Life isn't easy in the old West. The rule of law is a tenuous thing and often the manner of its application depends on whose jurisdiction you happen to be in that day. So if you've got a bunch of no-good rootin' tootin' varmints riding into town and shooting up the sheriff, you'd better hope that you've got recourse to a lawman who'll get the job done.
Mattie Ross has a host of problems. Her father Frank has been shot dead by a man, Tom Chaney, who took advantage of Frank's good nature, got him to give him a job and a roof over his head, and then shot him in cold blood, stole some gold from his cold dead hands and scarpered. Mattie wants Tom brought to justice, and why wouldn't she, but there's a problem: she's a fourteen-year-old girl. And while these days we're all groovy and inclusive and let fourteen-year-old girls be astronauts and Prime Minister and everything, back in the old West things were a little more traditional.
So the first thing Mattie has to do is find someone to agree to bring Tom Chaney to justice. This turns out to be reasonably easy, as Marshal Reuben J "Rooster" Cogburn is in town and is just the sort of man for the job, if he can stay off the sauce long enough. The second thing she has to do is persuade Rooster that part of the deal is her coming along on the trip, as she is a girl of unusual determination and wants to see justice done with her own eyes. Needless to say Rooster isn't particularly keen, as there's bound to be a lot of high-speed galloping, punching, drinking and farting involved and Mattie is likely to cramp his style.
But Mattie is relentless, and her offer of money is persuasive. They set off, accompanied by a Texas Ranger called LaBoeuf (pronounced "La Beef" and not to be confused with either the correctly spelled version of that surname sported by footballer Frank Leboeuf or the utterly bonkers version sported by Shia LaBeouf) who has his own reasons for wanting to catch up with Chaney. It appears that Chaney has taken up with a band of outlaws led by notorious wrong'un "Lucky" Ned Pepper and has fled into some remote part of what is now Oklahoma.
The trio head off in pursuit of the outlaws and Rooster cooks up a scheme to ambush them at a hideout they're known to have made use of before. All goes according to plan until LaBoeuf starts loosing off his gun before the outlaws are in position - a gun battle ensues during the course of which several outlaws are killed, but not Tom Chaney or Ned Pepper, who escape. So the pursuit continues until they catch up with the outlaws again when Mattie has an unexpected encounter with none other than Tom Chaney when collecting water at a stream near their overnight camping spot. Mattie manages to pull her gun and shoot him, but not fatally, and he grabs her and drags her back to the Pepper gang's hilltop camp with Rooster and LaBoeuf in hot pursuit.
There then follows a brief stand-off wherein Chaney and Pepper threaten to throw Mattie into a rattlesnake pit unless Rooster and LaBoeuf beat a retreat. This they do...OR DO THEY? When Pepper and a couple of his henchmen leave Chaney in charge of Mattie and ride off, they are ambushed by Rooster who charges at them kamikaze stylee with guns a-blazin'. This tactic is surprisingly successful until Pepper shoots Rooster's horse out from under him and moves in for the kill, only to be picked off by a long shot from LaBoeuf's rifle. The day is not yet saved, though, as Chaney bashes LaBoeuf over the head with a rock, whereupon Mattie shoots him, but the recoil sends her tumbling into the rattlesnake pit, whereupon it further turns out that Chaney isn't quite dead after all. Fortunately Rooster has freed himself from under a dead horse and arrives in the nick of time to apply a bit of lethal competence to the situation by dispatching Chaney properly and, with a bit of help from LaBoeuf and Mattie's horse, rescuing Mattie from the pit. The day is not yet saved, though, as Mattie has a broken arm and has been bitten on the hand by a rattlesnake, so Rooster sets off at breakneck speed to deliver her to a doctor and save her life.
I'd imagine most people's reaction to discovering that there is a book called True Grit would be, like me, to start by assuming it's a novelisation of the celebrated 1969 film (for which John Wayne won an Oscar for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn), and then, on discovering that the novel came first, to assume that it therefore must be some forgotten 1890s relic that was dug up by an astute Hollywood researcher, and then finally to be rather surprised that it was actually published in 1968, the year before the film was released. It's a book that has the feel of oldness without actually being old, a bit like the song Long Black Veil as mentioned here. The 1969 version is still the definitive movie, despite the 2010 Coen Brothers remake being a better film in just about every way - Jeff Bridges is closer to Cogburn as written (John Wayne essentially just plays a grumpier John Wayne in an eyepatch), Hailee Steinfeld gives a remarkable performance as Mattie Ross (all the more remarkable for being thirteen at the time, unlike Kim Darby who was twenty-one when the original film was released), and (from my recollection anyway) the film keeps Mattie as its focus more than the earlier film did, and rightly, since the story in the novel is told in her voice.
Like Winter's Bone this is a book that succeeds by making you like and care about its young female protagonist - Mattie is relentless in her pursuit of justice, determined not to be taken advantage of, scathingly puritanical about adult vices and generally un-self-aware to a wryly amusing degree. It is a sad reflection of the times she lives in that being an intelligent, independent woman not prepared to take any shit from useless feckless drunken men lends a sort of inevitability to the framing device which depicts Mattie as an elderly spinster recounting her exciting youthful exploits.
As revisionist Western novels go this is slyly subversive rather than brutally so (in the manner of, say, Blood Meridian) but it makes very clear that the nominal "good guys", Rooster Cogburn in particular, are morally compromised to some degree, and moreover that this is inevitable. It's slyly amusing, too, it a deadpan sort of way.
A more obscure connection to some earlier entries in this list is provided by the foreword to my 2005 paperback edition: as with The Queen's Gambit and Stoner this is written by a different previous featuree here, in this case Donna Tartt.
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