Secure Borden Chantry Compiled By Louis LAmour Displayed In Manuscript
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. This story is set during the time the Sacketts, Orrin, Tyrel and Tell, were still living and ranching in Mora, New Mexico, The boys find out that a woman that helped some miners with smallpox is now very sick and in need of help, One of the miners was a Sackett so the boys send Joe Sackett to give the woman some money so she can get to a better climate, Joe is killed and the local marshall has to figure out what happened to him, It turns out the Joe is only one in several killings that are all linked to Mora,
Most of
this story the readers doesn't know for sure who the handsome young man that was murdered is, There are some twists and turns but I think it is obvious who the killed all the people but it is alway nice to have that confirmed, I love the glimpse of life for a small town marshall with no experience in investigation, I always love reading about the characters that help tell the story mostly because Louis L'Amour seems to make them real, This isn't a bad story and it is a pretty quick read, Louis Lamour addsthings to all his westerns on top of being a fine story teller who writes in an economic, easily read script, of course!
He likes to spend time with historic characters, places, and events from those times and
He always like to make a suitably moral message, which he drums in just enough to dig in under your subconscious
So here we find little cameos for Billy the Kid, Pat Garret, Buffalo Bill and others from the East the town of Durango in Colorado, and a famous old hotel or two.
Along with the True Meaning and Value of the Law :,
All of which adds just enough flavour and colour to put substance to what is a very nice little murder mystery, and a very satisfyingly selfeffacing hero.
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Good for an hour or two's feetup reading,
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,
JUSTICE FOR ALL
Borden Chantry another rancher/town sheriff who was only twentyfour years old, The life in the west caused you to mature quickly,
A good plot lots of intrigue and mystery, people were murdered by an unknown killer, Borden had to figure out who was during the killings and why,
Lots of arroyos, empty buildings and buildings roof tops that were used to drygulch a body if you had a mind to do so, Bord's life was at stake someone in town wanted him dead, The reasons unknown, but who ever this drygulcher was he wasn't wasting any time,
Find yourself a comfortable chair, sofa or whatever makes you comfortable I guarantee you will not put this book down until your finished, Only taking time to get yourself an iced tea or coffee to really relax, . Ride easy everyone 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, 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 :,
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,
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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
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. 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, Take my rating and review with a grain of salt: I'm certainly not a hardcore western fan and this is actually the first Louis L'Amour book I've ever read.
This old paperback onlypages, so a bit short, novelwise was sitting at the thrift shop forcents, and I realized that I'd never read LL before.
I knew he was a hugely prolific and hugely popular writer in the classic western genre, so I decided to give it a try, just to broaden my horizons.
I can see why he was a successful writer, People who like pulp westerns for escape and entertainment must love this, It's short, breezy, easy to read, interesting, with a good moral compass, It's a decent story, too,
It doesn't make much pretense to be high literature: "It was gloomy in the old barn, The body was laid out on an old worktable, " But I don't see that as a fault: LL knew his audience, and they wanted entertainment, Still, there are a few passages, later, especially describing the landscape that are almost poetic,
There's a big streak of naivete, a simplistic, almost childlike rightvswrong morality that pretty much matches the tone of network TV of the time, "Borden Chantry" could have been in TV's "Gunsmoke" universe, In fact, this book almost reads like a novelization of a TV western, because it does feel formulaic, a romanticized version of the west, You know that nothing terribly surprising will happen and that good will triumph over evil, This isn't a knock on the book, It was meant to be entertaining, and it succeeds by fitting an expected pattern with the requisite storytelling skill,
I would be remiss not to mention the character "Big Injun" to say he's a caricature is an understatement:
"What Big Injun was thinking, he knew not.
To many Indians the white man's way was incomprehensible, anyway, and this might be just one thing more, Actually, Big Injun troubled himself very little with the concerns of the white man, "
And of course, Big Injun is depicted as speaking that pigeon English common in old movies "Man ride him, "
Even though the overall depiction of Big Injun is outdated and demeaning, if not outright offensive, the book is copyright, and I don't believe in retroactively judging past work by later, more modern standards.
Times change, we grow and learn as a culture and a society, and improve, This book is a product of its time, and at that time, this depiction wasn't generally seen as offensive, in fact it was the default way that native Americans were depicted in the western genre.
So I'm including this note in case anyone reading this review would be offended, they'll know to avoid this book, and probably this author, and likely the entire pulp western genre from this era.
But I'm not going to take this depiction into account for my review, because, as I said, I think it's unfair to retroactively applystandards to a work written in.
Borden Chantry is a somewhat reluctant sheriff, but one determined to do his utmost duty now that's he's in the position, He finds himself trying to solve a murder in his town, and finds a connection with the death of the prior sheriff and some other men, In that regard, the novel is a bit of a mystery and Borden investigates and dodges peril, As alluded to earlier, the plot's complexity and style isn't dissimilar from that of a good classic TV western episode maybe a twoparter, and I was entertained enough to enjoy reading to the end.
And it was a satisfying conclusion,
It was a nice change of pace from what I normally read, but I don't foresee reading more LL novels, I can totally understand though how he was so successful, and he definitely earned his success, cranking out several books a year for many years,
I'm sure people will enjoy this and his countless other novels for many years to come,
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