western omelette

In range of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Alix Hawley’s All True Not a Lie In It, Natalie Appleton’s “mostly true” novel I Want to Die In My Boots imagines the life of an actual early 20th century cattle rustler on the plains, from Montana to Sask and ultimately the Okanagan. 

The cattle rustling makes up a rather small part of Belle Jane’s story, though it defines the shape of her life. Appleton’s prose is the main draw here and it’s strong. She takes a maximalist, almost Melvillean approach to storytelling and there are are many lively digressions throughout the book. On one hand I appreciate Appleton’s bold swerves, fixing on Belle Jane’s interior life. She’s got chops and there are loads of wonderful passages. On the other hand, we are promised cattle rustling and outlaws and we never quite get them. There’s something in that, though, that parallels Belle Jane’s lifelong yearning.

About midway through I remember thinking, wow Appleton put everything in. But after some space, there are vast, defining stretches of Belle Jane’s life that take place mostly off page. I sense that the lack of documentation may have played a role in Appleton’s choice to focus the parts of Belle Jane’s life that have

I had some ambivalence while reading Die in My Boots from my own expectations not lining up with the book Appleton wrote. I looked at some online reviews, and many reflect that. There’s evidently an audience for a more conventional telling of Belle Jane’s story, but Appleton made other choices and I think they’re worthwhile. More challenging, more rewarding.

I read Die in My Boots in between reading the first and second halves of Alix Hawley’s All True Not A Lie In It. I read a few books during the hiatus. The first half of All True had so much in it, I needed to let it air out. I saw Hawley read from it about 10 years ago, when Andrew F. Sullivan came through at Pulp Fiction on his book tour for Waste. I’ve long been a fan of Hawley’s short stories. “My Pleasure” is simply divine. But I resisted her Daniel Boone novels. They were still showing the Disney series from the 60s on TV when I was a kid, and I remember liking it a lot—better than Davy Crockett—but I just didn’t think I could get gassed up for a literary retelling of that. My tastes ten years ago heavily favoured contemporary urban fiction, mostly crime fiction. But, uh, things change.

Everything I love about Hawley’s short stories is at work here. Boone’s voice is so intimate and palpable, his world is so vibrant. So many novels about historical figures bend their narratives to make their subjects’ great accomplishments seem predestined. Nothing of the sort here! It’s loss after loss, humiliations and indignities. And yet. Just a beautiful, heart-wrenching book.

There’s a follow up book, My Name is a Knife, that—as much as I needed a break after the first half of All True—I am champing at the bit to get into.

I seem to have lately unlocked an interest in the early parts of the colonization of North America. Most likely due to my ongoing Moby Dick obsession. To see the way the world we live in was shaped. So much of who we are comes from that project of grinding the continent and its original stewards under European heels. The land grabs of Daniel Boone, the whale grabs of the Pequod, the sowing and reaping of Matt Bell’s eco-myth cli-fi parable Appleseed, the origins of the Cattle-Beef Complex in Joshua Specht’s Red Meat Republic, Percival Everett’s biting God’s Country. Jane Smiley’s A Dangerous Business. My kids play Red Dead Redemption, often while I’m tapping away at fiction a few metres away. Letterboxd reports that my most watched performer of 2025 was Gian Maria Volonte, who played two different memorable villains in the first two Man With No Name movies (and had another juicy role in Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge)—operatic mythology. Over the winter break, I watched the recent & decent adaptation of Butcher’s Crossing with one of my kids. At the end, my kid says, “is that what Moby-Dick is like?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” I say.

This turned into something of a stock taking. I guess I’ve become one of those old guys who is into Westerns. Or at least one of those old guys who sees the Western in everything.