Drum's Ring

By Richard S. Wheeler

Book Overview

After her husband's death, Angie Drum inherited his newspaper, The Opportunity Outlook, and the responsibility of publishing it. She does her best to print the truth but finds herself at odds with the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0451203631
• ISBN13: 9780451203632
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: Signet Book
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.2" x 6.7"

Customer Reviews

Between love and justice

This is the third in a little triptych of books (beginning with "Restitution") that focus on personal honor in small communities prone to corruption. I can relate to that.The three are also excellent illustrations of what it means to write within a genre, "tennis with a net" as it were. Though to me the better analogy is chess. The frontier economy and social forces -- this time, cattle drives escorted by tough, traumatized Civil War veterans versus little towns just getting organized -- are the playing board and the squares of it are familiar enough. Then the author must devise "chessmen," each with their own stylized moves: the tough brute of a sheriff, the greedy and scheming mayor, the weak liveryman and -- to hold the trilogy of stories together -- a postmaster who acts as a sort of stage manager as in "Our Town." The gimmick is that the newspaper editor is both female and mother of the corrupt mayor.As stockmen arrive in the town, which is a railroad shipping point, the town officials accuse them of bad behavior and strips them of all their new hard-won money as phony "fines." The story unwinds one side's strategy against the other. It ends with a Shakespearean eulogy delivered by the postmaster. Virtue wins at a terrible price.The art of plot is to set up expectations and then either make the tension rise so high that one is relieved when the predicted finally happens, or to take the events around a turn that no reader could have predicted -- but without resorting to a "deus ex machina." And one of Wheeler's characteristics is that few of the bad characters are ALL bad, while few of the good characters are ALL good. Angie is nearly an exception. She accuses herself of being a bad parent, but it's pretty clear by the end that her son is simply missing one of his parts -- his conscience.Wheeler's stories rarely resort to the wild violence that are the equivalent of movie car chases and explosions. In fact, his account of vengeance finally arriving turns to "reaping the whirlwind" as a poetic and effective metaphor. The "meanest sunnuvabitch in the valley" who is expected through the book comes disguised as an ordinary seeming little trail boss whose formidable reputation appears misplaced. But he turns out to be a destroyer who justice is erratic.

A Fine Work

This is the type of Western that makes you think and feel. In the story of the newspaper editor there is something for all of us to learn and consider. Truely Fine Work. Wish there were more books like this out there!