The Man Called Noon (1970)

With The Man Called Noon, Louis L’Amour employs a classic storytelling device. The protagonist wakes up with amnesia, and we join him as he seeks the answers to the questions “Who am I and how did I get here?” One of the rules of this narrative structure is that, after many twists and turns, the protagonist and the reader figure it all out, usually at the about the same time. Pulling off such a tale requires tight plotting and careful construction. Alas, for all his storytelling gifts, these are not L’Amour’s strengths. Those hoping for a great Louis L’Amour should look elsewhere. Those of us who are die-hard L’Amour fans can read The Man Called Noon with an indulgent shrug and move on.

We always like to know where L’Amour places his stories, and there are three maps at the beginning of The Man Called Noon which are crucial for following the events. The plot revolves around the Rafter D Ranch and its owner, the lovely Fan Davidge. The largest of the maps shows the watershed of the San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado, and if you look closely at the fine print you can find the Rafter D Ranch about twenty miles northwest of Durango. However, a good deal of the action also takes place in railroad towns up and down a corridor that runs south from Colorado through New Mexico, down to El Paso. You will need to consult the maps frequently to follow the plot, but even so you will encounter difficulties. The action jumps and jolts around, with major geographical disconnects along the way.

We also like to nail down the year in which each of L’Amour’s stories occurs. We are left in the dark on this with The Man Called Noon until nearly half way through the book, at which point our protagonist muses that “The Lincoln County War was playing itself out.” The main events of that infamous feud ran from February through July 1878, though some argue that the war didn’t truly end until Pat Garrett hunted down and killed Billy the Kid in 1881. Another clue L’Amour offers is the Rio Grande and Southern Railway, which plays a significant role in the story. The RG&S linked up with El Paso in mid-1881, and a minor character notes, in Chapter 10, that “the railroad had come in a few months back.” Those clues are good enough to place the timing of The Man Called Noon in or around 1881.

Except, well, that just can’t be. The largest of the maps at the beginning of the book shows the Rio Grand Southern Railway spur that runs west from Durango, and that stretch of the line is the setting for the final chapters in the book. However, that section of railway wasn’t built until 1891. Further, L’Amour’s makes repeated references to train headlights and other lights in use at train stations and other buildings. Per an internet search, train headlights first came into use in the 1890s, and it wasn’t until 1901 that electricity became widely available in El Paso, with outlying towns getting electricity later. So which year is it, Louis, 1881 or 1891? There is no way of squaring this circle. It seems that L’Amour just mashed up his historical references to suit the immediate needs of his narrative.

The true identity of our hero, who’s nom de guerre is Ruble Noon, is actually Jonas Mandrin, and his back story is a lurid one. We gradually learn that Mandrin was a prosperous newspaperman, hunter, and manufacturer back East, until someone murdered his wife and child, after which he succumbed to his demons, changed his name to Ruble Noon (a play on “noble ruin,” perhaps? Or is that giving L’Amour too much credit?), and became a vigilante for hire in the West. His dossier includes at least twelve murderous assignments. Now someone has hired him to bail out Fan Davidge at the Rafter D, which has been taken over by outlaws who use it as their base of operations. As the novel begins, Noon is on his way there when he is grazed with a bullet to the head, knocking him out and inducing his amnesia.

This back story generates several discrepancies that are never resolved. It is clear that Noon and Fan Davidge have never met, and she knows nothing about him, yet we learn that Noon has not one, but two hideouts in the mountains within a day’s ride of her ranch. In fact, Noon has been using the vicinity of the Rafter D as his base of operations for years, and Noon even has access to a remote and exclusive railway stop nearby. And who hired Noon for this job? The obvious answer is Fan’s father, who has recently died of a heart attack. Sure enough, Noon finds a letter indicating that he has been hired by Davidge, and that Davidge has recently signed a deed giving Noon title to one of the hideouts he has been using. This suggests that Davidge and Noon must be well-acquainted, perhaps even good friends. How is it, then, that Fan knows nothing of Noon or these arrangements, and that Davidge found it necessary to hire Noon through a shadowy middleman named Matherbee, rather than directly and man to man? Maddeningly, L’Amour himself notes some of these discrepancies, yet never bothers to clear them up.

Another problem with The Man Called Noon is that lack of a consistent antagonist. L’Amour is at his best when he builds up a single deadly enemy over the course of a novel, but he has an unfortunate tendency to create multiple antagonists who weaken the overall arc of the story. L’Amour is particularly prone to this fault in The Man Called Noon. Noon is up against not one, but two masterminds who are out to get him and Fan, and the novel also contains, by my count, seven gunslingers who try to kill Noon. The last of these appears in the final chapter for no apparent reason and dies two pages later. These killers are bland and virtually interchangeable, and Noon knocks them down like ducks in a shooting gallery. (Although it takes until Chapter 7 for the shooting to start, once it does the bodies pile up, fourteen in all by my count.)

