Comstock Lode – Louis L'Amour, 1981 ★★★★

L'Amour Goes Long, Successfully

Walking steady to face down a dangerous hombre, sharing coffee under the stars with people happy to take a bullet for you; catching up with a girl from your past who turns out both beautiful and fascinated by you: Reading this made me feel like a 12-year-old. Comstock Lode is pure escapism, and I lapped up every page.

The novel presents familiar territory for legendary Western author Louis L’Amour: Val Trevallion comes to the American West from Cornwall, England with his parents, who seek their fortune in an untamed land.

They find tragedy instead, from a greedy group of “drifting scum” tempted by a chance at free liquor and rape. Egging them on was a mysterious character who took advantage of the attack by making off with some gold coins the Trevallions had carried.

“I’m going to kill them,” Val vows. “I am going to kill every one of them.”

Grown to manhood, Val arrives in Virginia City, Nevada just as it becomes the epicenter for the exploitation of a silver deposit which will go down in history as the Comstock Lode. Val carries with him ample ability and a desire for revenge that waxes and wanes with every member of that drifter gang he catches:

“He had come to find a man...or men. He had come to kill...They were not miners, they were wolves, and they would flock to this place. And he would be waiting. The trouble was, he no longer wanted to kill.”

L’Amour was averaging two novels a year when this was published in 1981. Usually these were slim paperbacks sold in hotel gift shops and airports, around 200 pages in length, meant for simple entertainment on a lazy afternoon. Comstock Lode weighs in at twice that, and shows a great deal of care, more in the plotting than the actual writing, but in both departments. There’s ambition here unusual for L’Amour.

You get here the familiar L’Amour theme; that of a sturdy individual of high moral fiber challenged by nature and evil men. The basic story is straightforward that way, in line with the other books L’Amour put out so profitably. Yet there’s a complexity to the way this novel is laid out.

L’Amour presents a vast panorama of characters, employing Virginia City and its environs as a snakepit of greed that brings out the worst in people. A Mad Max vibe is strong here. As usual with L’Amour, there are bad guys and good guys, with pretty clear lines separating them, but this time the author allows for more grey shadings in the various characterizations, allowing for more ambiguity. The many secondary characters come off like real free agents rather than just random guns awaiting a chance to rally around the main hero.

Will Crockett is one of the main figures in the story; he has a large mine he is trying to make pay and tries unsuccessfully for a while to enlist Trevellion’s help, knowing Trevellion’s abilities in that department. Crockett’s good people, but Trevellion doesn’t care for the partner he took on, a silent, ominous fellow named Hesketh. He takes a pass, but maintains a friendly relationship.

“I may not even stay,” Trevellion explains. “If I do stay, I’d rather have a place of my own that I can work when I wish. You see, Crockett, I am probably the only man on the lode who doesn’t want to get rich.”

Then there’s Tapley, an Arkansas man who introduces himself to Trevellion with a handshake which is all the two need to take their measure of one another and decide they can be friends.

“A lean, stoop-shouldered man who had lived his life along the ragged edge of poverty, asking nothing of God or man but freedom to make his way,” is L’Amour’s description of “Tap.” “He would always be where he was most needed because he was that kind of man, and he could probably shoot the head off a turkey at two hundred yards with that old rifle.”

Some of the characters we meet seeking their fortune aren’t mine workers at all, but work the Lode in other ways. This encompasses plenty of the lowlife element, various gunslingers and bushwhackers with whom Val must tangle; but also saloon keepers, hotel managers, and Melissa Turney, abandoned by her bravo boyfriend after a bit of gunplay. Melissa, it turns out, can bake real well. Trevellion suggests she turn this in her favor by opening up a bakery in Virginia City. Miners have appetites, he points out. Her restaurant becomes a community hub, and a profitable business.

You think L’Amour will use this angle to develop a love interest for Trevellion, but he’s playing a deeper game. The love interest in the story turns out to be another businesswoman, an actress named Grita Redaway who first knew Val when he was still a boy, riding a wagon train west. Now in charge of her own theatrical troupe, she heads out to Virginia City on business that, unknown to her, will connect up to that shared past.

The book does get a bit pat in places, dropping in an occasional annoying “coincidence” that just happens to put Val at the center of a major plot point. Yet it is on the whole imaginative and crafty. Even the Grita angle is well-turned, given you can see it coming a mile off. L’Amour is usually a good story-teller, but the narrative is both crisper and smarter this time out, even if he does bite off a lot more than usual.

A group of miners at the Comstock Lode during its 1880s heyday. Louis L'Amour imagines them as a mixture of good-hearted tough guys and nastier characters in need of correction. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Lode

The business of mining is central to the novel; L’Amour really draws this out with some fine technical writing to explain various ways people tried to draw riches from the ground. There’s placer mining, which is simply pulling gravel from river beds and loose ground and trying to find enough ore among the debris to make it worthwhile. Trevallion starts out with that, then soon graduates to dig out his own piece of ground, using his Cornish-bred knowledge of the craft to dope out where the good ore is. “Single-jack” mining, L’Amour calls it, meaning the digger uses a small jackhammer wielded with one hand. Of course, this takes a lot of strength and know-how, which Val has in spades.

We get details on the different types of deep mining, too; winzes and raises, which involve digging down and digging up respectively depending on which direction a promising vein of ore is found. One of the major plot points involves an attempt to defraud a mine owner by keeping quiet about valuable ore findings, putting the owner on the wrong scent and devaluing the mine until the owner believes it worthless and gives up.

“Everybody hopes to strike it rich, many of them believe they have, others are con men just looking for a gullible newcomer to whom they can sell their claim or a piece of one,” Trevellion is told en route to Virginia City. “Everybody has ‘feet’ to sell, and most of it ain’t worth the price of a Digger Injun’s breakfast.”

Villains can be a problem for L’Amour in my experience reading him. Sometimes they aren’t all rotten, but usually they are, which is what you get here. That said, the story isn’t so simple. The main villain is Hesketh, somewhat simple in his baseness and greed, yet a complexity beneath makes him interesting. He is a sociopath with a need to be on top of things, the kind of man who wants to be seen enjoying a meal while others carry out his dark orders. He works all sorts of angles to serve his ends, with a certain logic that earns your respect. Hesketh doesn’t work alone, of course; there are plenty of other varmints who work with him who are pretty base characters. L’Amour juggles them all with aplomb.

Val does his part to clean house, but others lend a hand, too. One of the more enjoyable detours from the main story regards the fate of Sam Brown, an outlaw who hasn’t come to terms with the fact law and order has put up stakes on his turf. It’s a fine little story on its own, in which Val and the other main actors in our story take the role of interested spectators while a cool sheriff takes Brown on in an amusing standoff involving no gunplay.

An Amazon reviewer put it best: “Easier than reading.” L’Amour makes it easy, anyway, and you will enjoy this more leisurely Western excursion of his. It reminded me why I like reading L’Amour even as it raised the bar for future novels of his I encounter.