SHANE, HONDO, AND THE QUIET MAN: HOW AN IRISH SHORT STORY GAVE BIRTH TO HUNDREDS OF WESTERNS
This August brings us the seventieth anniversary of the release of John Ford’s classic 1952 film The Quiet Man, which starred John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Victor McLaglen, and Barry Fitzgerald. The film is a perennial favorite both in Ireland, where it is set, and in America. Rabid fans of the film are known as The Quiet Maniacs. Numerous books have been written about the film. A writer named Des McHale has made a career of producing titles such as The Complete Guide to the Quiet Man, A Quiet Man Miscellany, and Picture The Quiet Man: An Illustrated Celebration. And he’s not the only one who has written about the film. Other titles include In the Footsteps of The Quiet Man by Gerry McNee, and The Quiet Man and Beyond: Reflections on a Classic Film, John Ford and Ireland by Sean Crosson and Rod Stoneman, and John Ford’s The Quiet Man: The Making of a Cult Classic by Jordan R. Young. Of course, the film is written about in countless other books, including studies of the careers of John Wayne and John Ford. It was the subject of a 2010 documentary called John Ford: Dreaming The Quiet Man, which was directed by Sé Merry Doyle. Film experts – including Martin Scorsese and Stephen Spielberg – consider it a masterpiece. I am not quite a Quiet Maniac, but I am a Quiet Fan.
The film is based on a short story of the same name that was published in The Saturday Evening Post on February 11, 1933. It was written by Irishman Maurice Walsh. The story was a big hit with the Post’s readers. Two years later, in 1935, Walsh brought out a novel called Green Rushes, which contained an altered version of the original short story. In February of 1936, John Ford purchased the film rights to the The Quiet Man for a paltry $10. The contract stipulated that Walsh would be paid more if and when the film went into production. Eventually he would earn $6,250 for those film rights, still a paltry sum considering that the film was a huge financial success.
John Ford (born John Martin Feeney) was the American-born son of Irish immigrants. Ireland was in his blood and never far from his thoughts. Many of his early films had Irish themes, including the silents The Shamrock Handicap (1926), Mother Machree (1928), and Hangman’s House (also 1928; early in his career Ford sometimes made as many as 15 films per year). Some of his talkies, such as The Informer (1935) and The Plough and the Stars (1936), also dealt with Irish subjects. According to Des MacHale, in The Complete Guide to The Quiet Man, these films “gave him an unrivaled vehicle for expressing his pro-Nationalist and anti-British feelings.”
The Saturday Evening Post’s version of The Quiet Man contained no anti-British sentiment. In fact, it wasn’t at all political. It was the tale of Irishman Shawn Kelvin, who has returned to his native soil after spending fifteen years in America, working in steel mills in Pittsburgh, and boxing professionally in New York City. He is now 35 years old, has saved up a bit of money, and wants nothing more to do with fighting. When he finds out that Big Liam O’Grady, an overbearing rich man “given to berserk rages” has gained possession of the Kelvin family’s ancestral farmstead by unscrupulous means, Shawn makes no effort to get the land back. Instead he purchases a smaller, humbler farm overlooking the mouth of the Shannon River. He lives here modestly in a “four-roomed, lime-washed thatched cottage.” Shawn’s life is quiet and peaceful until he meets lovely redheaded Ellen O’Grady and falls hard for her. Alas, Ellen is the sister (and house servant) of Big Liam O’Grady. Shawn would like to woo Ellen but he fears that Liam would never allow it. Liam despises Shawn and has no desire to lose his unpaid housekeeper, but when a wealthy neighbor named James Carey dies and leaves his estate to his widow, Kathy, Liam’s greed gets the better of him. He knows that Kathy will not marry him and unite her fortune to his so long as Ellen remains in Liam’s household, so Liam reluctantly agrees to allow Ellen and Shawn to marry. Irish tradition requires Liam to offer Shawn a dowry for marrying his sister. And so Liam promises Shawn £200 as a dowry. Shawn and Ellen marry and are quite happy – at first, that is. Trouble arises when Ellen asks Shawn to collect the £200 dowry from Liam. Shawn doesn’t need the money and has no desire to ask Liam for anything. But for Ellen it is a matter of pride. Thus, over the next few months, whenever Shawn and Liam encounter each other in a public place – market, fair, etc. – Shawn asks humbly for the money and Liam laughs in his face. Liam doesn’t care much about the money. But he is a big and powerful man and enjoys making smaller men look cowardly in his presence. Shawn is an ex-prizefighter and not physically intimidated by Liam, but he has no desire to fight, so he shrugs off these public insults and moves on with his life. Alas, Ellen isn’t so eager to move on. She wants the dowry. She views it as money that she earned while taking care of Liam’s household for so many years. Finally, she pushes Shawn too hard. The two of them climb into a horse-drawn carriage and travel four miles across the Irish countryside to Liam’s property where the big man and some of the townsfolk are harvesting corn with the aid of a steam-driven thresher. Ellen thinks Shawn has brought her here to finally collect what is owed her. But Shawn surprises her by throwing her at her brother’s feet and then insisting that the marriage is null and void because the dowry, which is lawfully required, was never paid. Suddenly, Liam realizes that Shawn has got the better of him. If he takes Ellen back into his household he’ll look as if he is too cheap or too poor to pay a modest dowry that he was obligated to fork over months ago. The townspeople will lose respect for him and “The scandal on his name would not be bounded by the four seas of Erin.” Grudgingly he produces a wad of crumpled bills and thrusts it at Shawn. He orders Shawn to count the money in front of everyone present. He wants to make Shawn look cheap and grubby. But Shawn doesn’t count the money. Instead he shoves it into the wood-burning furnace of the thresher where it is instantly incinerated. This enrages Liam who screams, “My money! My good money!” And then he attacks the much smaller Shawn. Unfortunately for Liam, Shawn is a gifted boxer who was known as Tiger Kelvin in New York City and he has lost none of his abilities. He proceeds to put on a boxing clinic for the dozens of people gathered at Liam’s farm, many of them cousins of Liam’s. Though Liam is much taller than Shawn and forty pounds heavier, he never manages to land a punch. Shawn spends five minutes pummeling the hapless brute. Then he turns to the rest of the O’Grady men and asks if any of them would like to take him on next. None avail themselves of that opportunity. And Ellen, now immensely proud of her husband, and feeling that her feud with Liam has been properly settled, walks arm and arm with him back to the carriage, and they ride home together, presumably to live happily ever after.
