Title: Borden Chantry
Author: Louis L'Amour
Date: 1977
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0-553-27863-0
Length: 170 pages
Quote: "Dead man out in the street." "Again? Third this week."
Borden Chantry is yet another Louis L'Amour hero, another mostly nice guy who has no alternative to killing a lot of other guys, mostly by shooting them. Like most of the heroes in his genre he shows the benefits of the hard work and discipline that really "won the West," but somehow we never see him doing the work. In the course of this novel he has to track down and kill a serial murderer who doesn't even start a fair fight before killing another man. We know he will be safe because in genre fiction serial murderers always lose the ability to shoot straight when they confront the hero.
Meh. I laugh at it in books but I watch the movies made from those books--for the landscapes and the horses, of course. I'm not going to scold the people who now collect paperback "westerns." I've found some of the best of the genre for them.
"in genre fiction serial murderers always lose the ability to shoot straight when they confront the hero." Thank you for this. I laughed so hard my husband ran into the room to make sure everything was okay. 😂
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