truepenny | UBC: Dan Schultz, Dead Run (Reply)

Dead Run: The Murder of a Lawman and the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West by Dan Schultz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good book with some flaws.

1. It badly needed one last going over by a weapons-grade copy-editor to fix the persistent punctuation errors, the persistent confusion of "lie" and "lay," the equally persistent confusion of "may" and "might" (why do people even make this mistake? it baffles me), and the occasional use of the almost-right word.

2. It is not Schultz's fault that the narrative he's trying to tell is confusing. The crime, the manhunt, and the investigation all proceeded on different timelines, at different paces, and criss-crossing each other in knotty nodes of unanswered questions. But he makes it more difficult to follow by trying to save important information for a big reveal. (E.g., because they found Mason first, in his hypothetical reconstruction of Mason's death he posits two men whom he labels "the commando" and "the accomplice." As a reader, I naturally assumed that those two men were Mason's co-conspirators, McVean and Pilon, so that when he gets to the discovery of Pilon's body and presents his hypothetical reconstruction that Mason killed him, I got very confused. I actually had to go back and reread his reconstruction of Mason's death to notice that when he describes the two men escaping downriver in a raft, one of whom was identified as McVean, he never actually puts a name to the other guy. And isn't until much later in the book that he coyly presents the idea of a fourth conspirator. It's clear he can't name names, presumably for legal reasons, but, dude, this is what pseudonyms are for. Call him "John Doe" or "X," whatever, that's fine, but give me some kind of clear antecedent that I can use to sort things out in my head.)

3. It's clear that the manhunt was a clusterfuck from start to finish, and when he's discussing operational problems, Schultz is tactful and impartial, but he presents the evidence about who failed to do what part of their job and how jurisdictional squabbles took up a stupid amount of everybody's time and energy. The choice to sideline the Navajo Nation Police trackers, for instance, stands out painfully as a decision reached for all the wrong reasons. The contrast between the FBI behaving like the worst caricature of themselves: smug know-it-all bullies demanding first crack at evidence and witnesses, hoarding information away from all the other investigators and alienating witnesses by their antagonistic interrogation techniques: and the local cop who went in later, not treating the encounter as a battle for dominance (but instead, deliberately and cannily, offering tokens of submission), and not only got those witnesses to talk, but got information that could have been valuable if it had been elicited the first time around--that contrast also hurts. But when Schultz is talking about the parts where forensic evidence was deliberately ignored in order to maintain the story that Mason, Pilon, and McVean were all suicides, suddenly it's "the police" thought this and "the police" said that, like "the police" is the monolithic shadowy reified institution that his description of the manhunt emphatically shows American law enforcement is not. (Also, above, note that while he names the local cop, the FBI agents are just "the FBI." The Colorado Bureau of Investigation agents are likewise "the CBI." So even at the operational level, he's not consistent.) His volte-face means that the book is only about half of an analysis of why the manhunt for Mason, Pilon, and McVean was such a dismal failure (that subtitle--"the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West"--is ironic in a way I seriously doubt anyone involved intended).

With all that said, this is in fact a good book. Schultz's narrative style is engaging and he presents a staggering amount of information without ever getting bogged down. His discussion of why McVean, Mason, and Pilon did what they did and were trying to do what (he conjectures) they intended--and why so many people in the area supported them or were sympathetic to them or actually helped them evade the law--is thoughtful and careful, both in its discussion of the culture of the American West, the specific beliefs of the conspirators (the way that reactionary white men have worked themselves around to believing that they are the oppressed never fails to boggle my mind; see also Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith), and the weird ethical clash between the scale of right vs. wrong and the scale of government vs. the individual that ends up with people sincerely believing that shooting a police officer in cold blood is the right thing to do. He makes frequent reference to the legends of the "Old West," particularly those who have come to have a Robin Hood like mythology around them: Billy the Kid, Jesse James, especially Butch Cassidy, who hid from the law in the same canyons that these modern conspirators use. I don't know if it's intentional, but McVean, Mason, and Pilon make very tawdry hero-outlaws (just as the real outlaws of the "Old West" were more like the Clantons of Tombstone ill-repute than Newman (Cassidy) and Redford (Sundance)). I found myself wondering, if they'd actually succeeded in what Schultz hypothesizes their intent was, to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam--and it's important to remember that, despite the certainty with which Schultz presents his theory, it's still only speculation--they would still have been regarded as heroes by anyone. (Probably, the answer is yes, because our species is like that.)

There's a lot of Peter Pan in Robin Hood, and Schultz's examination of the short lives of Jason McVean, Bobby Mason, and Monte Pilon brought that out very strongly for me. These were men who were resisting taking on adult responsibilities, who were trying to carve out a space where, Lord of the Flies-like, they didn't have to answer to anyone, where they could quite literally play with guns and have camp-outs and never have to deal with the ambiguity, ambivalence, and confusion that--like it or not--is inherent in being a sapient, self-aware adult in modern (quote-unquote) civilization. I am repulsed by most of their beliefs, but even so I can feel the draw of the freedom they imagined they were winning. (Sherwood Forest=Neverland=Cross Canyon)

But their ideals were ugly and violent and narcissistic and led not to freedom but to murder, both as murderers and (if Schultz is correct) victims. After Dale Claxton was gunned down on McElmo Bridge, Pilon lasted maybe a couple of days, Mason a week, and McVean an unknown number of years (probably five or more). McVean was probably happy before karma caught up to him; he was living exactly the way he told his friends he wanted to: on his own, in the desert. McVean, the ringleader (it is so very clear that Mason and Pilon were followers; McVean was the one with the ideas), the man who pulled the trigger, used up and discarded his friends like pawns sacrificed on a chess board (it's very telling to me, somehow, that when they split up, McVean went one way on his own, and his "best friend" Mason went the other way with their fat geek hanger-on: Pilon is a weirdly perfect allusion to Piggy, even though I know better than to allegorize real people), and forged onward. If he felt remorse, we don't know it, and I suspect his self-repairing ideology of persecution, oppression, and millennarian righteousness (McVean believed the Apocalypse was coming; he just got tired of waiting) kept his self-esteem intact.

Obviously, I found this book very thought-provoking; for all its flaws, it has a lot to say about one of the major fault lines in American culture.

[I apologize for the gross abuse of parentheses in this review. It's a sickness. --Ed.]

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