We have nearly completed our review of the works that Louis L’Amour wrote about Lance Kilkenny, but one last essay is in order. While the Sackett saga rightly gets the most attention in the Louis L’Amour canon, Kilkenny, as an individual character, gets more ink than any Sackett, with the possible exception of the formidable Tell Sackett. Thus, attention must be paid.
Because the Kilkenny stories follow a loose chronology and involve several repeating characters, it is useful to set out, in one place, an overview of the timeline..
Order of Authorship
We start with the order in which L’Amour published the stories:
— The Rider of Lost Creek (1947 version). L’Amour wrote the original, novella-length version of The Rider of Lost Creek in 1947, when he was thirty-nine years old, under the pen name Jim Mayo, for West magazine.
— A Man Called Trent (1947). As with The Rider of Lost Creek, L’Amour write this story as a novella-length piece for West magazine under the name Jim Mayo, published in December 1947. He later re-wrote it as The Mountain Valley War in 1978.
— Kilkenny (1954). L’Amour wrote Kilkenny just a year after he had his breakout success with Hondo in 1953.
— The Rider of Lost Creek (1976 version). In 1976 L’Amour re-wrote The Rider of Lost Creek as a full-length novel. The timing of the re-write is probably not coincidental: the copyright on the original would have belonged to West magazine, but it would have lapsed after twenty-eight years unless renewed. If the copyright was not renewed, then the story would have fallen into the public domain sometime in 1975 and L’Amour (or anyone else, for that matter) could have used the material without need for permission from the original copyright holder.
— The Mountain Valley War (1978). In 1978 L’Amour re-wrote A Man Called Trent, and renamed it The Mountain Valley War, and published it as a stand-alone novel.
— Monument Rock (1997), discussed herein. As far as I can tell, this novella-length story was first published posthumously by L’Amour’s estate.
— A Gun for Kilkenny and West of Dodge, discussed herein. These are two short stories about Kilkenny, again published, as far as I can tell, after the author’s death. It’s entirely plausible, though, that L’Amour might have dashed them off for a pulp magazine, perhaps under a pen name, before he achieved success as a novelist under his own name.
Kilkenny’s Timeline
Although L’Amour published the Kilkenny stories in the order noted above, if we want to read them in the order of Kilkenny’s fictional life, we need to do so as follows:
— A Gun for Kilkenny and West of Dodge. These stories could occur at any time before the action in Kilkenny, but we put them at the beginning of the timeline for two reasons. First, because they evoke, and add to, the mystique of Kilkenny as an elusive but deadly gunfighter who rescues the underdog then rides out of town. And second, because the stories are not in any way dependent upon the events and characters from the Kilkenny novels, which suggests that they occurred earlier.
— The Rider of Lost Creek. The story takes place on the Texas-Mexico border. In our essay on this book, we loosely placed the action as occurring somewhere between 1877 and 1880, though L’Amour’s historical references in the book are mutually inconsistent, offering possibilities as early as 1871 and as late as 1881.
— Monument Rock. There is nothing in this book to tie the action to any historical date, but, given the relationships among the characters, it clearly must occur in the interval between The Rider of Lost Creek and Kilkenny.
— The Mountain Valley War. As with Monument Rock, the action takes place between The Rider of Lost Creek and Kilkenny.
— Kilkenny. Two or three years after the action in The Rider of Lost Creek, Kilkenny settles down for good with the love of his life, Nita Riordan, in southeastern Utah.
With these timelines in mind, we now turn to the remaining stories in the Kilkenny saga.
Monument Rock
If you’re a die-hard Kilkenny fan, then you will feel compelled to track down this novella, published in 1998 by L’Amour’s estate. Otherwise, you can skip it. It’s not clear whether L’Amour had completed Monument Rock before he died, or for that matter whether he had set it aside as not worth finishing. Heirs, agents, and publishers plunder the archives of dead writers and musicians for “lost manuscripts” and “lost recordings,” then release them for the sake of a quick buck, dressing the process up as scholarship, or respect for the fans, etc. Being dead, the creator has no say in the matter, and we often wonder whether he or she would have approved. I cannot think of a single example where a posthumous work ranked with the best of the works published when the artist was alive, except for a wonderful posthumous nocturne by Frederic Chopin. Certainly, Monument Rock is no match for L’Amour’s best. If someone can show that Monument Rock was published in L’Amour’s lifetime, I will stand corrected on the facts, but it would not change my opinion of the writing.
