The Return Of Kid Cooper

The Return Of Kid Cooper, by Brad Smith, is a crackerjack Western that is set a little later than most--it's 1910. Automobiles are showing up in the ranch lands of Montana. Nate Cooper has just been released from prison after 28 years, so like Rip Van Winkle he has to adjust to progress: "I was always of the opinion that progress made things easier. But it don’t look that way to me. If anything, things seem more complicated. Is that the whole idea of progress—to complicate matters?” he wonders.

Cooper was in prison after killing a crooked Indian agent in self-defense, but the local rancher lied about the facts. The first thing Cooper does upon release is kill a man for his treatment of young boys. Then he reconnects with his old flame, Rose, who has married his former partner and best friend, Harry. Rose's brother, Clayton, is going to run for governor, but there's something fishy about a survey done twenty-five years earlier that screwed the Blackfoot, whom Cooper is close to, out of their land.

There are many pleasures to this book, but Cooper's character is the best. He is a plainspoken fellow, often saying things in a comical way, such as “I shot a man named Dudley.” “Oh, dear. Was he badly hurt?” “Bad enough that they buried him.” He is in his 50s, older than most Western heroes, and I couldn't help but picture the late Richard Farnsworth playing him in a movie.

While Cooper is righteous, he is not without fault. "Nate Cooper had done some bad things. He had robbed a bank in his reckless youth, and he had killed men. He had trifled with the affections of more women than Rose wanted to know. He had squandered too much time at poker and billiards. He had known prison, and the inside of a few brothels. There was no evidence to suggest that he was a great man." But of course he always does the right thing.

The ending is terrific, a suspenseful page turner that surprised me a bit and has a heavy body count. But what Brad Smith does is give us the essential tropes of the Western--the cowboy as a knight errant, and bring it a bit into the modern age, where he doesn't belong. As he writes, "The country was changing, and not always in a good way, but one truth remained—a cowboy didn’t want to do anything he couldn’t do from the back of a horse."