Kid Rodelo (1966)

Kid Rodelo is a one of Louis L’Amour’s more forgettable works, dating from 1966 when he was churning them out at the rate of three or four books per year. It has a few good moments, but you get the sense with Kid Rodelo that L’Amour was just going through the motions.

As the novel starts, Dan Rodelo is being released from Territorial Prison in Yuma, Arizona. In the first sentence we learn is that it is really, really hot there, information we are not likely to forget. Throughout the novel L’Amour hammers into us that the Yuma Desert is a killing ground. So, of course, we know from the start that the desert will be the setting for the story to follow.

Although we know the location and setting of Kid Rodelo, we don’t know the year. L’Amour usually tells us outright when his tales occur, or gives us enough clues to make an educated guess, but he gives us very little to work with in Kid Rodelo. We learn that Rodelo rode with the Fifth Cavalry, but that is of no help because there is no mention of where he served or the battles he fought. That legendary regiment’s history stretches from the Civil War, through the Indian Wars, to the Spanish American War, and on into every major war since. A slightly better clue comes from learning that Yuma Territorial prison opened in July 1876. Given that Rodelo has served a one year sentence, we know that the action in Kid Rodelo must occur sometime after 1877.

The plot is highly contrived, so you need to sit up and pay close attention to the first few chapters, especially Chapter One. Lest there be any doubt, we learn on page 4 that Rodelo has finished doing his time in Yuma Territorial for a crime he did not commit. Even as Rodelo walks out, three Yaqui Indians bring in the corpse of an escaped prisoner whom they have hunted down. The dead prisoner is a man named Isacher. Isacher tried to run for the Gulf of California, across the border in Mexico, to meet a ship at Adair Bay, a ship that will stand off shore for fourteen days and pick up anyone who appears during that time and take them to Mazatlan, no questions asked. This information is at once critical to the plot and completely implausible. Think of the two special letters of transit in Casablanca, “signed by General Weygand,” exit visas that “cannot be rescinded, not even questioned.” It’s purely a plot device to get the movie going. Same thing with Isacher’s ship.

With Isacher dead, only one person knows about the boat at Adair Bay, another convict named Tom Badger. We also meet two other cons, a thoroughly nasty character named Joe Harbin, and a weak but crafty fellow named Gopher. Yep, those are their names, Badger and Gopher. L’Amour sometimes gives his characters names that fit their personalities, a technique used by authors going at least as far back as Shakespeare, and used to brilliant effect by Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, among others. L’Amour doesn’t belong in that pantheon, and the names “Badger” and “Gopher” are hardly subtle or clever, but they help us keep track of the characters as we go.

There is one other character we meet in Chapter One who will play a key role, the leader of the Yaqui bounty hunters, who wears a battered cavalry hat and is called, in another unoriginal moniker, “Hat.” Hat gets fifty dollars for every escaped convict he brings in, dead or alive. We may pause to consider the economics of Hat’s occupation, given that Isacher is the only convict who has escaped in the last six months, and that Hat employs between three and and a dozen other Indians to help him hunt them down. Fifty dollars every six months, to be shared among at least four bounty hunters? Tough way to make a living. The information provided on Hat, though, does give us a little more to work with in guessing the year in which Kid Rodelo occurs. We learn that Hat has been hunting down escaped prisoners “for years,” and has captured seventeen so far. This information suggests that Yuma Territorial has been around for at least a few years, which gets us into the 1880s, though it could be later.

L’Amour covers a lot of ground in Chapter One, but there is more to come. A lot more. Kid Rodelo is only about 40,000 words long—barely longer than a novella—and the basic story line is straightforward, but it is weighed down by a heavy load of exposition. Before our characters start plodding through the desert sands, we have to plod through a lot more background information. As it turns out, Rodelo did time for a crime that Joe Harbin committed, robbing a mine payroll worth fifty thousand dollars. Harbin managed to hide the loot before he got caught. Now Harbin is worried that Rodelo will find it and take it for himself. And so the pieces start to come together. Badger knows about the boat in Adair Bay. Harbin knows where the gold is. In Chapter Two they team up and plan to escape from prison, get the gold, make it across the Yuma Desert, and catch the boat to Mazatlan.