Ford’s film follows that synopsis fairly closely, although many of the names and other details have been changed and a variety of subplots have been added. In Ford’s film, Shawn Kelvin has become Sean Thornton (played by Wayne), an Irishman who left Ireland for America when he was a little child (this was necessary to explain Wayne’s lack of an Irish accent) and made good as a prizefighter under the name Trooper Thorn. The O’Gradys are now Red Will Danaher (McLaglen) and Mary Kate Danaher (O’Hara). The £200 dowry is now a £350 dowry. For the most part, however, the film adheres fairly closely to the Saturday Evening Post story.
The version of The Quiet Man that makes up a part of Green Rushes, however, is vastly different from the Saturday Evening Post version. The Quiet Man that appears in Green Rushes is part of a cycle of tales that essentially constitutes a novel about the Irish War of Independence, which was fought between 1919 and 1921. The film glosses over entirely the conflict between the Royal Irish Constabulary (known as the Black-and-Tans, and loyal to Britain) and the Irish Republican Army (the military branch of Sinn Fein, and devoted to an independent Ireland). In Ford’s film, the Republicans and Nationalists, Catholics and Protestants, all pretty much get along. But the conflict between those groups is front and center in Green Rushes. Given Walsh’s background, this makes complete sense. According to Gerry McNee’s In the Footsteps of The Quiet Man, “Maurice Walsh loved his native Ireland [while] loathing everything the British Empire represented…”
The quiet man of Green Rushes is named Paddy Bawn Enright (Paddy Bawn means “fair Patrick”). Paddy Bawn is a member of the Irish Republican Army. Walsh uses the terms IRA and Sinn Fein interchangeably. Thus Paddy and his fellow soldiers are occasionally referred to as Shinners. Here’s how Walsh describes the character who would be played by John Wayne in the film:
Paddy Bawn was he whom we called The Quiet Man; smallish, with a trick of hunching one shoulder, and the steadfast eyes of the fighting man below craggy brows. He had spent fifteen hectic years in the States, had been one of the best welter-weights of his time, and had returned home to Kerry to seek peace on a few hillside acres; and the peace he was likely to find was the final peace of death – death in a Black-and-Tan ambush.
Early in the novel, Walsh describes the Ireland that The Quiet Man has returned to after his years in America. In that scene, an IRA guerilla leader named Hugh Forbes is outlining various British atrocities, while narrator Owen Jordan, a doctor for the IRA who loathes violence, downplays them in the hope of discouraging further clashes between the Shinnies and the Black-and-Tans.
The British Military Police were nicknamed “The Black-and-Tans” because of their uniform – black-blue tunic and khaki trews – and they possessed all the virulent fighting qualities of a black-and-tan terrier gone sour.
“We will not fight until the board is set for us,” said Hugh mildly, “and this bunch of Tans has a lively way of doing that. They burned Ballaghford in mid-January of a snowy morning.”
“The one town in Ireland improved by a bit of burning.”
“And shot up Kilduff on Good Friday.”
“And were themselves shot up a mile outside it, and lost five men.”
“And only last month they got Paddy Pat Walsh and four of his men resting at Scartley’s.
I had no reply to that. Paddy Pat Walsh was the heart o’ corn and his four men true steel, and they had been trapped and shot, no arms in their hands.
“Well?”
“Nothing!” said I, and puffed deeply at my pipe.
What hope of rest had we now, and we so tired. After three months of the hardest guerilla campaigning – ambush, sally, get-away, and night jumps of forty miles – our leader, Hugh Forbes, had pulled what was left of us, twenty fighting men, right out of the war area into the quietness of these hills. Wise in war, he knew when men had had enough. We had been getting careless, reckless, selling lives too easily, and Hugh had said:
“All a matter of nerves children. There are so few of us against so many, we dare not die too easily.” And then his deep voice had grown wistful. “It is so easy to die, and be done with it all.”
And here we were now, hoping for a quiet month amongst the hill-farmers; fishing a little, sleeping deeply, gathering a fresh store of munitions, experimenting with land-mines cunningly contrived out of railway buffers, girding ourselves for a fresh sally to the endless and careful fighting that might last not only our lives but the lives of children still at breast. That is how we in the South viewed that war. It would go on and on and on, against a foe terrible in his steadfastness, until we were dead – or until we were free.
Paddy Brawn differs from Sean Thornton in numerous ways, both small and large. While Sean Thornton, as played by John Wayne, is big and brawny, Paddy Brawn is short and wiry. What’s more, Paddy is not only handy with his fists, he’s also very adept with a Thompson submachine gun. He has killed many British soldiers with his Tommy gun. Likewise, his best friend Matt Tobin is portrayed in the Saturday Evening Post story as a handy man with a thresher. In the novel Green Rushes, here’s how Owen Jordan describes Paddy and Matt as they prepare to ambush an approaching Black-and-Tan convoy:
Paddy Bawn Enright and his friend Matt Tobin of the bowler hat bent, heads together, over a Thompson gun, and there was only a live interest in their faces. Paddy Bawn had too often faced the tension of the squared ring ever to show any in his steadfast eyes, and Matt Tobin, hat on the back of his head, went over the mechanism of the gun as if it were part of his threshing-machine.
Green Rushes was published in 1935 and Ford bought the rights to The Quiet Man in 1936, by which time he would have been aware of the more martial version of the tale. Author Gerry McNee claims that Ford planned to base the film on The Quiet Man story as it appeared in Green Rushes. Lord Killanin (birth name Michael Morris) was an Irish member of Britain’s House of Lords and a longtime friend of Ford’s who helped facilitate the filming of The Quiet Man. In the 1980s he told an interviewer, “I remember John showing me a copy of Green Rushes and saying: ‘I want to make a film of that.’” Given Ford’s background, this makes perfect sense. According to McNee, “In 1921, a year after he was married, Ford headed for Ireland where the IRA were embroiled in a bitter struggle with the Black-and-Tans. His intention was to join his cousins, the Thorntons, in the fight for freedom...” But after Ford reached Ireland, he decided that he could do better things for the cause of Irish independence than shoot at British soldiers. As McNee explained, “With a number of his relations on the run and one of their homes torched by the Black-and-Tans, Ford returned to the States filled with a sense of injustice and decided his best contribution would be through fund-raising to help in the battle which would force the British out of Ireland.”
