Book Review: The Man from the Broken Hills

Title: The Man from the Broken Hills

Author: Louis L’Amour

Publisher: Bantam

Date: 1975

ISBN: 0-553-10827-1

Length: 217 pages

Quote: “[M]esquite was nearly always a sign that water was near.”

Milo Talon, protagonist of another book by this author, is now a grown-up outlaw seeking revenge…and society’s “redemption,” and a chance to Settle Down. In this book he meets two young women. One of them, we’re told, will marry another man who’s behaved like a good western-novel hero in this book. The other one, he’ll be seeing again soon, indicating that the author had a sequel in mind.

Everyone who’s studied English Literature at school is officially obligated to laugh at the focus on brawling and shooting in “westerns” and the conventions. Those other men the protagonist feels obliged to kill may die, obligingly, toward the end, or escape in order to come back and be killed in a sequel, or get themselves killed by accidents (especially the kind that reveal how unworthy of life they always were), or (occasionally) save themselves by revealing new information and helping the protagonist. They never, ever win a fight with the protagonist. The protagonist is never in mortal danger, though he can be wounded, in order to explain how he missed killing an adversary the first time or to show his heroic fortitude by winning a fight even with an injured leg. /And so on.

Now that the paperback “westerns” of the mid-twentieth century are collectors’ items, it’s generally acknowledged that a lot of writers did That Sort Of Thing worse than Louis L’Amour. Though the commonplaces and conventions of his books were news items, L’Amour did draw inspiration from actual history, and was as unlikely to commit an anachronism as to commit a grammatical error. He saw himself as an historian catering to an audience looking for one particular kind of story, but insisted he found most of his plots in real newspapers from that audience's favorite period. So his novels, like this one, are considered among the best of the genre.