Jonesing for the Bad Old Days

In all likelihood, you have never heard of the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture (EAHC). It’s an ambitious online resource, originating with the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, a department of the Central Arkansas Library System. Since I have no links to that Southern state myself, it’s probable I never would have encountered the EAHC, either--except that an editor there was kind enough to assign me to write an entry about Arkansan Douglas C. Jones (1924–1998), a career U.S. military officer turned award-winning novelist, whose first of two “frontier mysteries,” The Search for Temperance Moon (1991), brought him to my attention.

Marilyn Stasio outlined the plot of Temperance Moon fairly well in her 1991 New York Times review of the book:

The year is 1892 and life is rowdy in Fort Smith, Ark., which lies just at the edge of the Indian Nations. In the courthouse, Judge Isaac Parker is working on his record as the hangingest judge in the West. Down by the freight yards, the bordellos are doing their usual brisk trade, and over in the Nations, “life is cheaper than a ten-dollar goat.”

The whole town is shocked, nonetheless, in THE SEARCH FOR TEMPERANCE MOON (Donald Hutter/Holt, $22.50), Douglas C. Jones’s big and beautiful western mystery, when someone guns down Temperance Moon, known by legend as the Outlaw Queen. (“She called the dance,” one mourner says by way of tribute. “She was smart.”) The citizens quiet down somewhat after blame falls on the victim’s shiftless brother-in-law. But that doesn’t satisfy Jewel Moon, Temperance’s daughter and the proprietor of a “society parlor” that is considered “the class of Fort Smith sin.” Jewel hires Oscar Schiller, a former marshal whose steady and thoughtful research into the Outlaw Queen’s past is less a manhunt for her killer than the detective’s personal quest for reasons why the older, wilder West had to die.

An able-bodied cast of “bootleggers, horse thieves, railroad roustabouts, Texas cattle drovers, land speculators, Baptist evangelists, pimps, bank robbers, and murderers” clamors to be noticed in Mr. Jones’s dense canvas. And those are pretty much the good guys, every one of whom died a little when they put Temperance Moon in her grave.

Six years later, Jones brought his “crusty,” cocaine-licking, and frustratingly nearsighted detective, Schiller, back in A Spider for Loco Shoat, which takes place in 1907 and propels the ex-marshal into an investigation involving the murder of a leading Fort Smith citizen who had his hands in places he shouldn’t have had them, and a 7-year-old orphan and bordello resident who claims to have spotted a fairy prince napping in a local graveyard. (Schiller also has the lead in Jones’ last published work, Sometimes There Were Heroes [2000], but that’s a historical novel of Texas, rather than a mystery.)

I won’t go into all of Jones’ story here; you can read more in my EAHC piece. But I should mention that, in addition to this author’s pair of western mysteries and the more than a dozen other novels he plotted around events and characters in U.S. history, Jones penned a best-selling novel called The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer (1976), which speculated on what might have happened to Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer had the brash officer survived Montana’s 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn. The book won Jones a prestigious Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and it was adapted into a 1977 TV movie starring James Olson and Brian Keith. However, the novelist (who had gotten his feet wet in publishing by trying, unsuccessfully, to peddle stories to detective pulp magazines) was once quoted in American West magazine as saying that Court-Martial “never set too well with me. Maybe it was because of the gimmick: ‘What if Custer had survived the Little Big Horn?’ Or maybe it was because so much of that book came right off the pages of various courts of enquiry following the battle. Hence, there is less of me in its pages and more pure history than in any novel I’ve written.”

The blend of record and imagination sings, though, in A Spider for Loco Shoat and especially in The Search for Temperance Moon.

Douglas C. Jones isn’t around to write any more mysteries. (As his son, Eben Jones, told me months ago, the author was cremated after he died in 1998, and his ashes were scattered over northern Arkansas’ Boston Mountains, “a place he often wrote about in his stories, talking about hounds chasing fox up into those hills.”) We have to be satisfied with the tales he completed before succumbing to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease eight and a half years ago. Fortunately, those two Oscar Schiller yarns are worth many re-readings. You’ll do yourself a favor to track down a copy of each.