by Clifford Irving
Tom Mix was a silent-movie cowboy, much like William S. Hart or Hoot Gibson. Mix moved stiffly, and the expression on his face was more like that of a wooden Indian than a human being. Irving (yes, it's the writer who went to prison for forging an "autobiography" of Howard Hughes) got the idea that Mix might have gone across the border from El Paso, where he grew up, to join the notorious Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. The result is what the author calls "a historical fantasy" about a young man in search of adventure at the beginning of the century. The pages are filled with bloody fights and the kind of violence that made The Wild Bunch so startling; crazed misfits maim and kill with random impatience, like children torturing insects. There are pretentious quotes from Shakespeare which add nothing, a lot of confused Mexican history and an unconvincing ménage à trois of Mix, his Indian child bride Rosa and an older German woman. But Irving knows how to keep a plot humming. Readers who like big, preposterous adventure tales will enjoy this novel. (St. Martin's Press, $16.95)
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