Flint

Fresh off my first time reading of "The Broken Gun" (see yesterday's post) I decided to go ahead and re-read on old favorite, "Flint" by Louis L'Amour. Let me start by saying that L'Amour always wrote a great story, and always spun a good yarn. His stories are always fun to read, and never overly complicated, just really good stories to sit back, enjoy and pass the time with. His stories also are never boring. As I was discussing with someone one time, there is virtually never a lull in a L'Amour story, and if it seems to be going into a valley, you can rest assured, the hero is only going into the valley to escape the villains or Indians (and no, in L'Amour books the Indians, even the hostile ones, are not always cast as villains) and the bullets or arrows whizzing by overhead keep that from being boring either.

"Flint" has all of that, but something more, you see, "Flint" is also a great work of literature. It may be unheard of by many, lost in the shuffle amongst all the other great books L'Amour wrote, or amongst all the other great books that have been written by other authors, but "Flint" truly is an example of the great American novel.

This story follows a man who is dying of Cancer and leaves the fast paced life of New York City, where his name is feared in the financial sector, of which he is truly a giant, the Donald Trump of his day, though he never went bankrupt... but I digress. Anyway, leaving New York City behind him he returns to the Western land of his youth to die alone, on his own terms, and finds himself in the middle of a range war, and decides to take part on the side of right and justice, and as the other players in this saga soon learn, this man is no tenderfoot.

This is a stellar story, fast paced and fun, and never dull.

One thing that I find very interesting is that, unlike most writers, L'Amour never used an outline or planned his stories in advance. He simply sat in front of his typewriter and hammered out some of the best western stories ever written. In fact, this leads to one of my favorite quotes from L'Amour, "One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter - who was a child at the time - asked me, 'Daddy, why are you writing so fast?' And I replied, 'Because I want to see how the story turns out!'" Of course, this style of writing fits very well with how L'Amour saw himself, "I think of myself in the oral tradition -- as a troubadour, a village taleteller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered -- as a storyteller. A good storyteller." And he was, he really was.