In Monument Rock, a young woman named Lona Markham is set to come into her inheritance of a ranch in New Mexico. Lona has been raised by a man who claims to be her father, but who is actually a crook named Poke Dunning. This improbable set up is explained by a backstory in which Lona’s mother dies when Lona is four, and her father brings Lona to live on the ranch when she is five. En route, Poke Dunning kills Lona’s father and then sends her away to school in the East. With Lona away, Dunning impersonates the murdered Markham for a dozen years or so, and uses the ranch as a safe house and staging ground for outlaws. Now Lona is back, and the game is up. Poke is trying to keep the charade going, and has plans is to marry Lona off to one of his confederates, a heavy named Mailer. Mailer will then become the legal owner of the ranch because of archaic patriarchal property laws, after which Dunning and Mailer can dispossess or kill Lona and split the loot. The plot is such rubbish that I didn’t bother to check the 19th century laws of New Mexico on such matters, and I doubt L’Amour did either.
Lurking around the hills overlooking the ranch is a ghost-like figure in black, who is of course Kilkenny. Lona’s real father had helped Kilkenny in some way when he was a kid, and Kilkenny was fond of Lona’s long-deceased mother. Not only is Kilkenny himself hovering around, but so is the rest of his retinue. Nita Riordan is running a saloon in the nearby town of Salt Creek, with the help of Jaime Brigo and Cain Brockman, both Kilkenny regulars. Rusty Gates (whom we met in The Rider of Lost Creek) is also there, and gets himself hired by Poke Dunning as a ranch hand so that Kilkenny has someone on the inside.
Things get complicated when Mailer decides he’ll just take the whole ranch, and cut Dunning out of the deal. Being thoroughly despicable and also over-reaching, Mailer figures on moving in on Nita Riordan, too. This gets him a solid beating by Kilkenny. Mailer then takes a few of his cronies a day’s ride to the south and west to rob the bank in Aztec Crossing. That ends badly; the townsfolk shoot up the gang then set off in pursuit with a very determined posse. (Says their leader: “This is one trail I ain’t leaving until those hombres stretch hemp.”) One by one the bad guys get what they have coming, until there’s no one left but Mailer. Kilkenny hunts him down and kills him back in the hills, though he catches some lead himself in the process. The story ends with Kilkenny and Nita planning to marry and move to California, which of course never happens.
Plot holes, improbabilities, and incongruities leap out everywhere. No suspension of disbelief can get us comfortable with Lona’s backstory. Five-year-olds are not stupid, and surely Lona would have asked questions of Dunning such as “You’re not my real father. What happened to him?” Then there’s Nita’s age, already a subject of exasperation in the other Kilkenny works. In Monument Rock we hear that “She had known Kilkenny now for more than three years.” Nita met Kilkenny in The Rider of Lost Creek, and she was twenty-four in that book, so she must be about twenty-seven in Monument Rock, right? And yet, we told that she is “just beyond thirty.” It’s incredibly sloppy. Could it be that L’Amour’s heirs were as lazy with their editing as the great writer was himself?
It’s best to read Monument Rock as an out-take, rather than a final product and equal participant in the Kilkenny series. It adds nothing to the overall saga, and contains several discrepancies that make it impossible to fit into the already-confusing Kilkenny timeline.
The Short Stories
One can also find two short stories about Kilkenny in volumes published by L’Amour’s estate after his death. They would not be worth mentioning, were it not for a desire to be thorough with Lance Kilkenny, now that we’ve come this far.
In A Gun for Kilkenny (1998), a small-time crook buffalos a town for a while by pretending to be Kilkenny. He meets his end when the real Kilkenny rides in to straighten things out and rescue his reputation. Although it plays on Kilkenny’s reputation, it’s a stand-alone story that could have been about any other notorious gunfighter.
In West of Dodge (date unknown), Kilkenny rides in to town, foils a nasty plot, guns down the bad guy, and rides on. Again, it could be a story about any gunslinger, but L’Amour decided for whatever reason to use Kilkenny.
And thus we end our analysis of Louis L’Amour’s Kilkenny works.
Comentários