New West Book Review

Debut Novel Revisits 19th-Century Idaho Murder Mystery

By David Abrams, Guest Writer, 2-12-10

Deep Creek
by Dana Hand
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pages, $25

Dana Hand’s debut novel Deep Creek opens with an unforgettable scene.  In 1887, a small-town judge and his daughter go fishing in the Snake River in Idaho Territory.  The girl throws in a line and catches a man.  Soon, more bodies are bobbing in the flood-swollen river and the judge, Joe Vincent, has a mass-murder mystery on his hands.

The corpses—shot, hacked, disemboweled, dismembered—are Chinese miners who have traveled deep into Hells Canyon where they met their fate at the titular Deep Creek.  Even though the body count rises to forty, law enforcement authorities and politicians in Lewiston (home to “fifteen hundred whites and five hundred Celestials”) are slow to launch an investigation.

Judge Vincent is hired by the miners’ employer, the Sam Yup Company of San Francisco, and soon he’s tracking the suspected killers up the Snake.  Vincent has had just about every job in Western law enforcement and politics there is:  marshal, probate judge, justice of the peace, federal commissioner and territorial representative.  Now, he turns into a frontier Sherlock Holmes—even disguising himself and going undercover to infiltrate a horse-rustling gang.  He’s joined in his investigation by Grace Sundown, a Metis (French-Indian) tracker; and Lee Loi, the company agent from Sam Yup sent to Idaho to ensure the untidy matter of the dead miners is handled quickly and quietly.

It’s a perilous time to be a dedicated lawman (or a minority like Grace Sundown and Lee Loi in the lily-white West).  As one character observes, “No one who went upriver to Deep Creek came back the same.”

The trio investigating the dark and dangerous curves of the Snake certainly returns from the mission damaged, both physically and spiritually.  The land at the edge of civilization is a frightening one and Hand spares none of the gruesome details of the murders in the flashbacks woven throughout the plot, which is based on actual events in 1887.

Deep Creek becomes more complex as it progresses.  We soon learn that Grace is Vincent’s former lover and that his current wife is a femme fatale who has discarded him in the wake of her money-grubbing ambition.  His investigation is also hampered by what Hand describes as “the Idaho-Oregon jurisdictional tangle, the wilderness conditions on the upper Snake, the undoubted destruction of evidence by the later May flood, and Lewiston’s limited appetite for solving an all-Chinese crime.  Bury and move on, that was the local sentiment.”

Vincent defies the prejudices of the Old West as he pursues the murderers.  Like a morally-upright Gary Cooper riding the range, he’s a noble (if flawed) hero sticking to his guns.

This is the first novel from Hand—the pen name of Will Howarth and Anne Matthews, authors of eighteen non-fiction books on American history and literature—and it shows the first-time novelist’s strain of trying too hard to be too many things for too many readers.

At times, the novel is permeated by the spare, chilly dread of Robert Altman’s film McCabe and Mrs. Miller; in other stretches, Deep Creek carries the burden of its research, moving at a deliberate pace which is alternately plodding (a la James Michener) and richly evocative (a la E. L. Doctorow).

Surprisingly, the novel becomes more exciting and interesting after Hand has dispensed with the murder investigation and trial.  The book’s major characters leave the courtroom and go their separate ways—some to San Francisco; some to Portland, Oregon; and some back to the blood-darkened valleys of western Idaho.  This is when Hand reveals the true heart of the novel:  Deep Creek is less of a murder mystery than it is a pointed condemnation of prejudice in the frontier West.

As awful as it is to see the blood-soaked corpses floating down the current of the Snake River, even worse is the apparent disregard for equal justice in Hells Canyon.  This is Deep Creek’s powerful message: not only was the Old West wild and wooly, it was criminally unfair in its treatment of women and minorities.  Only in the novel’s final, haunting scene does Hand bring some closure to the case—and even then it’s up to the land itself to exact vengeance for the murders.

David Abrams’ short stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Glimmer Train Stories, The Missouri Review, and The North Dakota Review, among other publications.  He is currently working on a novel loosely based on his experiences during the Iraq War.  He and his wife live in Butte, Montana.

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