Beyond the Grave by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini (review)

224 Western American Literature Nathan Woodbarrow, hasn’t lived with his wife for years because of a stubborn conviction; Farley Chittenden’s “visions” assure him that his particular brand of polygamy is the true way of life; and even Wesley Earle, despite his toler­ ance of the peculiarities of others, clings stubbornly to faith in science, sup­ porting his wife’s Lutheranism only to avoid trouble. Some of the statements made about Mormons in The Backslider are mildly sarcastic and may offend Mormon readers who are overly protective about their religion, but Mormon readers who recognize their own human weaknesses will admit that Peterson’s characters are, after all, human. In fact, it is the humanness of the characters that gives this novel strength. But it also benefits from Peterson’s ability to show us the ranches, the small businesses, the towns, the powerful beauty of the southern Utah landscape. This is, indeed, a welcome novel from the hand of an expert story-teller. KENNETH B. HUNSAKER Utah State University Beyond the Grave. By Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini. (New York: Walker and Company, 1986. 235 pages, $15.95.) Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini collaborate on mystery-detective stories in which their respective sleuths, twentieth-century Elena Oliverez and nine­ teenth-century John Quincannon, manage to work on and solve mysteries though they are separated in time. In Beyond the Grave, a treasure chest buried in 1846 links Quincannon, after his death, to Oliverez, who as current director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Mexican Art, buys a chest for the museum and finds in it Quincannon’s notes on his effort to locate religious artifacts belonging to the Velasquez family, that were buried before Fremont’s men overran the Velasquez ranchos in 1846. Narrating the story of the search from the nineteenth century to the 1980s, the authors smoothly integrate the efforts of Quincannon, hired by a Velasquez descendant, to discover where a priest had secreted the priceless art objects, and of Oliverez, who continues the quest years later. Oliverez’sCatholic upbringing and sensitivity to the SpanishMexican culture help her to decode the clues that had stymied Quincannon. She finds the buried artifacts but almost loses her life when an unexpected killer follows her to the site of the treasure. The authors graphically capture the milieu of nineteenth-century San Francisco and Santa Barbara, the present-day ruins of the ranchos of the ranchos grandes period of California’s history, and varied life-styles of con­ temporary Californians. Their dramatizing of tensions between the conquer­ ing Americans and the Mexican-Americans, today’s Chicanos, recall short stories of “the splendid idle forties” of Gertrude Atherton and Bret Harte. The characterization of Elena Oliverez, who integrates her Chicano intuition Reviews 225 and knowledge, as she tries to think like nineteenth-century Quincannon and to gain the confidence of Sofia Manuela, the surviving granddaughter of Don Esteban Velasquez who provides the final clues, brings to mind Tony Hillerman ’s Navajo tribal police-detectives, whose cross-cultural confrontations also make western mystery and murder exciting. CHARLOTTE S. McCLURE Georgia State University Red Earth, White Earth. By Will Weaver. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986. 383 pages, $17.95.) Red Earth, White Earth is a novel that raises an old problem of literary values: what is the relative worth of books that entertain as opposed to those that instruct? For this is an eminently readable work that holds the reader’s attention right up to the end. But it is not a book of substance; it’s as easy to forget as it is to read. That this is so is especially disappointing because Will Weaver’s first novel contains ingredients that could have resulted in a penetrating drama­ tization of some problems in the contemporary American W est: abuse of the environment, Native American land rights, and depressed farm economy, to name but a few. Guy Pehrsson, the protagonist, has left his family’s Minnesota farm for life on the West Coast, where he makes big money manufacturing (what else?) computer circuit boards. Returning home (in his Mercedes), he discovers violence about to erupt in a land-ownership dispute between Indians and...