"Borden Chantry" by Louis L'Amour

I just might have me a new favorite L'Amour book.  It's been almost a decade since I reread Hondo, so I might have to pull that off the shelf to read again and see how it holds up, because... man, I really loved Borden Chantry.  

Borden Chantry is a recently appointed town marshal.  He never expected to be a peace officer, but his ranch hit some hard times and he had to sell off his herd.  To hang onto their land, he and his wife and son have moved to town so Chantry could find a job.  It's just not the job he was expecting.  But he's an upright, conscientious, trustworthy man, good with his fists and his gun if need be, but not given to showing off.  Just what a town needs in a marshal, even if it's a surprise to him.

Well, a dead body in the street one morning sets the town buzzing.  He was a stranger, and no one seems to know where he came from or why he was there.  He has good clothes, but nothing at all to identify him, and no money.  Also, his horse is missing.  Borden Chantry doesn't think of himself as a clever or intelligent man, but he sets about solving this homicide in a methodical and logical way that belies his own estimation of his intellect.  Before long, another murder rocks the town, and then Chantry finds a third, plus evidence that two deaths a year earlier may be linked to these.

Although this is not considered one of the Sackett novels, it has Sacketts in it, in minor roles.  As a writer who relishes tying different books together in small ways herself, that really pleased me :-)

(Photo by me.)

I picked this book up this past weekend at a tiny used book store up in the Shenandoah Valley -- I actually went hunting for it because I'd taken L'Amour's book Son of a Wanted Man along on a little family getaway and read it... and discovered that it is a sequel of sorts to Borden Chantry.  Happily, I found this for $2 and could start reading it right away, and I liked it better than Son of a Wanted Man! In fact, I loved it -- a murder mystery set in the Old West?  Yes, please!

Plus, Borden Chantry himself is just the sort of hero I love best -- quiet, calm, watchful, honorable, steely.  Yup, totally love him.  (His wife, on the other hand, I am not a fan of.  Sigh.)  Now I kind of want to reread parts of Son of a Wanted Man just to see all the ties to this.

Particularly Good Bits:

"Since the war, there's a lot of footloose men who can't seem to find a place to light" (p. 7).

As marshal his job was to enforce the law, and to him the laws were the rules that made civilization work.  Without them there was chaos.  They were not a restriction upon his freedom, but the doorway to greater freedom, for they established certain rules that men were not to transgress.  In the land in which he had grown up it was customary to settle disputes with a gun.  Consequently men, unless drunk, were cautious with their language and respectful of one another (p. 15-16).

"Some people believe the law to be a restriction... It is a restriction only against evil.  Laws are made to free people, not to bind them -- if they are proper laws.  They tell each of us what he may do without transgressing on the equal liberty of any other man" (p. 62).

He was himself an essentially private man, friendly but reserved, standing a cool sentry before the doors of his personal life (p. 107).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for some mild bad language and non-gory western violence.

Since this is a murder mystery, I'm contributing it to my We Love Detectives Week blog party :-)

This is also the 5th book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.