Hop Alley: A Novel
Bill Ogden, the raffish protagonist of Phillips’ quirky western Cottonwood (2004), returns. It’s circa 1880, and, using the name Bill Sadlaw, he’s now a photographer in Denver. But by any name, he’s still a rogue, and Hop Alley is a cracking-good picaresque novel. Much of Sadlaw’s roguery is driven by glandular imperatives. Maggie, his lover in Cottonwood, has been abandoned in the utopian community of Greeley; she’s been replaced by prickly Priscilla, the kept woman of a Denver newspaper editor. She welcomes Sadlaw’s visits because he supplies her laudanum habit. The titular Hop Alley is 1880s Denver’s Chinese ghetto, torched by anti-Chinese rioters, and where Sadlaw saves an elderly Chinese man from being lynched. But Sadlaw’s urges bring additional troubles. Priscilla shoots the newspaper editor, and Sadlaw is on the run, an accessory to murder. Phillips mixes real events, period turns of phrase, a noirish sensibility, and a cast of murderous women, madmen, drunks, grifters, and fools into a wildly entertaining, perhaps sui generis, slumgullion that might well be closer to reality than readers would imagine. --Thomas Gaughan