Cottonwood by
Scott Phillips
hbk out June 04
Published by Picador
at £16.99
It is 1872 and the railroad is coming to Cottonwood, a small town near Kansas. Bill
Ogden is a reluctant farmer, unfaithful husband, saloon bar owner and town
photographer. When wealthy businessman Marc Duval arrives, he recruits Bill to
help him build up his empire. But Bill becomes dangerously obsessed with the
beautiful Mrs Duval. Among the shady dealers, pioneers, prostitutes, and farmers
lurk the Bender family - serial killers who run the Cottonwood Hotel and butcher
weary travellers.
Impeccable and gritty period detail brings the tough frontier world alive in all its
filthy, frozen, coarse and dangerous glory. Unfortunately the structure of the
narrative mitigates against sustained tension. Likely murders, first alluded to on page
39, are not revisited for another 80 odd pages. The book is in two halves and when
we return to the story some 17 years later, with the wrong suspects arrested for the
killings, the momentum of the chase, and concern resulting from the precarious
position that Bill is in, have to a great degree been lost. Phillips based the book on the
true story of the Bloody Benders, and this may have dictated the shape of his plot.
That aside, Phillips writes with flair and style and succeeds brilliantly in depicting a
cast of grotesque and fascinating characters and in letting us in on the seamier side of
Western life: bawdy, uncivilised and slathered in mud.
Manchester Evening News 7.8.04
(
Cath Staincliffe
author of the popular Sal Kilkenny mysteries set on the mean streets of Manchester)
Cottonwood by
Scott Phillips
