Whie Angels Dance [Paperback]

Jesse James? Even today the name rings with excitement. Ralph Cotton brings that excitement roaring to life in his romantic first novel: WHILE ANGELS DANCE published by St Martin's Press.

One thing about Jesse James, everybody has an opinion, and nobody else agrees with it.
With a subject this volatile, you open the book with a ready sneer, ready to pounce on all the facts sure to be a little awry. But there is a delightful surprise in store. This writing is so good the sneer is immediately transformed into a grin of sheer delight.
Who cares about chasing down facts when you can go chasing down the old owlhoot trail with the 'real' Jesse James that Mr. Cotton has dreamed up?

A writer's job is to raise that curtain of the mind and create a reality the reader can actually see, hear, touch and smell. Ralph Cotton jumps right in, and pulls the reader in after him. In just a matter of minutes the smoke is boiling and outlaws with the bark on stand in the shimmering light with guns blazing.
There's no turning back, from the first page to the last, you will be anxiously watching the shadows to see what happens next.

"You could stumble into more trouble in two minutes than you could crawl out of in a hundred years." in those days.
Jeston Nash killed a Yankee soldier over a horse trade in Kentucky and the only place he could run to was the home of his Aunt Zeralda Samuel, the mother of Frank and Jesse James.

"Look here," she said to Doc Samuel. "He looks enough like Jesse to be his brother."

Frank and Jesse were off riding under the black flag of Quantrill's guerillas. The rumors of Nash's presence bring them back, leery of a trap. "I'd been drawing a fresh bucket of water from the well; the only sound in the stillness of morning was the squeaking crank handle and the clucking of chickens scratching in the dirt. Then all at once behind me, a horse nickered low, and the single heavy thud of a hoof jarred the ground. I froze, felt the skin ripple on my neck, and wondered in that split second how the hell a rider could've slipped in without them chickens raising a fuss."
It was Frank. "Frank could lock on to your eyes like a coiled viper, and though I learned to overcome it in time, that day at the well, off guard, I just stood there staring, dumbfounded by the sudden appearance of this stranger with a friendly smile and a voice like gravel wrapped in silk. And behind him ... less than fifteen feet ... not one rider ... but six! They'd slipped in as quiet as smoke, and sat there atop their horses, looking hard eyed and evil."

WHILE ANGELS DANCE has two things going for it: The characters are so real you dread finding out what might happen to them next, and the outlaw humor has your face laughing before you realize your belly is shaking.
For example, Quiet Jack had been living with a widow for some time when Jeston came to call. "You know, she killed her husband," Jack said casually the day we dug up the bank money.
He smiled affectionately. "Yep, stabbed him in the heart while he was asleep."
"Does that bother you when you go to bed of a night?" I asked.
"Why should it?" he laughed. "We ain't married!"
However, the token sex scenes are much too toxic even for a professional reader like me. Is all this trysting really that necessary?
The first one is more than a chapter long and could easily have been cut in half without the novel suffering any serious trauma. The blue language is almost black in places, but so naturally used that it doesn't actually ruin the story.

Only two, very brief scenes, jar the jaded senses. Both are deep into the novel and this reader probably only noticed them because discovering any less-than-perfect writing was a shock by that time.
A movie from this effort is almost unavoidable. Unfortunately, like Hondo, not even another John Wayne could make it as good as the original.