And still there is more work for L’Amour before the story can really get under way. In Chapter Three we meet the girl, Nora Paxton. Alas, beyond her name and a bit of information on her back story, we learn nothing about her age, height, eyes, hair, or figure. Nor do she and Rodelo get much action in. At one point he kisses her lightly on the lips, but that’s all. Nora and a couple of hard cases, Jake and Clint, pick up Rodelo on the road and they all go to the ghost town where the gold is hidden. Jake and Clint are heading for the Gulf of California, too, and that’s where Nora wants to go because she hopes to recover a box of family mementos left behind after a shipwreck that killed her parents. That explains Nora’s motivation, though it’s pretty contrived, but there can be no reason at all for Clint and Jake to be headed that way. To the contrary, they are after the gold. Whether they find it or not, there is no way they would then cross the desert to the gulf, because they have no way of knowing about the ship waiting there.

Nora’s two companions find the adobe in the ghost town where the gold is stashed, but they can’t find the gold itself. L’Amour explains that they know about the gold and its general location because Harbin carelessly talked about it to some girl in his past, and the girl passed it on to Jake. All, right, but how does it happen that Clint and Jake are coming for the gold at exactly the same time that Rodelo, Harbin, and Badger are? L’Amour offers no explanation.

Not that it matters. Neither Jake nor Clint survive past Chapter Four, and as far as we can tell their only purpose in the plot is to deliver Nora to the scene. They don’t even find the gold. Harbin and Badger arrive to do that, having picked up Gopher along the way. As they bag up the gold and get ready to leave, Rodelo sneaks in and gets the drop on them. After a bit of parlay, Rodelo joins the party, and, at last, loaded down with gold and after forty pages of exposition, we head across the desert with Rodelo, Nora, Badger, Harbin, and Gopher, with Hat and his posse close behind. Using Google Maps we can follow their trail, more or less. They stop at watering holes at Ravens Butte, Atlas Tinajas, and Papago Wells. All of these are on the map, and the last is the setting for another L’Amour western, Last Stand at Papago Wells (1957). It gets hot, then hotter. They get thirsty, then thirstier. L’Amour describes the area they pass through as a hellscape of sand dunes, craters, lava flows, and cacti. Ironically, the area is now a World Heritage Site known as El Pinacate and and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve.

From this point onward, the story is a predictable slog through the sand. Gopher dies, then Badger, and finally Harbin. Rodelo and Nora catch the boat in the last chapter. Hat survives, but all ten of his confederates are killed, most of them by Rodelo. Thus the body count for Kid Rodelo is sixteen if we include Hat’s posse, Jake and Clint, and a prison guard who dies during the convicts’ escape. There is exactly one female part in the story, played by Nora.

And that about sums it up. There is little left to do but to look for the plot holes, inconsistencies, and discrepancies that can make even a mediocre L’Amour fun to read. We’ve already heard of the necessary but implausible boat that is waiting in Adair Bay, as well as the coincidence that brings Clint and Jake on the scene exactly when we need them to deliver Nora.

Although no one in Kid Rodelo moves like a cat—perhaps L’Amour’s most frequently used cliche—L’Amour trots another one of his favorites. On Page 82, we get this: “Out in the night a coyote sounded, and he listened, but heard no echo. The Indians said that was the way to tell . . . that a man imitating a coyote would also make an echo, but there was something in the timbre of a coyote’s howl that did not echo.” We’ve seen this before: L’Amour claims that an animal’s call will not echo while a man's will in High Lonesome (owl), Killoe (owl, again), and The Man Called Noon (quail). Where L’Amour got this notion we cannot say, but its malarky, and perhaps L’Amour knew it. He practically gives the game away in his next sentence: “Rodelo had never decided whether this was true or not, but it seemed to be, the few times he had put it to the test.”

