Take Borden Chantry O Defensor Da Lei Penned By Louis LAmour Depicted In Digital Copy
marshal's name was Borden Chantry, Young, lean, rugged, he's buried a few men in this twobit cow townevery single one killed in a fair fight.
Then, one dark, grim day a mysterious gunman shot a man in cold blood, Five grisly murders later, Chantey was faced with the roughest assignment of his lifefind that savage, triggerhappy hard case before he blasts apart every man in town.
. . one by bloody one. Besides the Sacketts, Louis LAmour also wrote other family sagas with multiple books associated with them, most prominently, books featuring either the Chantry or Talon families.
In fact, all three families tiein together through events, marriage, etc, making these books even more interesting,
Here, Borden Chantry has had some bad luck with ranching so has been working as town marshal to earn a little money to provide for his wife and son, Tom who features in sitelinkNorth to the Rails.
Serving as marshal is not Bordens hearts desire but like most LAmour heroes, he strives to do a good job and earn the money he is paid.
So, when the body of a dead man is found shot to death, he is not content to merely chalk it up to a drunken brawl or a bad card game and simply have the man buried.
He needs to find the killer, More murders occur and it becomes increasingly evident that Borden is also targeted,
The story turns into much more of a whodunnit detective novel than the typical LAmour western novel although plenty of western action remains.
When Borden eventually identifies the dead man, it turns out to be none other than , I love it when characters from other LAmour books show up when I least expect it, Additionally, the character of Kim Baca is first introduced here,
All in all, I really enjoyed this one, The mystery elements are well handled as are the expected western gunfights, Borden is a likable character, a little less perfect and more like us than most of this authors protagonists, Despite his skill with a gun, he doesnt really think hes cut out to be marshal, much less a detective, but he perseveres anyway.
Really two and a half, This ones a murder mystery and Borden Chantry is the detective, A lot of suspects, a lot of possibilities, but the killer thinks Borden is figuring it out,.stars. A pretty darn good murdermystery that is also frankly a Western, a combination I like to see well done, I tend to increasingly find L'Amour's style a bit stilted, but I thought the story was well plotted, even though I did have a hunch about the killer fairly early more because of their behavior than any specific clue.
Overall, I enjoyed this Western murder mystery, but I never really warmed up to the main character, Borden Chantry,
Chantry is the marshal of a little Western cow town where, one day, the dead body of a stranger appears in the street.
Chantry assumes the man was killed "in a fair fight" a drunken shootout, so the death isn't his responsibility, Soon, however, clues begin to point in another directioncoldblooded murder,
In some ways, this book has the feeling of a lockedroom puzzle, Of course the town isn't a locked room, but it's a small place where everybody knows everybody, As it becomes more and more obvious the killer is one of Chantry's neighbors, and it's up to Chantry to figure out which one, the tension rachets up to quite an impressive degree.
Since I enjoyed the mystery, why didn't I like Chantry himself
Simply put, I found him callous.
I didn't like his initial reaction to the dead body "obviously a fair fight, nothing to worry about, dead bodies turn up on Main Street all the time.
" I didn't like the way he responded to the woman who alerted him to the problem he was kind of laughing at her, "hasn't she ever seen a dead body before" I didn't like his continued declarations that the frequent drunken shootouts which do litter the streets with dead bodies are perfectly normal and nothing to be concerned about.
And I REALLY didn't like his response to his wife Bess saying "hey, have you thought about raising our kid in a place where dead bodies don't show up in the street on a regular Wednesday morning" Because Chantry was all like "you married me, so this is what you get.
" Which of all the asinine things men say in fiction and in real life, has got to be among the Top Ten Most Asinine.
I don't know, . . I'm probably being too harsh on the guy, when it's really more a matter of the author's worldview and what he wishes to present as "normal" vs.
"abnormal. " I think L'Amour felt he needed to glorify the "Western way" of facetoface shootouts in order to contrast it with stabintheback type murders.
But killing a man in a shooting match isn't necessarily any more moral than stabbing him in the back, Sure, it CAN be, but it very much depends on the circumstances, Mark Twain brilliantly satirizes this type of thinking in Huckleberry Finn,
For me, L'Amour's best novels are the ones where he interrogates and challenges the Western code where his heroes are selfaware about the moral pitfalls of the violent society in which they live.
It's why To Tame a Land ends with It's why The Daybreakers ends with I would have liked to see a little more of that same selfawareness from Borden Chantry,
Anyway the mystery was still cool, even if the main character disappointed me, so I'm glad I read it,
./
Louis L'Amour certainly was, and still is, the King of the Western genre, This was a very winning read from Louis LAmour, It wasnt a typical western though, as it was also a murder mystery, I thought it was pretty clever of LAmour to be so innovative as an author to combine the two genres which worked very well together.
While today historical mysteries are common place, but in thes when this was written, he was well ahead of his time.
Borden Chantey is a small town marshall, thrust into a job he can do but doesnt love because his ranch has failed.
Then several killings happen in town that clearly are murders, which he is responsible for solving, The book was well written and a fastpaced a very good read, I just might have me a new favorite L'Amour book, A murder mystery set in the Old West Yes, please!
Borden Chantry himself is just the sort of hero I love best quiet, calm, watchful, honorable, steely.
Yup, totally love him. His wife, on the other hand, I am not a fan of, Sigh. Now I kind of want to reread parts of Son of a Wanted Man just to see all the ties to this.
Although this is not considered one of the Sackett novels, it has Sacketts in it, in minor roles.
As a writer who relishes tying different books together in small ways herself, that really pleased me : Marshall Borden Chantry must seek a town resident who has left a well dressed dead man in the street.
Soon other victims occur. His efforts set him up as the next victim, .
