Book Review: Milo Talon

Title: Milo Talon 

Author: Louis L'Amour

Date: 1981

Publisher: Bantam

ISBN: 0-553-24763-8

Length: 212 pages

Quote: "I want you to find a girl...my son's daughter. She has been missing for twelve years."

She's the heir to a treasure believed to be even bigger than it is, and the search leads Milo Talon, a classic western-movie hero, into encounters with mean, greedy people--some of them rival treasure hunters, and a couple who are just plain nasty. 

It's what the world expected of Louis L'Amour: Historical fiction, well researched, set in the nineteenth century in what would become the Western States. One tough-guy hero who never intends to hurt anybody but is forced by circumstances to kill a few baddies, usually by shooting, sometimes by creative torture. A young woman or two with roles that are simple enough to be played by no-talent pretty faces, but can be livened up enough to provide vehicles for real actresses. Stagecoaches, saloons, gold, steam-powered trains, horses and mules galore. 

Movies and TV shows inspired by Louis L'Amour's dozens of stories are admittedly some of the less off-putting fare on television--at least they feature interesting landscapes and horses--so people are still watching them for hours on end, and there is still a brisk market for L'Amour's novels. So I invested in a few boxes, and have some for sale. 

It's not my favorite genre. All the English teachers of years gone by, and also my mother and grandmother, used to preach against it. I personally agreed with them when they were preaching, and still do, so I'll mention their objection to these books here. In real life, The West Was Won by a lot of hard, boring, sweaty work, including a huge amount of wasted effort planting crops that dried up and blew away. Will James and Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about the West as it was. Louis L'Amour wrote about the West as boys back East fantasized that it might be. There. 

The reply to this sermon was that reading escape fiction, as distinct from reading porn or surfing the TV, is a cheap and harmless way some people choose to relax, and it's a free country. I agree with those claims too. So I'm reselling these novels.