REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:


  FRANK O’ROURKE – Legend in the Dust. Ballantine, hardcover/paperback (#211), 1957; paperback reprint, #421, 1960. Signet D3571, paperback, 1968; Pocket, paperback, 1989.

   An engaging work by an author I always meant to get around to.

   Legend opens in the classic mode: a lone rider enters the scene, as a thousand others did before him, riding into a terrain simmering with repressed tension and impending violence. And as simmering tensions go, the little town of Fort Ellis is on a slow boil; we quickly learn that the lone rider is ex-lawman Pat Glennon and the first man he meets is Buck Atherton, a likeable local boy with a reputation as a killer.

   In fact Buck makes his living mostly working for local capitalists who have exclusive contracts to supply beef to the nearby Army post…. and are getting product by rustling from the local cattle baron. Before many pages are past there’s a pitched battle between the factions with the merchants besieged in a store that gets burned down around them and Buck goes on the run as a wanted man with some scores to settle.

   Attentive readers, if any, will have gathered by now that Legend is loosely based on the saga of Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War, and that’s the way I like it: Loose. Dozens, maybe scores, of writers have written the tale as fact or fiction. And they all ultimately have to pick sides, discredit some accounts, endorse others and emerge with historical good guys and bad guys.

   Freed of these restrictions, O’Rourke can make what he wants of the characters, and they emerge as a vibrant, engaging cast. He can also make whatever history he feels like, and though the story stays fairly close to real-life events, it departs whenever dramatically convenient, which makes for better reading.

   I had never tried any O’Rourke before, but this will get me looking for more.