Borden Chantry
By Louis L'Amour
The Chantry Series, pub,, overpages
OVERVIEW:
A wild west murder mystery: who killed the welltodo stranger in town The killer tried to make it look like a typical drunken gun duelstaging the body out in the street.
The strangers exceptional horse was found buried in an arroyo, The unlikely investigator is the new town marshal,yearold Borden Chantry who's a bornandbred cattleman, Recently he lost his ranch and livestock to a big freeze, The town voted him in as marshal and he accepted the job to support his wife Bess and young son Tom.
The previous marshal George Riggin had been murdered and his death was staged to look like an accidenta rock slide.
He had been investigating the murder of Pin Dover, a cowpuncher from Mora, Soon a number of others are killed as well and shots are fired at Marshal Borden, The hiredgun Boone Silva arrives in town, hired to end the marshal: he fails,
The stranger turns out to be Joe Sackett, Thebook Sackett series is another frontier collection by author Louis L'Amour and concerns generations of a pioneer family, originating in England and making their way west in America.
When Joe's brother Tyrel from the town of Mora shows up, marshal Borden learns what the victims have in common.
They were all silenced by a man named Ford Mason who thinks he's being hunted for his past crimes,
In this town he owns the store and goes by the name Langdon Adams, a trusted pal of Borden Chantry.
He's actually an army deserter, bank robber, stage robber and sometime ago he shot the rancher Cunningham and his daughter when they discovered his criminal legacy.
The Cunninghams survived and didn't press charges, so no one was hunting Adams, He now rides west fleeing the six murders he committed and marshal Borden is in pursuit, When the marshal locates him in a saloon Adams won't go quietly, forcing his former friend to end him,
Mostly an engaging whodoneit,
It's not clearly layed out how the marshal
deduced that his pal Lang was the killer, Additionally the motive for some of the five or six killings doesn't seem clearly spelled out,
The time period and location are vague: somewhere in the wild west and after the war between the states.
.
Some Story Details:
Borden has been a competent cattleman since the age of, riding herd and taking his pay in cattle to build up his own stock and brand.
He did recently loose his herd to the big winter freeze, but so did others, Hired as the law in town, mostly due to his gun skills and common sense, He can bring in a horse
thief without firing a shot, knows when not to pull his gun and arrests the occasional drunk, so he can sleep it off in safety.
It's a peaceful town of a few hundred residents, but cowboys, minors and drifters from the surrounding area sometimes engage in drunken brawls, knife fights and gun duels.
This results in a dead body occasionally found lying in the street, Borden loves it here. His wife Bess wants to go back east Vermont and raise their boy Tom in a violencefree, gunfree world, Borden plans to get back to cattle ranching out here in the wonderful west, ASAP,
Now he's called upon to be a detective, gathering evidence, talking with suspects etc, Pin Dover was first killed some time ago and the former marshal George Riggin was investigating when he too was murdered.
Joe was killed because the paranoid Lang thought he was being hunted by Sackett, He was actually in town to give money to Mary Ann Haley, sick with lungfever, and needing to move to the better climate of San Diego.
Johnny McCoy was shot dead, He had stabled Joe's horse and had something he needed to tell the marshal, Ed Pearson was in his mine outside of town and was shot, A booby trap bomb sealed up the entrance to the mine when marshal Borden went in, He survives and Ed's dog leads him to an escape route at the back of the mine, They all had some connection to Mora or maybe clues to Joe's killer, It's not layed out clearly and the marshal does a lot of speculating, further muddying the facts of his case.
The Chantry Book Series in Chronological Order
Fair Blows the Wind
Borden Chantry
North to the Rails
Over on the Dry Side
The Ferguson Rifle
.
. A Sackett is murdered. Borden Chantry the town Marshal investigates who is the murderer, The body count rises, attempts are made on Bordens life, In the end he gets his man who mistakenly thought Joe Sackett was hunting for him,
The story is a bit clumsy with Borden failing to see key people early on and for a while forgetting he has the previous Marshals hidden notebook.
Still an enjoyable read. A good one. I like the Marshall Borden Chantry character, whose stories mix a bit of the detective story with the western setting.
Good stuff. Some random thoughts:
Totally called the identity of the mystery killer, though not due to poor or predictable writing.
The vibes were just Off, I feel very proud of myself, XD
Borden Chantry needs a good sleep and a wife who supports him,
Someone namedropped Tom Sunday and I was Not Okay,
I hope Kim Duca sticks around town as deputy,
A very good L'Amour novel in general, He writes so well. I got anxiety near the end, even though I knew everything would turn out all right, Either you like traditional westerns or you don't, They reflect their time: racist, patronizing at best towards Native Americans, and women are almost always relegated to he kitchen.
They focus on so called tough, manly adventures with horses and guns, Totally nonpc, and I completely understand why people hate reading them, But we all read stuff that is not pc, and this is my vice, If you DO like westerns, and you don't already know L'Amour, then you are doing it wrong, and are in for a treat.
This is not a bad place to start, It is only slightly related to L'Amour's Sackett saga many, many books about a single extended frontier family, and you don't have to know anything about those books to understand this one it does help to know that there IS a Sacket saga though.
Borden Chantry is a failed cattle rancher, forced to become the town sheriff to earn enough money to feed his family.
It isn't a job he wanted, but its one he is really good at, But his quiet little town suddenly is plagued with multiple murders, and Sheriff Chantry has no clue how to figure out who the culprit is.
So he starts to investigate, and the killer's attention appears to turn on Chantry, So in the end, what we have is a very fine murder mystery, disguised as a western! Well done,
Note: From the "dates read" info, it looks like it took me a long time to read this.
Nope. I read about/in a cabin in the Ozarks, . . but the book belong to the cabin, So I read a couple of books, and then got my hands on my own copyand finished it in an hour or so.
Its a quick read. .