Book Review of: Dark Frontier by Matthew Harffy
Matthew Harffy writes an absolute love letter to the American Western with all the charm of a newly unearthed Louis L’Amour classic.
There’s even a bit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in there to boot!
Dark Frontier is as much of a mystery novel and even a crime procedural as it is a Western. As smart as I like to think I am, I was totally surprised by the end, even though there had been clues all along.
Gabriel Stokes is a veteran of the Anglo-Afghan War and the crime-ridden streets of London, where he served as a detective. He has seen some things, man…horrible things, filling him with darkness and destroying his marriage with drugs and drink. When an invitation comes from an old army friend, Stokes thinks the wide-open skies of the American West will excise his demons. He soon finds out there’s plenty of darkness in the land of the setting sun.
Dark Frontiers has all the familiar elements you’d expect of a classic Western: stoic heroes, a beleaguered widow, the old whiskey-sodden gunslinger, and the powerful cattle baron who uses money and might to lord over a lawless land.
But Dark Frontier takes these beloved familiar pillars of our Saturday matinees and freshens them with unexpected twists and a new perspective. We see the familiar Old West through the eyes of an Englishman. Stokes is certainly a stranger in a strange land, but the dichotomy runs deeper than surfacy cultural differences.
Stokes brings the insistence of an ordered world in which justice and the rule of law prevail. His partner, Jeb White, is a utilitarian who’d rather deal out a reckoning from behind his smoking Remingtons. But as they point out their differences to each other, they’ll find they are more alike than different. They are merely the two sides of every man: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the gentleman and the savage, civilized man and the beast within.
I love fish-out-of-water stories. It’s what I like about Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe Series, in which a low-born soldier becomes an officer, or Cornwell’s Saxon series (The Last Kingdom), where an English child is raised by Danes and then has to reconcile these warring cultures within him.
So I was fascinated when I heard that Cornwell’s fellow and rival sword-and-shield author, Matthew Harffy, was writing an American Western set in the late 19th century.
Harffy is well known for his Bernicia Chronicles, A Time For Swords series, and The Wolf of Wessex novel. These are well-loved classics in the British Dark Ages subgenre of historical fiction. So I was stunned when Harffy admitted on his Rock, Paper, Swords Podcast to fellow author cohost, Steven A. McKay, that he is a life-long fan of the American Western.
I mean, why not? I grew up in Detroit, making wooden swords and pretending to be a knight in shining armor. I can see my British cousins wearing cowboy hats and slinging capshooters at each other. So, I was delighted to see Harffy take on this labor of love.
Folks, I’m gonna tell you right now, you can feel that love in every word he writes. You’ll share that boyish wonder in every sentence you read. Harffy is a masterful writer. He would shine in any genre. Here, he paints such visual and lyrical landscapes, flesh and blood characters, and intense action scenes. Do yourself a favor: saddle up and ride off into the Dark Frontier!
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