Had Ford been able to make The Quiet Man in the 1930s, it would probably have been a vastly different film from the one we know today. It would have been a war movie, with the Brits cast as the bad guys. But, after World War II, in which thousands of Americans had died fighting alongside British soldiers to defeat the Nazis, Hollywood was in no mood to depict America’s closest allies in a negative light. Thus, Ford’s film is set in a Celtic fantasyland that bears little resemblance to the Ireland of Walsh’s book. (Imagine setting a film in Vietnam in the 1960s and depicting the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese peacefully co-existing.) Here and there Ford throws in a few vague references to the conflict between Irish Catholics and British Protestants. We learn, for instance, that Sean Thornton’s father was sent to a penal colony in Australia, presumably for his activities on behalf of Irish independence (though it is never stated). At one point, Barry Fitzgerald’s alcoholic character says he is going off to the pub “to talk a little treason,” though it’s fairly clear that he just wants a drink. But, for the most part, Catholic and Protestant get along fine in Ford’s film. At one point, a Bishop from Britain comes to check up on the local Anglican vicar, Reverend Cyril Playfair. Because the town’s population is mostly Catholic, the Protestant reverend’s services typically attract only about three or four worshippers. But the local Catholics are fond of Playfair, so when the Bishop arrives, the Catholics, pretending to be Protestants, turn out in large numbers to cheer for the Reverend. Even the Catholic priests help perpetuate the fraud, covering up their dog collars with neckerchiefs, and whooping with enthusiasm as the Reverend and the Bishop drive by. For that reason, I don’t consider Ford’s 1952 film the truest cinematic expression of Maurice Walsh’s Green Rushes, which is, after all, a war story. A much truer cinematic expression of the themes explored in Green Rushes was released less than a year later, in April of 1953. It was directed by George Stevens and it was called Shane.
The film Shane, which starred Alan Ladd in the title role, was based on a novel of the same name, written by Jack Schaeffer and published to wide acclaim in 1949. (Ironically, Schaefer complained that Ladd was too short for the role and probably would have preferred John Wayne; while Alan Ladd, who was small and wiry, would probably have been a better fit for Walsh’s Quiet Man protagonist.) It is difficult to exaggerate just how influential both the book and the film were in America and elsewhere. In their 1982 reference guide Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-Bibliographic Sourcebook, Fred Erisman and Richard W. Etulain, write: “Everyone knows Shane. It may not be the most famous western novel; it is arguable that titles such as The Last of the Mohicans, The Virginian, or Riders of the Purple Sage are more recognizable. But Shane is a book people have read – and continue to do so. By 1978 over 4 million copies were in print in more than seventy editions and thirty-one languages. More recently, a committee of British readers selected it as one of the hundred best novels of the twentieth century. Everyone knows Shane.” In his introduction to the University of Nebraska’s 1984 critical edition of the novel, Marc Simmons writes, “By any standard of measurement, Jack Schaefer’s Shane rates as a classic in the literature of the American West…The fact is that Shane, the novel, addressed an entire generation: post-World War II Americans who did not quite comprehend, during the unsettling 1950s, that one age was crumbling around them and a new, tense, faster-paced time was at hand. Schaefer wrote of people – of Shane and the Starrett family – cut from noble cloth. They were strong, hardworking, brave, self-disciplined, responsible, honest; ungalled by self-doubt or any sense of inferiority. In short, they possessed those virtues that, by the mid-twentieth century, were increasingly being dismissed as outdated or unattainable.”
I have read a mountain of information about both Shane and Jack Schaefer over the years. I’ve also read quite a bit about Maurice Walsh and The Quiet Man. I have never come across any piece of writing suggesting that Shane was inspired, at least in part, by The Quiet Man. But I nonetheless believe it to be true. The similarities are too numerous to be overlooked.
Let’s start with the names. Shane is simply an Anglicized version of the name Sean (as in Shawn Kelvin or Sean Thornton, the names of two of The Quiet Man’s incarnations). According to Wikipedia, “Shane comes from the way the name Seán is pronounced in the Ulster dialect of the Irish language, as opposed to Shaun or Shawn.” The character of Shane arrives in the Wyoming Territory of 1889 and is believed to be a gunfighter hoping to escape his violent past. When Paddy Bawn (originally named Shawn) returns to Ireland, he is escaping a violent past as a prizefighter in America. In Green Rushes, before Paddy can seek out his own piece of farmland, his superiors in Sinn Fein instruct him to look after a local landowner named Sean Glynn, telling him, “You will take a job as his land-steward and you shall stand by him until the shadow lifts.” Presumably, Sean, who is older and less healthy than Paddy, is being menaced either by British soldiers, neighboring loyalists, or both.
In Shane, Schaeffer’s point of reference is the Johnson County War, a shameful chapter in Wyoming history wherein wealthy cattle barons went to war against smaller family-run cattle ranches – chasing them off the land, murdering some, burning their houses, killing their cattle. The War (1889-1893) is never mentioned by name in Shane, because it wasn’t recognized as such until a few years later. When Shane rides into town, the Starretts and a dozen other small farming families are being threatened by a large open-range cattle operation owned by Luke Fletcher (the name is changed to Rufus Ryker in the film), an unscrupulous tyrant who’ll stop at nothing – even murder – to rid himself of his smaller competitors (Fletcher seems to have been inspired by Liam O’Grady/Will O’Danaher, but is even more dangerous). When Shane stops at the Starrett ranch to water his horse, Joe Starrett asks him to stick around for a while and help him with the farming. Essentially, Starrett wants Shane to act as a land-steward, like Paddy Bawn. This is a tempting offer to a man like Shane, who has been a loner for most of his life. Joe has a wife named Marian, and her beauty and womanly softness seem to attract Shane as well. Thus, Shane entwines his fate to the fate of the Starretts and their neighbors for a few months. He puts away his pistol and for the longest time eschews gunplay entirely. Alas, he eventually realizes that he and Fletcher (like Paddy and O’Grady) are headed for a showdown from which only one man can come out on top. And so he reluctantly takes up his guns again.
In both Shane and Green Rushes, the protagonist finds himself attracted to a woman whose family connections make it difficult, if not downright impossible, for him to act on his feelings (Paddy is reluctant to woo Ellen because he hates her brother; Shane absolutely will not act on his attraction to Marian because he admires her and her husband and has too much integrity to come between them).
