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Reviews Bendigo Shafter. By Louis L’Amour. (New York: Bantam Books, 1979. 324 pages, $2.25, paperback.) Comstock Lode. By Louis L’Amour. (New York: Bantam Books, 1981. 378 pages, $6.95, paperback.) Readers who wish to get a full sense of Louis L’Amour’s productions, for whatever purposes, must inevitably take on his two blockbusters, Bendigo Shafter and Comstock Lode. These two novels, in their separate ways, continue the historical mode that L’Amour launched into with Sackett’s Land, Rivers West, and Fair Blows the Wind, with the exception that the main characters of the later two novels are not members of the Sackett, Talon, or Chantry families. Both are marketed as historical novels rather than as Westerns, and they are both about twice as long as the characteristic tales that flowed from his typewriter in the 1960’s and 1970’s. And Comstock Lode is physically a big book, being as large in paperback as it is in cloth. In their broader features they perpetuate the pattern of all of L’Amour’s fiction: there is a superlative hero who fights through adversity to ensure that the country will be settled and developed properly. Good and evil are clearly distinguishable from one another, and the conflict is resolved unequiv­ ocally through violence. The plot resolution, along with a steady stream of narrative comments, affirms the broadly held values of the mass audience. And in these novels, as in all of L’Amour’s fiction, there is a sprinkling of errors in grammar, sentence structure, and word usage — errors that are overshadowed by a profusion of corpses and a liberal fare of “authentic” historical and geographical detail. In Bendigo Shafter, the titular hero tells his own story of coming to manhood. Wise beyond his tender years, he lavishes upon his reader many mini-sermons about the building of a country; almost innumerable lectures on frontier lore; occasional analogies between the Plains Indians and Arthurian Knights, Bantus, and Europeans; and prophecies about the passing of the Indians and the buffaloes, and about the probability of stellar travel. He is a voracious reader (dwelling chiefly on Blackstone, Plutarch, and Locke), 316 Western American Literature not to mention the successful author of a treatise on mountain lions. When Bendigo goes to New York, Horace Greeley praises the budding writer’s lean prose style, and seeks his wisdom about the future of the West. An excellent pugilist, Ben beats up some New York thugs; a natural gentleman, he is not at a loss for social graces. All of this would be more tolerable if it were not narrated in the first person, a point of view that L’Amour has labored with frequently and without much success. It seems that when the narrator is not serving as the author’s mouthpiece for lectures in history and civilization, he is telling the reader of the many compliments he receives for his strength, good looks, and acute mind. As a youthly narrator, Bendigo Shafter dwindles in comparison with Dickens’ Pip, Twain’s Huck, or Schaefer’s Bob Starrett, even though he is not quite as risible as the narrators of L’Amour’s Rivers West and The Proving Trail. Comstock Lode is a less comprehensive, lessvisionary book than Bendigo Shafter; perhaps also because it is written in the third person, it is more read­ able. In Comstock Lode L’Amour introduces a new set of authentic details, the fruits of I/Amour’s renewed research, as he reworks the melodramatic plot of such novels as Reilly’s Luck and The Proving Trail — the story of a young man who avenges his parents’ death (the two earlier novels had a father and a father figure killed, while in this one L’Amour sets the wheels rolling with two murdered fathers and two violated, murdered mothers). Val Trevallion, like some of L’Amour’s other recent heroes, is an immigrant who soon becomes whole-heartedly American in his devotion to developing the country. He exercises this devotion in the silver mines of Virginia City, Nevada, in 1859-60, and he fulfills the larger purpose of producing the silver that the President will need if he...

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