“In order to run a highwayman to the ground, you have to learn to think like him: drink where he drank, eat what he ate, bathe in the same stream, and sleep in the bed … .” 

This remembrance of what lawman Irons St. John said by retired Pinkerton detective Emmet Rawlings kicks off Rawlings’ research and recollections of St. John—known as Ike to his friends—in Iron Star.

Loren D. Estleman’s newest Western novel reprises the character of St. John from his appearance in Mister St. John (1983) and looks back at his exploits. In the book, film star Buck Jones commissions Rawlings, who worked with St. John, to assemble his story for a new movie. 

Estleman is based in Whitmore Lake. Westerns are not the only books that he writes. Estleman has penned many mysteries, crime, and detective books, some of which are based in Detroit. 

In Iron Star, St. John has worked as a deputy U.S. marshal and spent time in jail. These disparate experiences on both sides of the law are evident in his behavior and speech. He is wary of everyone he encounters, as this exchange from St. John’s perspective illustrates: 

“Mister St. John?”

Which is no small thing to hear when you’re new in town and have enemies on both sides of the badge. Them days I carried my Army .44 on my left hip for the cross-draw, after Hickok, and I had it cocked and under the stranger’s chin before my chair finished tipping over. 

“We ain’t just been properly introduced.” I was proud of my choice of words; I hadn’t even had time to prepare anything.

The man smiled. He was constructed like a ham… . 

Some passages, like this one, are first-person reminiscences by St. John. The novel also switches to a third person narrator when following Rawlings’ memories and plotline.

The particular quest that Rawlings is recalling and reading about is typical of a Western—chasing the bad guys—so the details are what makes it unique. St. John possesses a reputation and intuition from his previous adventures, as illustrated by this scene on the trail of their prey:

The horses churned through fresh drifts, their breath smoking in the cold. The light was growing mellow when they stopped on the crest of a ridge and looked down on a long single-story building with a stone chimney built against an end wall. It had no windows and a covered porch leaned away from the front of the structure with a violent twist to its frame, as if a titan had taken it in both hands and wrenched it in two directions. Firs had sprung up around it, obstructing the path to the steps. A tin weathervane, twisted similarly, clung to the peak of the roof.

“That’d be the old farmers’ cooperative,” St. John said. “George?”

“Any tracks are wearing a foot and a half of snow. There weren’t any to begin with would be my guess.”

“You always was a better tracker than a guesser. Bill?”

“I never seen a place more empty. If I was a ghost I wouldn’t bother to haunt it.”

Rawlings didn’t wait for an invitation. “Your crystal ball’s got a crack in it, Marshal. No one’s been here since they took away the town.”

“Fine lot of manhunters. Look at the roof.”

He looked. It was swaybacked, the shingles overgrown with moss from the shade of the firs. “It’s about to fall in.” 

“Look again.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Something that ain’t there.”

“Snow,” George said.

“Good. There was a fire inside, melting it off; and not last week.” 

Their observation skills prove to be key time and time again. They continue tracking their quarry to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where they face more surprises. 

I talked with Estleman about his new novel, how he decided on the perspectives in Iron Star, how he distinguishes between the genres that he writes, and what he is writing next. 

Q: For the readers who don’t know you, how did you land in Whitmore Lake as an author? 
A: I was born in Ann Arbor and grew up in Whitmore Lake, on a farm across the road from the house where I live now, and which I built. One of the advantages—for a writer—of not living in New York or California is I get to be something of a local luminary instead of being lost in the crowd.

Q: Your newest novel, Iron Star, is related to your earlier, 1983 book, Mister St. John. What is the connection? 
A: Mister St. John was one of my best and deepest-foraging Westerns; in 40 years it hasn’t strayed far from my thoughts. I wanted to go back and explore how Irons St. John came to be, what became of Emmett Force Rawlings after they parted, and what happened in between, from Force’s own point of view. Iron Star is both a prequel and a sequel to Mister St. John and a reimagining of the original story, presented in the light of four decades of experience in observing the human condition.

It was a mammoth undertaking, and one I took on with both eyes open. Each time I begin a book, I set myself a greater challenge, and the prospect of writing an engrossing and cohesive narrative that takes place simultaneously in three different time periods gave me plenty. It’s these challenges that keep my writing fresh and prevent me from sliding into a rut. The method is harrowing, but as often as I find myself wondering why I let myself in for this, it’s paid off just as often.

Q: Tell us about the various time periods in which Iron Star is set. How did you decide when to go back and forth in time as the novel unfolds to tell the related storylines? 
A: The novel begins in 1926, when Rawlings, a retired Pinkerton agent, is forced by economic circumstances to revisit the manhunt he shared with St. John in 1906. He’s broke, and silent cowboy star Buck Jones asks him to furnish the material [on the manhunt] for a Western screenplay. On that long-ago journey, as reconstructed from Rawlings’ notes and chronicles of the time, St. John takes over the narrative, telling the story of his life—1856 to 1906—and recounting his experiences as an outlaw-turned-lawman-turned-politician-turned-lawman once again; this time with more candor than in the ghosted “autobiography” published during his run for Congress.