After an unarmed Shane refuses to defend himself against one of Fletcher’s armed thugs in a local saloon, the thug derides him as a pig farmer who probably can’t handle a drink stronger than soda pop. This diminishes Shane in the eyes of the other homesteaders. Schaefer writes:
Things became so bad they could not go into Grafton’s store without someone singing out for soda pop. And wherever they went the conversation near by always snuck around somehow to pigs. You could sense the contempt [for Shane] building up in town, in people who used to be neutral, not taking sides.
That seems to mirror what happens in The Quiet Man when Paddy Bawn finds out that his land has been stolen by Will O’Danaher:
He took no action whatever. Whereupon folks nodded their heads and said contemptuous things, often enough where they might be relayed back to Paddy Bawn.
Schaefer named his longest and most ambitious novel Monte Walsh, further circumstantial evidence that he was not only aware of Maurice Walsh but probably a fan.
Green Rushes is a novel steeped in Irish Nationalism, and many a critic has argued that the true subject of Shane, as well as most of Schaefer’s other work, is the evolution of American national identity. What Fred Erisman writes about America in an essay on Shane is just as true of the Ireland Walsh writes about in Green Rushes: “A goal of nationhood more complex than either territoriality or cohesiveness is independence. A nation, obviously, has to be politically independent. More than that, however, it needs also to be economically and culturally independent…Schaefer’s people seek a similar independence. Whether Shane, the gunfighter trying to find a new life as a farmer, or Monte Walsh, the aging broncobuster trying to come to grips with the acceleration of progress, they strive for a life that is peculiarly their own, even as it is linked to the established life of a community.”
In his 1957 novel, Company of Cowards, Schaefer writes of his protagonist Jared Heath: “He had the clothes he wore and a horse and a rifle. Only those. And something more. An enduring quietness within.”
Erisman notes that “enduring quietness…characterizes all of Schaefer’s major figures.” Like many other scholars, Erisman got ever so close to recognizing The Quiet Man as an influence on Shane without being able to connect the final few dots.
Although of German descent, Schaefer was passionately interested in Anglo-Irish Literature. While doing his graduate studies in Literature, he focused primarily on the work of Irish-born writers Arthur Murphy (1727-1805) and Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774).
In many ways, the timing of Shane’s publication couldn’t have been better. Shane is the tale of a gunfighter trying to readjust to ordinary life, to become a contributing member of a peaceful society. After World War II millions of American men found themselves in the same predicament as Shane. They came home to wives and children and suburban homes and peacetime occupations, but they still, to various degrees, possessed the instincts of the warriors they recently had been. When, in the film version, the young Starrett boy accidentally rattles some pots, Shane jumps up and grabs for his gun, momentarily thinking that some enemy has snuck up behind him. Plenty of WWII vets reacted with fear when they heard ordinary civilians sounds for the first few times – cars backfiring, firecrackers exploding, balloons popping. The theme of much Hollywood cinema – from the Best Years of Our Lives, to Some Came Running, to Coming Home, to Unforgiven, to A History of Violence – is how difficult it can be for a fighting man to walk away from a life of violence and reintegrate into society. Today, relatively few Americans have any kind of combat experience. But millions of American men entered the 1950s with such experience. And movies like Shane spoke to something deep inside of them. At the end of the novel, Shane, despite conquering all his foes in town, is compelled to ride off. And when young Bob Starrett (renamed Joey in the film) asks him why, Shane says, “A man is what he is, Bob, and there’s no breaking the mold. I tried that and I’ve lost…There’s no going back from a killing, Bob. Right or wrong, the brand sticks and there’s no going back.” Alas, it sometimes seems as if Shane might have been talking about the post-WWII U.S. Armed Forces, warning us about what was to come, just as President Eisenhower did in his 1961 farewell address, the one where he coined the phrase “military industrial complex.” The U.S. entered the fighting of World War I just a year and a half before the end. A relatively small number of Americans came out of that war with a lot of combat experience. Thus, it was relatively easy for the country to return to a peacetime footing. But after World War II, America never really returned to a peacetime footing. We fought in Korea, and then in Vietnam, and then in Kuwait, and then in Iraq, and then in Afghanistan. Like Shane, post-WWII America couldn’t seem to break the mold.
I said above that the film Shane did a better job of depicting the themes explored in Green Rushes than did John Ford’s film The Quiet Man. Curiously, another 1953 film, released just seven months after Shane and about a year after The Quiet Man, did the best job of all. Like Ford’s The Quiet Man, John Farrow’s Hondo starred John Wayne as a fighting man who is eager to abandon his dangerous career (he’s a freelance “dispatch rider” – i.e., a courier – for the U.S. Army) and retire to a piece of property where, with luck, he can live out his days in peace and quiet with a loving bride by his side.
The original source of Hondo was a short story written by Louis L’Amour called “The Gift of Cochise,” which was published in Collier’s in July of 1952 (similarly, Shane began as a three-part serial in the magazine Argosy). John Wayne liked it and purchased the film rights for his newly minted production company Batjac, which he had founded with his friend Robert Fellows. Wayne hired his frequent collaborator James Edward Grant to write the screenplay. This raises the question of whether Hondo was a novel or a novelization. The Louis L’Amour Companion, a compendium of articles, interviews, and facts about L’Amour’s work, edited by Robert Weinberg and published in 1992, contains a brief essay about Hondo written by Scott A. Cupp, which notes, “…many readers thought the book was a novelization of the screenplay. They soon came to realize otherwise.” But Cupp offers not a scintilla of evidence in defense of this statement. As if to give all sides a fair hearing, the Companion also contains an essay by John Tuska titled “Hondo: Novel or Novelization.” Tuska argues that Hondo is very clearly a novelization of Grant’s script, and he brings plenty of receipts to prove his point. Tuska actually interviewed John Wayne and asked him about the evolution of the novelization. Wayne stated flat out that he and Robert Fellows gave L’Amour and his publisher permission to bring out a novelization based on the film script (Wayne provided a blurb for the book but never actually read it). Tuska writes, “L’Amour’s novelization of Hondo follows Grant’s screenplay very closely, using much of Grant’s dialog.” It seems clear to me that Hondo is a film novelization, but that should not diminish its worth as a book. In fact, what makes the book so much better than most Western novels is the amazing amount of frontier lore L’Amour was able to weave into Grant’s story. The book has an authenticity that even the film cannot match. I happen to be a fan of film novelizations and believe that they comprise a wholly worthwhile genre of popular fiction. Some of the most interesting writers of the twentieth century turned their hand a time or two to movie and TV tie-in books, authors such as Beverly Cleary, Jim Thompson, William Kotzwinkle, William Saroyan, Graham Greene, Paddy Cheyefsky, and many others. L’Amour was one of the all-time masters of the novelization. On a list compiled by The Western Writers of America of the best Western novels of all time, Hondo appears alongside works by Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Charles Portis, Conrad Richter, A.B. Guthrie, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Willa Cather, and many other prestigious authors, all of whom received far more formal education than L’Amour and none of whom managed to make it onto the list with a lowly novelization. L’Amour had a knack for novelizing film scripts. His first four books were novelizations featuring the film character Hopalong Cassidy. The producers of the 1962 film How the West Was Won hired him to write a novelization of that epic. L’Amour’s How the West Was Won is considered a classic of Western fiction. Many experts place it among his best work. Even many sophisticated literary people have forgotten that the film script preceded the novel. In its 1988 obituary for L’Amour, the Washington Post reported that, “Mr. L’Amour’s novel How the West Was Won was made into a 1962 film with a cast that included John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Gregory Peck.” The obituary also noted that, “Hondo, published in 1953, was his first novel and probably his best-known and most popular book. It has sold more than 1.5 million copies and was made into a film starring John Wayne.” Unlike most tie-in writers, L’Amour added so much value to the screenplays he novelized that even august publications like the Washington Post believed the books preceded the films.
