A chase through paradise

Paradise Sky might be the perfect title for a different kind of novel. The title may be suggestive of the west, which is where, at sunset, we find paradise in the sky, but it hardly suggests an expansive western saga of the type we find in novels with titles like Little Big Man, Wild Times and The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. Yet that is what Joe R. Lansdale gives us in his endlessly entertaining 2015 novel.

This is a highly fictionalized retelling of the life of Nat Love, or Deadwood Dick, although some would say Love's original telling of his story in his autobiography was itself highly fictionalized. Wherever the truth lies, Lansdale's version makes fine reading.

There were plenty of black cowboys in the Old West, but only Nate Love became a western legend. An expert horseman and marksman, he associated frequently with other, more prominent western legends. In the novel he is a close friend of Wild Bill Hickok. In his own account Love knew such men as Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid.

The son of freed slaves, Love is still in his early teens when a white man named Ruggert catches him looking at his wife's backside. From then on Ruggert proves willing to ruin his own life to end Love's, and the chase covers many years and a lot of western territory.  A story that begins with Ruggert chasing Love ends with Love, by now a Judge Parker deputy, chasing the outlaw Ruggert.

In between there are shooting matches, gunfights, Indian battles, love stories and, always, witty storytelling.

Lansdale has written some terrific novels, and Paradise Sky ranks high among them. With a different title, more people might have read it.