Here’s another discrepancy. L’Amour tells us in Chapter One that Badger is the only person, other than Isacher himself, who knows about the boat waiting at Adair Bay, writing that Badger “was the escaped prisoner’s only confident (sic).” Yet in Chapter Four Rodelo somehow knows about the boat as well.

Another discrepancy: On Page 62, Rodelo is thinking about what awaits him at the end of the trail: “It would mean a shooting, of course, and he was not the gunman that Joe Harbin was.” Oh, no? In the last chapter, Rodelo outdraws Harbin even though Harbin has a slight edge, and as Harbin bleeds out Rodelo tells him, ”I was a kid outlaw-gunfighter back in Texas.”

And there is this: At one point, out in the desert, Harbin double-crosses Rodelo and leaves him to die without a horse or water. Rodelo spends the rest of that day and the next finding water, and on the third day he catches up with the others on foot. Well and good, but as far as we can tell, only one day passes for Harbin and the rest the gang while Rodelo takes two days to catch up to them. It’s a small but annoying anomaly.

Not so small, and far more annoying, is a giant, gaping plot hole that basically wrecks the whole story. We find out, with only ten pages left in the book, that Rodelo’s goal all along has been to recover the gold and return it to its rightful owners in order to prove his innocence. That’s a decent motivation, but remember back to Chapter Four. There, Rodelo gets the drop on Harbin, Badger, and Gopher just as they find the stash of gold. Why, then, does Rodelo ride off into the desert with them? Why not just tie them up, take them back to prison, and return the gold? We enjoy finding little inconsistencies and discrepancies in L’Amour’s novels, but this is too much. When a plot hole is so large that it swallows the entire story, as this one does, we can only shake our heads in disappointment. Louis, we expect better of you.

And yet, we can still take pleasure at times in Kid Rodelo. L’Amour is a master at describing the landscape. Let us end with a few examples.

The sun was now high overhead, the heat intense. In the brassy sky there was no cloud, only the sun whose rays seemed to blend into one great searing blast. The floor of the desert was hot beyond belief, and their horses plodded wearily, hopelessly, into the dead stillness. Far off to the south a dust devil sprang up, racing wildly across the flat desert floor.

He could see nothing but dancing heat waves, shimmering their watery veil across the distance.

The mirages vanished, and the mountains far off to the south turned blue, then purple. The sun declined, the shadows grew long, and canyons bulged with darkness, ominous and threatening. The sky was streaked with flame; a few scattered clouds were edged with gold.

Postscript: The recent re-issue of Kid Rodelo has additional material provided by L’Amour’s son, Beau, who has been mining the archives. There we learn that Kid Rodelo started out as a short story, Desperate Men, which L’Amour shopped without success starting in 1950. Years later the story was optioned by Hollywood and L’Amour provided additional material for the scriptwriters, who turned it into a B Grade movie in 1966 with the title Kid Rodelo—a title that L’Amour apparently disliked. According to Beau L’Amour, his father then created a full novelization of the story, incorporating most of the elements from the movie, giving us the novel we know. Perhaps L’Amour hoped that lightning would strike twice: a similar maneuver gave his career a big boost when he published Hondo concurrently with the release of the movie. However, neither the movie nor the novel Kid Rodelo enjoyed the level of success that Hondo achieved. Given this provenance, one might argue that we are being unduly hard on L’Amour for the plot holes in Kid Rodelo, but L’Amour retained full control over the final product, and I therefore maintain that he must be held responsible for both the good and the bad in the book.

Second Postscript: Like many other fans of Casablanca, I always thought Ugarte said the special letters of transit were signed by "General de Gaulle," but a convincing case can be made for "Weygand." Google it for yourself.