In the case of Hondo, both the novel and the film seem to bear a lot of resemblances to Jack Schaefer’s Shane. This is understandable. Shane, as we have seen, was hugely popular and it seems to have influenced dozens and dozens of books and films that followed in its wake. In fact, Wayne may have tried to acquire the rights to Shane and, when that failed, purchased an unrelated story by L’Amour and then instructed Grant to shape it into something resembling Shane. The similarities between L’Amour’s Hondo and Schaefer’s Shane are numerous. Both have a five-letter, single-word title, and that title is the name of the main character. We never learn Shane’s full name, but Hondo’s last name is Lane, which rhymes with Shane. This isn’t unusual. After the publication of Shane, lots of cinematic and literary gunmen came along bearing Shane-like names. In the 1952 film High Noon, Gary Cooper plays a lawman named Will Kane (the film is based on a 1947 short story in which the lawman is named Doane, not Kane). In the 1954 film Vera Cruz, Cooper played a gunman named Ben Trane. In the 1957 film Outlaw’s Son, Dane Clark (Dane!) played a gunman named Blaine. Also in 1957, James Stewart starred in a Western called Night Passage, in which he played a character named McClain (immediately after making The Quiet Man, John Wayne starred in a piece of anti-communist propaganda called Big Jim McLain). In 1955, Western novelist Will Cook produced a book called Sabrina Kane, giving the Shane phenomenon a distaff twist. In 1958, L’Amour published a book called Utah Blaine. Plenty of other 1950s Westerns featured lead characters with single-syllable names that contained a long A vowel sound: Slade, Wade, Cade, Clay, Hayes, Blake, Tate, etc. Of course, as a child, Schaefer was a fan of Zane Gray novels. He was also a big fan of the cinema. When looking for a handle for his hero, he may have simply been inspired both by Zane Gray’s first name and John Wayne’s last name (Schaefer and Wayne were both born in 1907, about six months apart; L’Amour was born in early 1908, less than a year from Wayne’s birth date – quite a twelvemonth for the American Western). In Kung Fu, a 1970s TV Western, actor David Carradine played Kwai Chang Caine, an Asian-American variation on the Shane character. Earlier, in 1966, Carradine had starred in a short-lived TV series called Shane, based on the novel but despised by Schaefer, who told the producers, “Please take my name off that-piece-of-crap show.” (At least he asked politely). Carradine told TV Guide that he perceived Shane as “the first folk-rock cowboy.” That couldn’t have thrilled a fuddy-duddy like Schaefer. The character of Shane was so iconic that The Batman TV series (1966-1968) spoofed it with a cowboy villain named Shame, played by Cliff Robertson. Both Evil Roy Slade, a 1972 TV movie, and Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks’s 1974 theatrical release, feature Old West gunslingers trying to reform, and appear to have been conceived, at least in part, as spoofs of Shane. Clint Eastwood’s 1985 film Pale Rider was partially inspired by Shane, as was James Mangold’s 2017 film Logan, which directly references it. Plenty of other Eastwood films, from High Plains Drifter to Unforgiven, seem to be in conversation with Shane as well. Ernest Tidyman, who wrote High Plains Drifter, also created the character of Shaft, a bad-ass African-American variation on Shane with a similar-sounding name (although the name Shaft was clearly intended to convey sexual connotations not hinted at in Shane). Sylvester Stallone’s iconic film character Rambo is, like Shane, a wanderer with a violent past (U.S. P.O.W. in Vietnam) who will do anything to protect those he cares about. Though his name sounds nothing like Shane, he first appeared in a 1972 novel by David Morrell called First Blood. In 1951, Schaefer followed up Shane with another slender Western called First Blood, which suggests that Morrell might have been trying to tie his character to Jack Schaefer’s work. Morrell’s opening page bears some resemblance to the opening of Shane. Morrell writes: “His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station at the outskirts of Madison, Kentucky. He had a long heavy beard and…his hand out trying to thumb a ride from a car that was stopped at the pump.” Schaefer writes: “He rode into our valley in the summer of ‘89. I was a kid then, barely topping the backboard of father’s old chuck wagon…In that clear Wyoming air I could see him plainly…There seemed nothing remarkable about him…He was clean shaven and his face was lean and hard…” Both opening pages give us the name of a largely rural state. Both employ the word “kid,” which is ubiquitous in Westerns (an in Sundance, and Billy the). Both reference conveyances of some kind. Both refer to the protagonist’s facial hair (or lack thereof). Neither protagonist strikes the narrator as anything special. Both books would give birth to immensely successful films (in fact Morrell’s book gave birth to an entire franchise of successful films).
