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"What do we have here? The story of a lonely man hiding his loneliness behind a cloak of independence, a man as bleak as the land over which he rode, yet beneath the harshness and the necessary violence, a kind man, a just man, a man who had come to terms with the land in which he lived."



Hondo Lane is a gunman, a survivor, riding dispatch for General George Crook commander of the Army's forces in the Southwest. Crook valued men like Hondo--men of mixed blood, who knew the ways of the Apache. In the late 1870's Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains were a hard land, a land that could feed and shelter those who understood it, but a land that could kill the unwary or the weak. The price of survival was constant vigilance.

"He smelled the stale sweat of his body, the smells of tobacco, horse and greasewood smoke that lived with him. A fly lighted on the back of his hand, he heard the sound of water running over stones. Around him were the grey bones of a long dead tree. His shoulder cramped. There was no movement; only a small bird started to land in a clump of brush, then veered away...and Hondo took a chance..."

There is a visceral realism to L'Amour's descriptions. You feel every moment of tense expectation.



For lovers of action adventure stories Hondo packs a punch--and the villain is such low-life scum that I was cheering every blow.



L'Amour's descriptions of the land make me want to head West: "The sun was down but it was still light, and the air was turning cool with the desert night. Long streaks of red remained in the sky, and on the western edge of a cloud there was a blush of old rose. Pale yellow light lingered on the topmost leaves of the cottonwoods and their leaves whispered in the dry way they have."

There is also a very believable and satisfying romance with an admirable heroine. Angie Lowe, like Hondo, is a fighter, a woman raising a young son alone on a ranch her father built. Her husband has disappeared leaving her to fend for herself in Apache country. Hondo sees the care with which the stone house was built, but also the neglect of the hardest jobs that only a man could do. "He read more into the place than she would have believed. There had been a lot of work done here, good solid work that a man could be proud of...but that had been a long time ago. Since then the place had been had been slowly running into the ground, and here and there were the fixings of a man who was shiftless, a rawhider if ever he saw one."



Angie is drawn to the stranger. "She liked listening to his voice. It was slow, somehow restful, and underlying his words there was understanding, compassion. There was none of this you-get-along-on-your-own-or-die feeling. She had seen too much of that. The more people had, the more they felt that way. But this man had known loneliness and hardship."

Hondo, carrying dispatches about a likely Apache uprising tries to convince Angie to leave her farm. "We've always got along splendidly with the Apaches," Angie argues. But Hondo counters that was before "We broke that treaty....There's no word in the Apache language for 'lie', and they've been lied to. If they rise there won't be a live white in the territory."

The Apache wars are the backdrop for Hondo and Angie's story and the book is filled with accurate details about the military campaigns....



And fierce fighting that left few survivors.



There are good and bad men on both sides, men of weakness and men of high courage. Vittoro, the Apache chief who plays a major part in the story, is based on the war chief dubbed Victorio by white settlers. Like Hondo, Vittoro is a man of honor, a man of his word who respects courage and sacrifice.



I won't give away more of the story because it's a splendid one. Four and a half stars rounded up because it was pure escapist pleasure and because it is such fun to rediscover a genre that I'd long abandoned. This is my first Louis L'Amour and I've already ordered two more.

Content PG: Killing, fighting, scalping, racial language, but no sex except for a great kiss and a fade to desert starlight love scene.