Title: The Burning Hills
Author: Louis L’Amour
Publisher: Bantam
Date: 1965
ISBN: 0-553-28210-7
Length: 150 pages
Quote: “He had killed a man in Tascosa who called him a liar and he killed four Indians hw trapped him in a buffalo wallow…And a gun-slinger had died of bad judgment on the Ruidoso. But Trace Jordan was a quiet man.”
The man who called Trace a liar was riding a horse that had belonged to Trace’s murdered partner. This made Trace impatient, and disrespectful of the other man’s age and social status. Though killing anyone who accused you of acting dishonorably was not (yet) punished as murder in the West, the older man’s friends and relatives drove Trace into the desert along the Mexican border. There he proved his ability to survive extreme weather, picked off his enemies by ones, and even mustered the energy to persuade a Mexican-American woman that he was not a bigot like the inferior-grade White people she knew, but the Hero of a Western Paperback Novel, for the beautiful Maria Cristina would settle for nothing less…
It was comedy, and much of the time the joke was on the boys and men who paid for the books or for seats at the movies. Louis L’Amour wrote with more respect for the boys who collected his books than many of his colleagues showed. His books stayed in print, were reprinted many times; my copy of The Burning Hills is a 1992 reprint and thus lacks the price of less than a dollar, stamped on the spine of the book, that identified his first editions. Trace Jordan’s success may be improbable but stories as unlikely was his were at least printed as facts in nineteenth century newspapers.
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