Customer Reviews

Heller with a Gun: A Novel

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Easily in my top ten L'amours! The story may sound familiar - innocents led astray by sweettalking baddies and hero to the rescue. Thinking about it it seems to fuse "Westward the tide" and "The empty land"! But still the way L'amour develops the story - his dark portrayal of the hero - the way he builds the relationships between the characters - the action scenes - the not-so unpredictable twist in the end (quite like "The Empty Land"), give the work its individuality that will remain in your memory for a while. It still is in mine after years!

This novel takes you from a warm fire to the icy wastes and carries you on a wild flight to survive the elements and overcome the threat to innocent travellers. A excellent adventure with a unexpected ending.

Haven't read many books by L'Amour, but what I have read, I've enjoyed. This was fast-paced, with all the usual elements - gunfights, Indians, intrigue, romance, survival - all tied together in a good story.
Nice twist at the end.
Not really sure where the name Heller comes from though??

Why did Louis L'Amour have to shoehorn a schmaltzy romance into what could have been a lean, mean Western yarn? That infernal love triangle with King Mabry, Tom Healy and Janice Ryan just ground to a halt the momentum of the story and soured the closing quarter of the book, where this long-simmering subplot began boiling over into the primary plot, that of King Mabry escorting a hapless theater troupe up through Wyoming into Montana in a brutal winter, their tracks dogged by a band of greedy gunmen as well as by roving bands of renegade Sioux Indians.

A strength of the story is seeing a seasoned man of the west--King Mabry--saddled with a group of five city-folk from back East. Mabry originally wanted nothing to do with them, meeting them at the Hat Creek Station as he was moseying south and they northwest. But their naivete, Tom Healy's plucking a gold coin from a full pouch in full view of wide-eyed, greedy dry-gulchers, for example, troubled his conscience, knowing they would be easy prey for the hard-bitten men bred by a hard land to hard ways (to paraphrase my copy's cover blurb, pulled from the closing line of Chapter One). And not only Mabry's conscience was stirred--he had an eye for Janice Ryan, one of the singers in the troupe. That coupled with his learning that Andy Barker--a fugitive killer from the Plummer Gang--was hired to lead the two wagons over the wintry expanse, motivates Mabry to follow along and watch for trouble, which invariably arises.

The troupe of tenderfoot thespians is led by Healy, who is also in love with Janice. Doc Guilford is a "charming old windbag," writes L'Amour. A 17-year-old ingenue, Dodie, and an older woman, Maggie, who is stricken with pnuemonia, round out the cast. Each responds differently to the trials and tumults they encounter on the frontier, though Doc and Maggie are window-dressing and relegated to remaining one-dimensional. Dodie moves from the background to the foreground in a well-done work of character development on L'Amour's part, showing how the struggles of the West can tap into and tease out from people strengths and abilities they didn't suspect they possessed. Tom Healy is the book's best example of that. He's a changed man after his escape from the camp and long, cold trudge through the snowstorm following Mabry's tracks. As doubtful as it appeared early in the book, there's now a confidence Healy has mustered what it takes to make it in the West.

An element I always enjoy in L'Amour novels is his opening chapters. Like the pre-credits sequences in the classic James Bond movies, they often have no real connection to the main plot, but set the stage and galvanize the reader for action. This novel features one of the best I've yet read, with Mabry suspecting he's being tracked by a killer that he can't see in the blinding snowstorm. His finding and preparing a shelter and then confirming his suspicions of a pursuer makes for compelling reading. Chapter One could stand alone as a short story.

This is a relatively early novel of L'Amour's, first published in 1955. It caught the attention of Paramount Pictures and was adapted into the 1960 movie Heller in Pink Tights. As is often the case, the movie strays far from the source material. The ludicrous title change alone indicates this movie is less a Western and more a "romantic comedy with slices of Americana," to quote Robert Weinberg in his invaluable book for L'Amour readers, The Louis L'Amour Companion. Weinberg adds that it's "a wonderful film," but that "most of the L'Amour novel disappeared." Top billing went to Anthony Quinn as Tom Healy and Sophia Loren as Angela Rossini (the Italianized Janice Ryan role), with Steve Forrest of later fame on The Baron: The Complete Series and S.W.A.T. - The Complete First Season playing the rechristened "Clint Mabry."

Was I the only reader perplexed to discover no character in the book is named Heller? I kept waiting for this person to show up (with a gun, of course). I looked in vain for the meaning of this term, wondering if it was Irish or theatrical slang. The best I turned up was a dictionary definition of a "heller" as "a reckless person," a description that could be applied to many characters in the book, from those foolhardy enough to oppose Mabry to--in my conclusion--Mabry himself in the final chapter!

A gunfighter with a reputation again is the hero in Louis L'Amour's yarn that plays out in the wilds of Montana in the dead of winter. King Mabry reluctantly aids a theater troupe against bad guys with robbery and murder planned for their victims amid gun fights and Indian attacks. There's also a bit of a romance plot thrown in for good measure, which adds up to a fine western novel by one of America's favorite storytellers.

I LIKE THIS BOOK SO WELL I WENT BACK IN TWO OR THREE PLACES TO MAKE SURE I REMEMBERED EVERYTHING ABOUT DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES OF STORY.

to tell you the truth, i didn't like this book. i am not into the whole "western" books. i had to read it for a project at my school and i thought it was terrible. plain and simple. sorry to all you out there who liked it but u guys r weird!