Book Report: Silver Canyon by Louis L’Amour (1956, 2013)

Book coverIt seems like I just read Hondo, but I guess it has been a couple of weeks. Which is a very short “just” in terms of the passage of time in my head, but it’s still been a couple of weeks. This book first appeared only a couple of years after Hondo, which was apparently his L’Amour’s first, but it actually reads more like a men’s adventure paperback or later work than the straight forward Hondo.

In this book, wandering gun Matt Brennan comes to a small town in Utah and falls in love at first sight with a young woman. He learns that there’s a bit of trouble between two large cattle operations squeezing a single man building a ranch in the canyon between them, and violence is breaking out. Turns out that the girl whom he decides he will marry is the daughter of one of the big boys. He has trouble with a man who thinks he’s courting the girl (the guy beats the tar out of him), and he (Brennan) signs up with the man in the middle ranch. But that ranch owner is killed but before he does, he gifts the ranch to Brennan, who vows to defend it. The girl’s father dies of a gunshot wound on the ranch, and Brennan is briefly considered a suspect. His name is still Mudd, but he discovers a third party plot to stir up the violence between the ranches for what might be a silver strike initially found by another courter of the girl who left suddenly. Or was he murdered?

Compared to Hondo, it is a very busy novel with the intra-human intrigue coming to light slowly and with the characters, particularly Brennan, spending paragraphs or pages mulling over not even so much the possibilities but how much he cannot figure it out. So a bit more like the Pendleton Mack Bolan books in that regard.

Which is probably why this book is not considered in conversations about L’Amour’s best works. Not that I am privy to those conversations. I’m just a guy on the Internet, providing elementary school-level book reports and hoping not to get asked tough questions about them. Because I’ve read a couple of books since this one and only dimly remember it outside of the brief summary I’ve listed above. And the thought that gunslingers in the old West should not really punch men in the face a couple of times and expect to close their hands around a gun butt anytime soon.

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