Tag Archives: Sigmund Brouwer

Fiction, Reviews

‘Sam Keaton Wild West Mysteries Omnibus,’ by Sigmund Brouwer

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I enjoyed Sigmund Brouwer’s Christian-oriented Nick Barrett mystery novel, Out of the Shadows. I didn’t enjoy the sequel, Crown of Thorns, quite as much, so I won’t review it here (it dealt with racial issues, and was as awkward as such stories generally are).

But when I saw Brouwer had written a series of Western stories, I thought, hey. I’ve been meaning to read more Westerns. I’ll give it a try. I bought the Sam Keaton Wild West Mysteries Omnibus. There was much to enjoy there, but in the end it didn’t work for me.

Sam Keaton (an alias) was once a bounty hunter. Now he’s a cowboy, trying to live a peaceable life and avoid an old wanted poster. One day in Laramie, Wyoming he comes upon a big man trying to kick a little Indian to death in an alley. He’s no great lover of Indians, but the injustice of the thing rankles him, so he tries to stop it. The big man goes for his gun, and the next thing he knows the man is dead, and Sam is on the run again. Oddly enough, the Indian follows right at his heels.

The “irksome Injun,” as he calls him, turns out to be a sort of emissary, delivering messages periodically from a mysterious woman named Rebecca Montcalm. The messages give Sam instructions, with a promise of gold.

The story was interesting, but it seemed a little contrived to me. Improbable situations staged to orchestrate plot points. Insufficient credibility.

But my big problem was what I saw as major factual errors. This especially applied in the area of Colt’s handguns, about which the author knows far less than he thinks. He overestimates the ubiquity of the brass cartridge in 1871. He thinks gunfighters fanned their pistols (though in the second book he describes fanning in a way that makes me wonder what he’s talking about). He thinks you can unload a Colt by holding it upside down and shaking it.

But worst of all, he says really mean things about Wild Bill Hickok. I consider Wild Bill one of my pards, and I don’t cotton to that kind o’ talk.

So I didn’t finish the second book.

I will try the next Nick Barret book though, if I see it. Because the author is clearly learning his craft.

Fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘Out of the Shadows,’ by Sigmund Brouwer

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We do not want to risk coming out of the shadows, preferring to remain in the darkness of lives of quiet desperation, afraid of all that is unknown about God and holding on to our only certainty, even if this certainty is the pain we know and understand.

How come nobody ever told me about Sigmund Brouwer before? (I’ll bet somebody did, and I overlooked it.) He’s a Canadian writer, and yet in Out of the Shadows he’s produced an excellent mystery in the Southern Gothic style. It reminded me a little of Walker Percy.

Nick Barrett is a son of Charleston aristocracy, but only in a marginal way. His mother married into the old, moneyed Barrett family, but then bore a child – Nick – out of wedlock. After she disappeared, with Nick’s trust fund money and (according to rumor) with yet another lover, Nick was raised in the family home and tolerated. But they never let him forget his inferior status. He thought he’d beat them all when he married the beautiful Claire, also from their circle. But that all blew up a few nights after the wedding, when several of the young people were in a car accident. Nick lost half his leg in that accident, while Claire’s brother was killed. And Nick found himself faced with an ultimatum from the corrupt county sheriff – sign an affidavit admitting to being the drunk driver (which he wasn’t) or go to prison. Nick left town, the marriage was annulled, and he traveled the world before settling down to teach astronomy at a small college in the southwest.

But now he’s gotten an anonymous letter, telling him that if he comes back to Charleston he can learn the truth about his mother’s true whereabouts. He goes back, limping on his prosthetic leg, to face the still-hostile relatives, and starts kicking over stones and stirring up hornet’s nests. People will die, including (nearly) Nick himself, before the truth comes out and he learns the true power of love, the reality of forgiveness, and something about God.

Out of the Shadows knocked me for a loop. It was thoughtful, lyrical, and even action-packed (I didn’t see that coming). I’ve read a fair number of Christian novels, but never one where the actual act of conversion is portrayed as effectively and movingly as it is here. I was reminded of Leif Enger, but Brouwer is more explicit in his message.

Highly recommended. Really, you need to read Out of the Shadows.