Introduction
Opening Passage:
He rolled the cigarette in his lips, liking the taste of the tobacco, squinting his eyes against the sun glare. His buckskin shirt, seasoned by sun, rain, and sweat, smelled stale and old. His jeans had long since faded to a neutral color that lost itself against the desert.
He was a big man, wide-shouldered, with the lean, hard-boned face of the desert rider. There was no softness in him. His toughness was ingrained and deep, without cruelty, yet quick, hard, and dangerous. Whatever wells of gentleness might lie within him were guarded and deep. (p. 5)
Summary: Hondo Lane is a dispatch rider for the army, and is making his way across Apache-dominated territory. Technically, the Apache and the United States are under a peace regulated by a treaty, but the Apache are becoming increasingly aggressive because they think the United States is deliberately ignoring the treaty. (The book makes clear that the Apache are in fact right about this.) In trying to evade Apache who are hunting him, and having lost his horse, Hondo comes across a homestead, where he meets Angie Lowe and her son Johnny. Angie says that her husband, Ed Lowe, is up in the hills that day working some cattle, but she gives him water and food, and agrees to sell him a horse. In return, he helps her out with a few chores. Hondo very quickly figures out that Angie is in fact alone; there's a lot of work to do on a homestead, and it is clear that the chores that would usually have been done by a man have either not been done, or been done in very limited and sporadic ways, for a long time; he figures that Ed Lowe was probably killed by Apaches. Angie has difficulty believing this, since the Apaches have always gotten along well with them, and there is a treaty, but, of course, as Hondo points out, this stays true only up to the time that it stops being true. Hondo heads out.
In the meantime in the hills, Company C under Lieutenant Cretyon C. Davis are engaged in a difficult game of cat-and-mouse (with the cat and the mouse roles continually shifting) with the Apaches under the war leader Vittoro. The Apaches have massacred several homesteads, brutally scalping men and women alike; the Apaches are especially brutal to women, we are told, although they are remarkably kind toward and protective of children. In response, Lieutenant Davis hatches a plan to ambush Vittoro. Davis's plan is very clever and succeeds extraordinarily well -- they catch Vittoro's band by surprise and do significant damage to it. What Davis did not account for was that Vittoro had been even more clever, and had managed to hide an entire reserve of allied Apache; they allies attack Company C from the rear, and, hopelessly outnumbered, the entire company is massacred. Hondo comes upon the remains of the battlefield and brings the guidon of the company to the cavalry unit of which they were a part. While there, he meets a mouthy, obnoxious gambler, who likes to pick fights, especially with Hondo; it turns out that he is named Ed Lowe.
Not long after Hondo left, Vittoro and his Apache stop by Angie's homestead. They are inclined to kill her and burn her home, but she is saved by Johnny, who tries to protect his mother by shooting the Apache (named Silva) who is threatening her. He only wings Silva, but the Apache, recall, are quite generous toward children, and a boy willing to fight singlehandedly an entire band of Apache warriors both amuses them and impresses them. Vittoro adopts Johnny into his Apache lodge, putting Angie and Johnny under his protection. But Silva has a grudge, and if Vittoro ever dies, Silva will be back with a vengeance.
I often consider adaptations of books into movies and the like. But this, of course, is an unusual case; there is a movie, Hondo, starring John Wayne, but it is not an adaptation of this novel. Rather, the novel is an adaptation of the movie's screenplay. As is common with novelizations of screenplays, they are very similar, dialogue-wise; L'Amour tightens it a bit, but we get the same lines, more or less. L'Amour, however, takes full advantage of both his primary advantage over a screenplay (the capacity for detailed description) and his primary advantage over a movie (the capacity to follow the thoughts of characters); he does so deliberately enough that it seems clear that he was trying to write a novel better than the movie, coming out at the same time, could be. And while the novel will never be the classic the movies is, he does very well. One of the trademark features of Louis L'Amour's later work, that the landscape is itself a character in the book, is clearly in view here. The Southwestern desert is not a backdrop, it is a player on the stage, and while L'Amour hasn't refined this as much as he later will, it is already done quite well here. Following the thoughts of the characters is, I think, somewhat less successful -- the story is from a screenplay, so everything you really need to know about what the characters are thinking and feeling is already in view. But I think that, apart from the fact that it occasionally comes across as telegraphing what was already obvious, L'Amour does very well in using it to make the characters plausible on the page.
I also read "The Gift of Cochise", L'Amour's short story on which the screenplay had been based. The essentials of the story are there, although structured very differently and with slightly different characters. In the short story, Angie already at the beginning comes under Cochise's protection, for the reason that Angie comes under Vittoro's protection in the movie and novel. Ches in his dispatch duties comes to the cavalry unit, where he meets Ed Lowe; they get along badly here as well, and it leads to Ches killing Ed. Learning that Ed had a wife and two children (Johnny and Jane), he feels guilty about being the reason a woman is left alone in Apache company, becomes obsessed with finding her so that she knows what happened. He gets caught and tortured by the Apaches, but he has Ed Lowe's tintype of Angie, and Cochise recognizes it and brings Ches to Angie (Ches is the gift of Cochise). It works very well as a short story, but I think it has improved greatly on expansion.
Favorite Passage:
For an hour of lonely riding there had been no life upon the desert. The sun was high, and sweat trickled down Hondo's neck, and the body fo the lineback became dark with stain. And before them stretched the vast and rolling plain of sand, rock, and cactus that is the desert of the Southwest.
Here there was no moment of security. Somewhere out there the escaped Apache had joined his friends, and somewhere those hard and tireless desert fighters were moving out, beginning their search for him.
Desert...but a desert strangely alive. Not a dead land, but a land where all life is born with a fire, a thorn, a sting. Yet a strong land, a rich land for the man who knows it. One cannot fight the desert and live. One lives with it, or one dies. One learns its way and its life, and moves with care, and never ceases to be wary, for the desert has traps and tricks for the careless. (p. 102)
Recommendation: Recommended.
****
Louis L'Amour, Hondo, Fawcett Gold Medal Books (New York: 1953).