Not only were plenty of fictional characters named for Shane, a lot of real-life children were also named for Schaefer’s character. In his introduction to the critical edition of Shane, Marc Simmons writes, “I think it is safe to declare that today the many men and boys (and even a few girls) who are graced with the given name of Shane bear witness to the influence that Schaefer’s hero exerted upon their parents.” I grew up in an Irish-American Catholic family. My oldest sibling, born in 1955, is named Shauna, a feminine variant of Shane/Sean. Had I been born first, I’d have probably been called Shane or Sean. I was educated exclusively in Catholic schools, and I have met a fair number of Baby Boomers named Shane, Sean, Shawn, Shana, and the like. (Curiously, the names Ian and John are also variants of Sean, which means that the star of The Quiet Man and Hondo, as well as the directors of both those films, were all essentially named Shane. Ford, in fact, used to claim, falsely, that his birth name was Sean Alyosius O’Feeny.) By sheer coincidence, the name Shane is scrambled inside the names of at least twenty film characters played by John Wayne, including such iconic roles as Sean Thornton (The Quiet Man), Ethan Edwards (The Searchers), John Bernard Books (The Shootist), John Henry Thomas (The Undefeated), Genghis Khan (The Conqueror), William Tecumseh Sherman (How the West Was Won), Nathan Brittles (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon), Sergeant John Stryker (Sands of Iwo Jima, and a bit of a stretch), and U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn (True Grit, and ditto). It’s almost as if he had been born to play the role and his filmography is screaming in outrage. Even the man’s given name contained a scrambled Shane. (Wayne’s birth certificate identified him as Marion Robert Morrison. But when his parents later decided to name a younger sibling Robert, they changed Marion’s middle name. Some sources say it was changed to Mitchell. Most say it was changed to Michael. Both names provide the H necessary to spell Shane. Garry McNee, in his book In The Footsteps of The Quiet Man, claims that Wayne’s birth name was Robert Michael Morrison, and that his parents added “Marion” to it later on in the vain hope that a wealthy relation with that name might leave his young namesake some money in his will.)
The novel Shane was so ubiquitous by the early 1960s that Arthur C. Clarke included a reference to it in his 1961 sci-fi novel, A Fall of Moondust. Set in the 21st century (like Clarke’s most famous work), the novel details the plight of some tourists trapped in a “dust cruiser” (basically an ocean liner that floats on the ultrafine moon dust Clarke invented for the story) that has sunk beneath the moon’s surface. While awaiting rescue, the crew tries to entertain the passengers by reading from the few books aboard the ship, one of which is “a Harvard Press edition of Shane with scholarly annotations.” Clarke intended it as a snarky indication that literary and scholarly standards will have fallen dramatically by the century we now live in (no one is better at disparaging a disreputable genre of fiction than a practitioner of another, equally disreputable, genre of fiction; you should hear what horror writers have to say about romance novelists – and vice versa). A contemporary version of the joke would probably posit a Harvard Press edition of Fifty Shades of Gray.
But the similarities between Schaefer’s novel and L’Amour’s don’t end with the similarity of the names Shane and Lane. Both books are about a gunman who wanders into the orbit of a small family – wife, husband, young son – trying to eke out an existence in a hostile territory and each protagonist has a profound affect on the family he provides protection for. When Shane first arrives at the Starrett household, he helps Joe Starrett chop up a large tree stump. When Hondo Lane first arrives at the Lowe homestead, he helps Angie Lowe chop some wood. When Marian Starrett first meets Shane, she says, “I’ve been waiting for an excuse to try a deep-dish apple pie I’ve heard tell of.” And then bakes the pie for the occasion. On the same page she says to Shane, “I’m fair bubbling with questions about what the women are wearing back in civilization. You know, hats and such. You’re the kind of man would notice them.”
In Hondo, when a Cavalry lieutenant named McKay shows up at the Lowe residence, L’Amour writes:
When they had finished Angie got up and took down an apple pie and started to cut it, then she turned. “Hondo, would you like to ask the Lieutenant to join us for pie and coffee? I’m sure he’d like it.”
On the same page, we’re told:
Lieutenant McKay might know little of Indian fighting, but he understood the things a lonely woman wants to know. He talked briefly of things at the post, then of what women were wearing in Washington, New York, and Richmond.
L’Amour didn’t get that scene from Grant’s screenplay because it isn’t in the film. Although he often claimed he never read anyone else’s Westerns, he was almost certainly lying about that. It seems likely that he had a copy of Shane nearby as he novelized Hondo. In Shane, one character says, “I’ll bet Fletcher feels he got aholt of a bear by the tail and it’d be nice to be able to let go.” At one point in L’Amour’s novel, Hondo says, “Indians got a story about a hunter who chased a puma until he caught him. Then it was the other way around.” The line about the bear appears in Schaefer’s novel but not in the film version of Shane. The puma line appears in both John Edward Grant’s screenplay and in L’Amour’s novelization.
This is not to suggest that L’Amour (or James Edward Grant) plagiarized Schaefer. He most certainly did not. For one thing, Hondo is set around 1870, when the Indian Wars were still red hot and white families living west of the Mississippi still faced the serious threat of Indian attacks (as did Indian families from white soldiers). The Lowe family lives in Southeast Arizona (still more than forty years away from statehood) and has kept its small ranch in tact only because of the forbearance of a local Apache leader named Vittoro (always pronounced “Vittorio” in the film, for some reason), who has declared their land off limits to his fellow tribesmen. But, because Angie Lowe’s feckless husband, Ed, hasn’t been seen in nearly a year, Vittoro believes it may soon be time to declare Ed dead and then force Angie to marry an Apache, bringing her and her son – and their land – into tribal hands. Hondo shows up at a critical time for Angie Lowe. She doesn’t wish to marry an Indian, her son Johnny desperately needs a father figure, and she can no longer manage to run the ranch by herself. Hondo spends a day or two helping out on the Lowe property, and in the process he becomes enamored of both Angie and Johnny. Alas, as an occasional dispatch rider for the U.S. Army, Hondo is eventually required to leave the ranch for several weeks. And while he is away he runs into Ed Lowe, still very much alive and not at all pleased to learn that Hondo has recently been living on his ranch and looking after the wife and son he abandoned. Hondo realizes that he and Ed are headed for a showdown from which only one man is likely to come out alive. (Curiously, in one of his final films, 1973’s The Train Robbers, Wayne would again play a character named Lane who comes to the rescue of a widow named Mrs. Lowe, although the story is not otherwise connected with Hondo.)
