Hitch And Cole Are Memorable Western Heroes

"Resolution" (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 292 pages, $25.95), by Robert B. Parker: Everett Hitch and Virgil Cole, the confident, soft-spoken gun hands introduced in Robert B. Parker's 2005 novel, "Appaloosa," are back _ and it a big way.

Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen play them in a Hollywood movie of the same name that is scheduled for release later this year. Meanwhile, the two heroes are on the job again, cleaning up another town in Parker's new novel, "Resolution."

Hitch and Cole are the most memorable Western heroes since Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Lonesome Dove" (1985) introduced us to Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call. And in "Resolution," Parker's prose is at its very best.

Much of the story is told through dialogue as Hitch and Cole, just as reticent as Gary Cooper's Marshal Will Kane in "High Noon," manage to say a lot in a few words. A sample:

___

"O'Malley replace the fella you shot?"

"Cato and Rose," I said.

Virgil sat back in his chair a little.

"My, my," he said.

"My thought exactly," I said.

"You talk with them?"

"Yep."

"Anything come of it?'

"Nope."

Virgil appeared to suck on one of his front teeth for a moment.

"Cato and Rose," he said.

"My, my," I said.

___

When we last saw Hitch at the end of "Appaloosa," he was on the run after killing a man who'd been trying to steal Cole's woman _ a favor for a friend too upright to do the deed himself. As the new novel opens, he has wandered into the tiny town of Resolution and taken a job as a "lookout" at Amos Wolfson's Blackfoot Saloon.

By doing so, he has stumbled unwittingly into the middle of a turf war for control of the town _ a war that has not just two sides but three. Or maybe four.

Before things get too rough, Hitch's old pal Cole wanders into town. Cole's looking for his troublesome woman, Allie, who's run off again. But he decides to stick around and lend Hitch a hand.

"Resolution is Parker's third Western; the first, "Gunman's Rhapsody" (2001), was his take on the familiar Wyatt Earp saga. But the author is more famous for his best selling crime novels featuring Boston-area detectives Spenser, Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall.

Parker is hardly the first writer to wander between the two genres. There's Loren D. Estleman, for example. And Elmore Leonard, whose Westerns include the story on which the movie "3:10 to Yuma" was based.

The genres, after all, have a great deal in common. In both, the archetypical hero is a man of few words. He is self-confident, sometimes to the point of arrogance. And he adheres to a personal code of honor, no matter what others may think and no matter the cost.

It's easy to picture Parker's modern-day detectives, Spenser and Stone, tugging on 10-gallon hats and swaggering through the swinging doors of the Blackfoot Saloon _ or to imagine Hitch and Cole shedding their spurs and sauntering past the police lines to examine a crime scene at Logan Airport.