Q: In the Iron Star narrative, the characters are sometimes fighting for justice and other times at odds with the law, including St. John as you described in the previous question. As a reader, I found myself rooting for characters and then later read something sinister about them, or vice versa. As an author, how does this back-and-forth affect your relationship with the characters? 
A: This trajectory, from thief to thief-catcher, was common among those frontier icons who are so much a part of the American myth, and their stories are far more fascinating than the legends. I was never so interested in Wyatt Earp as when I found out he was wanted in Arkansas as a horse thief. Big flaws in a larger-than-life character are ingratiating; you can’t help but enjoy the company of someone who’s made worse mistakes than you.

Q: As you mentioned, Rawlings knew St. John and goes back through papers and journals to develop the story for a film. How did you balance these layers of memories and competing desires during the course of the novel? 
A: This was one of those times when the writer’s sources and those of his creations became one and the same. We were reading the same newspapers a hundred years apart. The surviving press accounts of the period are a treasure trove, not so much for accuracy—inventing the news didn’t begin with modern media—but for capturing the feel of a time; steeping yourself for hours in the language used by journalists, and the barely acceptable advertisements that kept the journals afloat, gives you a feeling for a time you can’t get from histories written a century after the fact, no matter how superior they may be in ascertaining the truth. There is truth, and there is Truth, and it’s the upper-case variety we historical novelists look for.

Honestly, I stagger out of microfilm reading rooms into the 21st century, blinking like Rip Van Winkle. The readers are the closest thing we have to a time machine.

Q: Later in Iron Star, Rawlings and St. John are talking, and Rawlings says, “I’ve given up trying to tell when you’re stretching the account.” St. John replies, “Me also, where you’re concerned. I can’t decide whether the Pinkertons recruit born liars or provide special training.” The narrator conveys the stream-of-consciousness thinking of these characters. Do you usually write with a third-person narrator? How does this type of narration help convey the story? 
A: I’ve used every kind of point-of-view there is. My two longest-running series, about Detroit private eye Amos Walker and Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, are told in first-person by the protagonists, as are some stand-alone novels and stories. The Valentino film detective books are in third-person subjective. Third person objective, asking the reader to follow the actions of a main character without being invited into his thoughts, is hardest of all.

I’ve applied omniscient, semi-omniscient, and what I call “shotgun perspective” on numerous occasions. The last is especially liberating: When I’ve gotten all I can out of one narrator for the time being, I can skip across town and see what another is up to. Mister St. John was told in this way. But it’s the story itself that dictates who will tell it and how. I’ve had to scrap more than one book 100 pages in when I realized I’d chosen the wrong approach. Once I light upon the right voice, all the doors open wide.

Q: You referred to your hardboiled fiction with a Detroit setting. How is your approach to writing Westerns different from your detective novels? 
A: One of the ways my Westerns give me a vacation from my contemporary crime stories is I don’t have to worry about fingerprints, DNA, and security cameras; these crime-busting developments make life more complicated for both criminals and crime writers—not that it’s stopped either from plying his trade. And there’s a freedom to the frontier setting that’s as appealing to a writer as it was to the pioneers. The Great American Desert, as it was called then, represented a second chance for anyone: If you’d failed in business or marriage, broke the law, or contracted a grave illness, you could always go west and start over.

Of course, this attracted the bad element as well as the good, so those old-time lawmen adopted Draconian measures that we civilized folk in our most private moments wish we could revive today in desperate circumstances. In order to stay in business and out of jail, Amos Walker must obey the law as far as his ingenuity permits while tracking a villain, whereas Page Murdock is free to shoot him dead from ambush. As disturbing as this is in modern life, it’s immensely satisfying in fiction.

And the prospects for strong female characters are limitless! In a place where women were outnumbered by men 10 to one, it took a powerful presence to survive and sometimes prosper. A Wyoming housewife battling nature, starvation, physical abuse, and loneliness in a prairie dugout was every bit as formidable a personality as Calamity Jane. Western pulp fiction lost a bet when it shoved these promising characters off to the side.

Q: What has been on your stack to read this summer? 
A: I read so much and so constantly I don’t separate my reading into seasonal categories; and the range is so broad I hesitate to provide specifics because people think I’m nerdish or putting on airs or, worst of all, intellectual. Just now I’m bingeing on history, struggling with philosophy, classics I’ve overlooked—Thackeray’s a find!—and some guilty pleasures; one of Scott’s Waverly novels is on my nightstand next to The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu. 

Q: That is fair! Last question: What are you writing next?
A: I’m five chapters into a new Amos Walker, and brushing up on silent films for a Valentino; this hardly seems like work to a film geek like me.

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.