If Hondo was influenced by Shane then it couldn’t help also being influenced by The Quiet Man. But L’Amour and Grant seem to have been well acquainted with the Maurice Walsh story and to have incorporated parts of it into Hondo. There are no dogs and no fishing in the novel Shane (though there is a dog of some importance in the film). But both Paddy Bawn and Hondo Lane are fond of fishing and are devoted to their pet dogs. What’s more, both L’Amour and Walsh seem much more interested in horses than was Jack Schaefer, who rarely describes any of them. Also, in Green Rushes, Walsh writes: “Only one man of us insisted on wearing a bowler hat: Matt Tobin, the thresher; and he wore it because, he said, it brought him luck. It had two bullet holes through it.” In the short story “The Gift of Cochise,” L’Amour, echoing Walsh, writes, “Lane’s jeans grew ragged. Two bullet holes were added to the old black hat.”
L’Amour’s 1960 novel Flint is further evidence that he was familiar with Walsh’s The Quiet Man. It includes a protagonist, Flint, who has returned to the land of his birth (New Mexico) after achieving some success in New York City (like the Quiet Man). Here he runs up against a villainous and wealthy landowner, named Baldwin, who is big and very handy with his fists, and who owes him five thousand dollars. Baldwin makes several very public efforts to humiliate and destroy Flint but cannot seem to dispose of him once and for all. In the end, the story comes down to a public fistfight between Flint, who possesses a lot of finesse, and Baldwin, who possesses a lot of power. The fight goes on and on for pages, but in the end, as in The Quiet Man, the smaller man wins the fight, the bigger man reluctantly pays what he owes, and the hero walks away with his beloved on his arm. Some of the descriptive details are the same, and the dialog sounds vaguely Irish – “With your fists you’re an honest man, and I’ll take your check. You’ll be wanting to write it before train time.”
Maurice Walsh’s Green Rushes is essentially a war novel set during the War for Irish Independence. Hondo is a war novel set during the Apache Wars. And Shane is a war novel set during the Johnson County War. And that is why the films Shane and Hondo seem to capture the spirit of Walsh’s book better than John Ford’s film. And yet I still believe that L’Amour’s novelization is better than either of those films.
Until the publication of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove in 1985, Shane was largely perceived as the definitive American Western. On the blog Saddle Bums Western Review, Western novelist Richard S. Wheeler calls it “easily the most famous of western novels, and the one that made the most history…It became the watershed novel that changed western fiction into men’s literature featuring the gunman hero. Its success was so phenomenal that publishers thereafter wanted gunman stories and little else.” Throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s Shane sat atop almost every list of the best western novels ever written. I can only imagine that this must have chapped Louis L’Amour’s fanny something awful. It sure chaps mine.
As entertaining as it is, Shane is less a Western than it is a crime novel in a historical setting. When he wrote the novel, Schaefer had never been west of his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. A good deal of his time had been spent in New York City, where, for awhile, he was a postgraduate student at Columbia (he dropped out when his advisors wouldn’t let him write a masters thesis on cinema, which they considered a frivolous topic). Schaefer’s lack of firsthand experience in the West is on full display in Shane (later on he would move to a ranch in New Mexico and his Western fiction would become more authentic; though he never said so, he probably also learned a great deal from reading Louis L’Amour books). In addition to being a variation on The Quiet Man, Shane is a book born of Schaefer’s love of Zane Gray novels and Hollywood movies. He originally titled the story “The Man From Nowhere,” which is appropriate, because the West he describes in Shane doesn’t seem to be any specific place; rather the story appears to be set on a Hollywood studio’s Western back lot. Hondo, on the other hand, is positively steeped in Western detail. Schaefer rarely bothers to describe any particular horse, probably because he wasn’t much familiar with the various types. But L’Amour knew all about horses. He knew that the Comanche Indians preferred pintos, believing that the striking coloring of the horses would bring them good medicine. Less knowledgeable Western writers have their characters refer to these horses as “paints,” but L’Amour knew that that term came later. For the same reason, his cowboys refer to quarter horses as steeldusts, which is what they were called in the Old West. Hondo, we are told, rides a “lineback,” a type of dun-colored horse that features a dark stripe down its back. He rides this type of horse because “the lineback’s dun color shaded into the desert as did his own clothing.” L’Amour also tells us that Hondo “wore nothing that gleamed,” because he didn’t want the glint of the sun to strike a bright belt buckle or hat ornament and give away his location to his enemies. Shane rides into town wearing a ridiculous all-black outfit, like the villain in a Hollywood film. Young Bob Starrett, who narrates the story, says on the novel’s opening page, “In that clear Wyoming air I could see him plainly, though he was still miles away.” Later, Bob mentions “the single flash of white, the outer ivory plate on the grip of the gun, showing sharp and distinct against the dark material of the trousers.” Louis must have hooted at that. No Western gunman who crossed the dun-colored plains or sea-green pasture lands of the West in black silk clothing at midday, and flashing a gleam of ivory from his gun handle, would live long enough to have much of a career as a gunfighter. Sure, the Indian Wars were largely over by 1889, but if you had any outstanding enemies – and what gunfighter didn’t? – you learned to make yourself as invisible as possible when you traveled. In fact, L’Amour seems to be talking directly to Schaefer when, in Hondo, he writes: “Nobody but a fool or a tenderfoot wears bright, shiny stuff on his clothes. Only a fool would ride a white horse. See it too far off. That bright, shiny stuff is for sissies, townfolk. You wear it out here and some Injun see you ten mile off by sun reflectin’. You’d lose your hair mighty quick.”
City slickers like myself have always been attracted to L’Amour’s novels by the authentic Western details. They give us a sense of traveling back in time. In Hondo alone I learned a wide array of facts about the life of a Western outdoorsman of the nineteenth century:
Wild game will not step on fallen branches. Neither would an Indian. Only a horse, a cow, or a white man would be so foolish.
***
“Was I you, I’d walk on the sunny side of that rock. When it’s hot the snake will be in the shade, when it’s cold he’ll be in the sun.”
***
“It’s a Gambel’s quail, Johnny. Drinks a lot, so you never find him too far from water. Thing to remember.”
***
Johnny straightened in his saddle and peered at the tracks. “What are they?”
“Wolf. Bigger than a coyote.”
“Maybe it was a dog.”
“No. Dog walks right up to something. A wolf is suspicious. He circles around, stops, smells, smells the air. Wolf’s more careful.”
