Mon 31 Aug 2015
A Western Fiction Review by David Vineyard: LOUIS L’AMOUR – Reilly’s Luck.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western Fiction[8] Comments
LOUIS L’AMOUR – Reilly’s Luck. Bantam, paperback original, 1971. Reprinted many times.
I have a theory that the reason so few of Louis L’Amour’s novels have done well on screen is that his quality as a writer doesn’t lie in story and character alone, but in his voice and small details that are almost impossible to translate to the screen. The same, by my estimation, is true of John D. MacDonald. Both men have had successful screen translations, but most often their work seems to lose something when it moves to film.
Reilly’s Luck is a good example of the qualities that illustrate my point: it is a strong well written western on classical lines with a story worthy of Greek myth, and yet as cinematic as it would seem I can’t really see it working on screen.
Valentine Darrant’s mother Myra abandons him in a snowstorm to the mercies of Will Reilly, a young gambler who like most L’Amour heroes is a little too good with a gun. Reilly is angered at first, but soon warms to the child and takes him under his wing as father and mentor.
With Reilly, Val kicks around the West from one trail town to another, from San Francisco to the capitals of Europe, gambling, working, and adventuring, but always haunted by why he was abandoned, and an unvoiced threat from his past. It is not until Val reaches maturity that things come to a head and he finds cold blooded gunman Henry Sonnenberg paid to kill him — by his own mother with a Russian nobleman from his European adventures involved.
L’Amour liked his themes from classical literature and he certainly works them here. Will Reilly is a sort of Charon ushering Val to manhood, and you can certainly see Myra as Medea murdering her own children when one interferes with her ambition. Val himself could be Jason or Theseus easily. Myra Fossett, Val’s mother, is certainly the most unusual woman in a L’Amour novel that I have encountered.
Obviously this sounds as if it would be a natural on screen. But the fact is the qualities that make a good L’Amour novel, the complexities and the details, just don’t transfer to the screen anymore than the savage commentary on the world of a MacDonald novel do. Like MacDonald, who he does not otherwise resemble, L’Amour’s plots aren’t really the point. You read them to be in their world, to experience them and not merely the story they tell.
The experience of reading L’Amour doesn’t translate to the screen as well as an Elmore Leonard or Luke Short western for instance. Here, and in many L’Amour works, the plot meanders a bit, a quality that is admirable in a novel but less so in a movie. Most of Reilly’s Luck would have ended up on the cutting room floor to the detriment of the novel and disappointment of L’Amour’s readers.
This one is one of my favorite L’Amour novels, penned later in his career and more ambitious than earlier titles. It’s a fairly big book, close to 300 pages, with a great many characters and a fairly busy plot. I’m sure many L’Amour fans dislike it for that reason, but for whatever reason I found Val Darrant’s quest an entertaining read, and Will Reilly a memorable companion for Val and for myself.
August 31st, 2015 at 9:50 pm
Not one I’ve read, but you make this one sound as though it’s a step above L’Amour’s other westerns, David.
Tag sales and library sales used to be filled with L’Amour paperbacks. The deluge has finally subsided. But you never find many other westerns around either. I see Barnes and Noble still has a section of new ones to offer, but the day of the western paperback is just about over.
September 1st, 2015 at 1:23 am
This is more ambitious than most of L’Amour from the fifties and sixties. I’m sure purists don’t care for that, but I liked some of his later work and more offbeat novels when he was trying to spread his wings with historical swashbucklers and contemporary adventure and even fantasy.
September 1st, 2015 at 1:45 am
Here in the Southwest the Western has more than a toehold. The only problem is readers tend to hold onto them and there is less variety available. L’Amour and Matt Braun dominate, a few others including Luke Hort, Brand,Gray,And Mulford since the reprints tied to L’Amour. Ray Hogan makes an appearance, Coburn, Raine, and Macdonald, with some Will Henry, but many fewer of the adult series than you would expect.
September 1st, 2015 at 7:37 am
I read this one when it was new and remember liking it quite a bit. I don’t care as much for L’Amour’s later work because his sloppiness (disappearing characters, unresolved storylines, repeated scenes) got worse and by then his editors had strict hands-off orders when it came to his manuscripts and weren’t allowed to do any actual editing. This was always a problem with L’Amour’s work — he was quoted in an interview as saying that once he wrote something he never looked back at it — but his earlier books are cleaner and tighter. FLINT, TO TAME A LAND, and HIGH LONESOME are all fine books. I think he was at his best, though, in short stories. I like his pure adventure stories from the pulps, like the Ponga Jim Mayo series.
September 1st, 2015 at 8:49 pm
James,
I’m an Edgar Wallace fan, so long as physical descriptions of characters don’t change in mid paragraph I’m pretty easy.
I like many earlier L’Amour’s as well, but I always felt he as at his best when he tried something a bit different. I agree about the shorts and the pulp work in many ways though.
I should have mentioned that the boy/man dynamic resembling Stevenson’s Alan Breck/David Balfour, occurs in more than one L’Amour novel, notably in HONDO and BRIONNE. It’s a theme he uses fairly often as he does the coming of age theme (THE FIRST FAST GUN). The European theme is also common, his heroes often being immigrants who have traveled West. Shalako, the eponymous hero of that book, is a former British soldier who served in several wars for instance and the European roots of the Sacketts and Chantry’s are both explored.
All that said, L’Amour’s carelessness is evident, and he is not a stylist. Despite liking REILLY’S LUCK there are several instances of awkward syntax. His use of the passive voice, particularly, “had”, can be really annoying in a writer as dynamic as L’Amour. He too often tells things he would have been better off to show in dialogue. I lost count of the ‘hads’ in one short expositionary chapter late in the book.
September 2nd, 2015 at 1:40 am
I have Reilly’s Luck in the UK hardcover printing published by Hale and would agree with most of what has been said by David and James. My favorite L’Amour book is the collection Dutchman’s Flat. That said, I continue to find it puzzling that L’Amour should have been, and still is, held in higher regard than many other western authors who began their writing careers in the pulps. The countless printings of the L’Amour books do mean that most titles are readily available at reasonable prices. The same can’t be said for many of his contemporaries who equally deserve to be read today.
September 2nd, 2015 at 9:41 pm
There’s a story — and I don’t know if it’s true or not — that when Bantam’s bestselling Western writer was Luke Short, they asked him if he could increase his output from two new novels per year to three, and he refused. So Bantam threw all their resources behind promoting L’Amour and made the decision to keep all his novels in print indefinitely. That strategy certainly seems to have worked for a long time.
September 3rd, 2015 at 10:11 am
Certainly Bantam’s strategy with L’Amour paid off for both writer and publisher. You have to wonder what would have happened if Short had taken that deal.
Glidden was a better writer, but his work does lack a homey quality L’Amour has as a writer. L’Amour has always seemed to me comfortable writer, incredibly easy to read, the literary equivalent of a favored uncle who was always spinning tales.