I was in El Malpais National Monument recently and posted a link on my Facebook page. Someone left a comment that this book was set in El Malpais and it was only $3 on Kindle so…
As most Western writers are L’Amour is enamored of the landscape (me, too) and it looks just as he wrote it. (One commenter on my post said you could follow Flint along on a modern day map. I didn’t go that far but I may yet.)
A gunfighter in New Mexico turned robber baron of the Gilded Age who receives a sentence of death from a doctor and goes home to die in peace and obscurity.
Well, no, not so much. Flint stumbles into a range war with lots of fights with guns and without, lots of bad guys, and two women, one worthy and the other unworthy in the extreme, which is always how women in these novels are graded. Flint is that quintessential Western character so beloved by conservatives, the mythological cowboy unbeatable with fist and gun who always and ever fights for the right and who takes no crap from nobody.
“When you say this is your range, you lie in your teeth. This is railroad land, owned, deeded, and surveyed. Now understand this: I don’t give a damn who you are, and I like it here. You can start shooting and I’ll spread you all over that saddle.”
You wouldn’t want to cross him but you’d want him on your side. Good yarn, great scenery, escapism at its best.
Looks like Flint’s hideout to me.
[Photo Credit:
https://handstandsaroundtheworld.blog/2023/01/10/bad-country-el-malpais-national-monument-new-mexico/]
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I love Louis Lamour novels, and read approximately 60 or 72 of them as a teen .
I enjoyed them but was always looking after the fifteenth novel for: the inevitable rolling hip lock in the fistfight, the secondary villain who changes his way after either being shot or punched out, and the inevitable recovery after the near fatal wound.
He is still better at research and writing than I could ever be.