in the traditional mystery vein. But of primary interest to me is the hard-boiled stuff, and there's quite a bit of it here: Dashiell Hammett's "Too Many Have Lived" (one of the Sam Spade stories he wrote to fill the enormous demand that followed the success of The Maltese Falcon), Raymond Chandler's possibly over-anthologized "Red Wind" (which turns up so often precisely because it's Chandler's greatest piece of short fiction), and "Midnight Blue," one of a bare handful of short stories featuring Ross Macdonald's private eye Lew Archer. This is among the very best, too, with as much intrigue and melancholy SoCal atmosphere as any of Macdonald's novels.

And, of course, there's some goofy shit. Try as I might, I've never been able to share in the widespread appreciation for Cornell Woolrich; to me he was an average exponent of the subgenre, not terrible but not someone whose work should ever be mistaken for great literature, either. In "Angel Face," Woolrich's histrionic heroine sounds eerily like Kelly Coffield playing Velma Mulholland the Film Noir Girl on In Living Color (if anyone remembers that): "I've been around plenty, and 'around' wasn't pretty. Maybe you think it was fun wrestling my way home each morning at five, and no holds barred, just so--so...Oh, I didn't know why myself sometimes; just so you wouldn't turn out to be another corner lizard, a sharp-shooter, a bum like the rest of them." This veers dangerously close to Carroll John Daly territory, but at least Woolrich wrote with a sense of momentum. All pretense to storytelling ability goes out the window, however, in Don Pendleton's "Willing to Kill": "Five, now, yeah--count 'em--with a minimum of five guns per vehicle. Not a pistol force, either--bet on that--they would be toting automatics and big boomers, for sure." That's not writing; it's someone jerking off on the page. (And it's an action hero piece, not a detective story, which is why I would have argued against its inclusion in this book.)

I was pleasantly surprised by the oldest story here, 1894's "A Clever Little Woman." Authored anonymously and featuring long-running dime novel sleuth Nick Carter, it's actually a pretty nifty tale of detection not so different in essence from an early Hammett story like "The Creeping Siamese." Its attitude of wariness towards sentimentality and idealization would become a vital component of hard-boiled detective fiction a few decades later.… (more)