***
“Bees can take you to water. Need water, an’ they go often. So you watch where they go.”
***
“Man walking in tall grass, he kicks the grass away from him in the direction he’s travelin’. Horse or cow, their hooves have a circular, swinging motion, so they knock the grass down and back. With them it points in the direction they come from.”
None of that information appears in Grant’s screenplay or John Farrow’s film version of Hondo. Before I read Hondo, I thought cowboys cut fringe into their buckskin coats for ornamentation. But, according to L’Amour, that has nothing to do with it. The buckskin fringe helps the coat shed water more quickly, because it shakes as the cowboy walks or rides. It also provides him with a ready supply of leather thongs he can cut free in an instant, in case he needs to tie a splint to a broken finger, or string together some fish by the gills. None of this information is in the film, but L’Amour’s novelization is full of such cowboy lore. In the aforementioned novel Flint, a character named Kettleman is hiding out after dark in a New Mexico wilderness area when a stranger on horseback calls out to him. Kettleman knows that the stranger cannot have possibly seen him, so he makes no answer, hoping the stranger will figure he is mistaken and ride on. But the stranger sits still and keeps talking to the unseen Kettleman, explaining how he knows that someone must be there.
“The horse,” the soft drawl continued, “is a good night horse. Broke him from a wild bunch, and he’s worth his weight in gold to a night-riding man. He spotted you first off. If you’d been a horse he would have whinnied, if you’d been a cow-critter he would have cut out after you, and he’d shy from a bear or a lion, so you’ve got to be a man.” The rider paused. “Something different about you, too. I can tell that by his attitude.”
Later in Flint, L’Amour writes of a man being hunted by a killer: “He must remain near the horses, for their perceptions were quicker than his, and their reactions could be a warning.”
Cleveland-native Schaefer tries to put some cowboy wisdom into Shane’s mouth, but it mostly sounds like Hollywood hokum:
“A man who watches what’s going on around him will make his mark.”
***
“Take care of a horse, Bob, and it will take care of you.”
Alas, Schaefer was the kind of literary man whom the east coast book critics were trained to identify and appreciate. He had been educated at an elite university (Oberlin), studied in New York, and worked as a journalist for the United Press syndicate, a mainstay of mainstream newspapers. His father had been a well-off attorney and a friend of Carl Sandberg. Jack Schaefer had worked for the Baltimore Sun and the New Haven Journal-Courier before turning to fiction writing. One reviewer of Shane wrote, “That Schaefer could turn out such a Western before he ever saw the West is a tribute to his dogged research, devotion to facts, and storytelling ability, all honed by his newspaper work.” Actually, all it took was a devotion to cowboy movies.
L’Amour, on the other hand, tended to get the bum’s rush from book reviewers, when they bothered to notice him at all. His formal education ended when he was fifteen years old. His family fell on hard times and he spent the next twenty or so years of his life as a cattle skinner, lumberjack, mine assessor, circus hand, merchant marine, soldier in World War II, and writer of pulp short stories. Until the 1980s, almost all of his books were published as paperback originals, a type of book usually ignored by reviewers and academics alike. According to L’Amour’s biographer Robert Phillips, “He was quick to dismiss the New York Intellectual Establishment, which he did all his life. This attitude probably was due to the fact that his books rarely were reviewed or taken seriously by the critics until near the end of his life. He often railed against the incestuousness of [New York intellectuals] living in the same buildings and going to the same parties. He would contrast one such critic, arising with a hangover in the morning, and looking at himself pale-faced in the mirror, and wondering what he was going to do next, with people who knew what they were going to do next. They were the doers of this world, and he wrote for the people who made things happen, not the effete who merely stood around and commented upon it. He would agree with the novelist Norman Mailer, who defined critics as ‘eunuchs at a gang-bang.’ Perhaps thinking of novelist John Updike, whose Couples had made a big splash, L’Amour said critics praised books as literature when all they were about was what a couple did in bed, while his books were dismissed when they traced the opening up of an entire continent.”
It was bad enough when L’Amour saw the press fawning over a serious mainstream novelist like Updike, but it must have stung even more when the press fawned over the work of a Cleveland-born greenhorn like Schaefer while ignoring the work of a true son of the golden West like himself just because the former’s books were brought out in hardcover by prestigious publishing houses while the latter’s work was released in a cheap paperback format by Gold Medal Books. If the press gave points for authenticity, for the ability to capture the lived experience of the Old West on paper, Hondo would have been celebrated in publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, and Shane would be recognized as the movie fodder it so obviously was.
L’Amour’s novels seemed to speak particularly to American men born in the 1940s, men who had been raised on the panoramic Western films of the 1950s and on early black-and-white television series such as Death Valley Days and Rawhide. Half of the men born in the 1940s were members of the so-called Silent Generation, which means that, in a manner of speaking, they were quiet men. Later in the 1960s, as the Vietnam War intensified, many of these men found solace in the Old West while fighting in the Far East. As Robert Phillips writes, “During the late 1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War, Louis L’Amour realized his books were giving American GIs a sense of dignity and pride even as they were caught up in that conflict. This realization came when he received over four hundred letters from servicemen, who said in various ways that they found relief from daily cynicism in his books and stories. One young man, a writer named Steve Mason, sent L’Amour a volume of his own poetry. He inscribed it as follows:
‘For Louis L’Amour,
Because on nights I thought would be my last, I did not write letters home or say my prayers. I simply read a Louis L’Amour, and daybreak always found me ready and hopeful. Such is your wisdom and your courage. Yours is the most human of hearts. Thanks for being who you are.’”
The film The Quiet Man celebrates its seventieth anniversary this August. If you want to watch it in order to commemorate its release back in August of 1952, you can find it on a variety of streaming services. But if you want to watch a film that celebrates the true spirit of Maurice Walsh’s The Quiet Man, I suggest that you stream Shane, or Hondo, or one of the hundreds of other violent Western films that it inspired. You might also want to seek out a copy of Green Rushes, but it is so steeped in its specific time and place that it can be a tough go for anyone not familiar with the milieu – which probably explains why, despite the popularity of the film, the novel remains fairly obscure. If you’d like a more accessible book in the same vein, get your hands on a cheap copy of Louis L’Amour’s Hondo and spend a few hours devouring its contents. Nobody ever wrote about the near impossibility, for a fighting man, of swearing off violence forever better than old Louis.