Any time it rains, not even to mention any more dramatic form of Weather, my part of the world is subject to power outages. We really need to break up the whole idea of an electric power grid, to have each household tapping into its own battery storage system rather than frying people's computers all over the county when one pole collapses in one mudslide. I currently have a sad little queue of five electronic devices waiting for the right sort of vehicle to drive up so they can go off to see the wizards, the wonderful wizards of Compuworld. Anyway, during one of these power outages, in July, there was enough sunshine for me to be able to read a paperback novel. Here's the review.
Title: Mojave Crossing
Author: Louis L'Amour
Date: 1964
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0-553-27690-8 (2001 reprint)
Length: 148 pages
Quote: "Seemed like trouble dogged my tracks wherever I put a foot down, and here was I, heading into strange country, running into a black-eyed woman."
Tell Sackett doesn't tell us his whole story all at once. He left Tennessee to join the Union Army and continued going west. His aversion to the black-eyed woman, travelling under the name Dorinda Robiseau, at first seems to spring from his self-identification as "tall and homely." Later he mentions a woman called Ange who's waiting for him. He doesn't think Dorinda Robiseau is using her original name, he tells us, but he's heard names that sounded stranger than that.
Dorinda is not the ideal trail buddy. She doesn't tell a party of men from town that Tell has gone for water, or that the horses and gold she's watching are his. When they get to a settlement, Dorinda considerably ahead of Tell for obvious reasons, Dorinda seems to be close to an older cousin of Tell's, who tells Tell that she's one of "the great courtesans" who have no feelings about men, who are all about money, but he doesn't care. In one scene Dorinda begs Tell to travel further with her, and "I will love you as you've never been loved." In her next scene she points Tell out to his enemies. She's not a sex worker; she's not even the sort of adventuress "courtesan" was being used to imply. She is a Piece Of Work.
And Tell's another. Only at the end of the book does he reveal why Dorinda, adventuress though she is, has such intense and mixed feelings about him. I don't want to spoil all the suspense, but let's just say that Tell deserves the sort of trail buddy Dorinda's shown herself to be.
There are the obligatory number of bad men who have to be killed. However, the challenges of travelling across Southern California at this period gets more attention than the fight scenes. Louis L'Amour tells readers what fun he had tracing Tell's course across what became Beverly Hills and Hollywood. If you've ever wanted to visualize that part of California free of its "people-lution," you'll enjoy Mojave Crossing.
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