Hunter's Trap - Paperback

by C. W. Smith (Author)

In Hunter's Trap, Smith's fifth novel, he creates a brooding tale of psychological suspense set on the film noir landscape of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. On the night of the vernal equniox 1930, Wilbur Smythe (a.k.a. Will Hunter) embarks on a plan to avenge the deaths of his wife and his employer, a wealthy Kiowa, both murdered by a banker greedy for the Kiowa's oil money.

A twentieth-century "western" blended with elements of Greek tragedy, Hunter's Trap explores the textures of place and time, collision of cultures, and the thin margin between good and evil in members of the human family. Hunter's Trap is a literary page turner that repays its readers from the first page to the last.

Back Jacket

On the night of the vernal equinox in 1930, the novel's protagonist, Wilbur Smythe, puts in motion his plan to avenge the deaths of his wife and his employer, a wealthy Kiowa, both murdered by a banker greedy for the Kiowa's oil money. Smythe intends to kidnap the banker's seventeen-year-old daughter, Sissy, and hold her hostage to torment her father before killing him. Hunter's Trap further explores the clash of values and cultures that formed the core of Smith's earlier novel based on historical events, Buffalo Nickel. In this new novel, he has written a blend of early twentieth-century "western" with Greek tragedy and has given the tension-filled story a sophisticated gloss of 1930s determinism and pre-Christian paganism, so that the horrific outcome of Smythe's plan to use the daughter of his nemesis has a fateful inevitability and a gruesome but implacable logic. Set largely in El Paso and its Mexican neighbor, Juarez, the story weaves together the strong political and social undercurrents of the Depression. Beneath its texture of place and time, however, the story reasserts the age-old wisdom of how thin the margin is between good and evil in members of the human "family".

Author Biography

C. W. Smith is the author of the novels Thin Men of Haddam, Country Music, The Vestal Virgin Room, and Buffalo Nickel as well as a collection of short stories--Letters from the Horse Latitudes--and the memoir, Uncle Dad. He is professor of English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.