Equally bland is our heroine, Fan Davidge. For Noon it is love at first sight, but we have to take her appeal on faith because L’Amour gives us no physical description. Her personality, too, has no quirks. She is brave, she is plain-spoken, she has grit—all the usual characteristics. But if she has a sense of humor, or a hot temper, or anything else to distinguish her, we never see it. By contrast, the femme fatale in the novel, Peg Cullane, gets considerably more attention. She is slender, with auburn hair and dark eyes, and she’s a real schemer: “hard as nails . . . there was not an ounce of emotion in her, nor any mercy.” Given the similarities in their backgrounds, you might think Peg a more natural fit for Noon that Fan Davidge. In a spicier novel, they might have a fling, but, alas, nothing of the sort happens in The Man Called Noon. At least the book has more than one female character with a name and speaking role; there are six, in fact. All but Fan Davidge and Peg Cullane are bit parts, but still that’s a pretty high number for L’Amour. Of course, the women are still greatly outnumbered by the male characters, 28 by my count.

Fairly early in The Man Called Noon we begin to flail in our attempts to keep track of all the clues and plot points. The story hangs together for a while, sort of, but then Noon takes a trip down to El Paso to try to figure out his past, and that’s when the story simply falls apart. We learn that, before he died, Davidge hid half a million dollars in gold and negotiable securities somewhere on or near the Rafter D Ranch. L’Amour makes no effort to explain how Davidge found time to do this. or why he didn’t just deposit the dough with a reputable bank. The novel now veers off into a hunt for the loot. There’s nothing wrong with a good treasure hunt, but that narrative device also has its conventions, including double-crosses, chases, misdirection, confusing maps, and the rest. L’Amour is already at sea trying to manage the amnesia story line, and once the treasure hunt is added the novel loses its way entirely. The sooner the reader gives up trying to make sense of the plot the better. Those who stick with the book are best advised just to read each chapter, and indeed each scene, as its own source of episodic pleasure, only loosely tied to what comes before and what comes after.

Given the mess that L’Amour makes of The Man Called Noon, we take less pleasure than usual in noting the plot inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies that we associate with L’Amour’s novels. There are so many, and they are often more exasperating than entertaining. At one point, Noon hears a quail in the night and knows it is not an Indian because “There was no echo, no aftersound.” This isn’t the only time that L’Amour has trotted out this particular canard. In both High Lonesome and Killoe, L’Amour writes that an owl’s call will not echo. I ate that sort of thing up as a boy, but it’s rubbish. Any sound will produce an echo if the conditions are right, and there is nothing special in this respect about the call of an owl or a quail.

The reader will also be annoyed by the character of J.B. Rimes. We meet Rimes in Chapter One, and he tells Noon in Chapter Three that he is one of the outlaws who is camping out at the Rafter D, after riding the outlaw trail for several years. In the final chapter, though, we find out that Rimes is actually a Pinkerton man. This both not credible (he has been living as an outlaw at the Rafter D for years), and pointless. What is a Pinkerton man doing at the Rafter D? We are never told why he is there, who hired him, or what his assignment is. At best, he seems to be just a random good guy who tags along on some of the action.

Then there’s the cook at the Rafter D Ranch. We know two things about him: his name is Wing, and he is Chinese. He appears twice, but he has no effect on the plot, and and he gets exactly one line: “Supper all finish. What you want?” Apparently this is what passes for diversity with L’Amour. Worth noting is that when L’Amour wants to write in someone who is not white, Indian, or Mexican, he will often do it via the kitchen staff. One of L’Amour’s only black characters is Ned Bladwin, the cook in Dark Canyon. Like Wing, Baldwin plays no meaningful role in the plot and appears to be there only for, ahem, color.

Another discrepancy: when Noon meets Peg Cullane in Chapter Eight, she recognizes the coat he is wearing as belonging to her brother. The coat has been a subject of curiosity for Noon from the start; it is well-tailored but ill-fitting, indicating that he somehow came to be wearing another man’s coat. We never find out how this happened, by the way, but in any case Noon had taken off Cullane’s coat back in Chapter Six, when he finds a closet full of his own clothes.

But enough, already. What fun is it, teasing out such discrepancies, when the whole book is full of them? The Man Called Noon is a hash of a novel, not even close to L’Amour at his best. Yet even on an off day, L’Amour delivers a few treats. The book is short on high church descriptions of the landscape, though we do read, in Chapter Six:

Sunlight fell through the pines and the rawboned ridges were starkly beautiful. In this place there as only the wind, and sometimes the rain, the snow, and the cold. Here change came slowly; a rock crumbled, a tree grew, a root pushed deeper into a crevice, forcing wide the jaws of rock. Here there was only one problem, the problem of existence alone.

The Man Called Noon also gives us three solid recitations from the Code L’Amour, in which the author lays out his world view:

If only the evil men are willing to use force, what will happen to the good men? Some of these bad men understand nothing but violence. It seems to me that there is a time to use a gun, and there is a time to put it down.

Here in these western lands men were fighting again the age-old struggle for freedom and for civilization, which is one that always must be fought for. The weak, and those unwilling to make the struggle, soon resign their liberties for the protection of powerful men or paid armies; they begin by being protected, the end by being subjected.

You cannot submit to evil without allowing evil to grow. Each time the good are defeated, or each time they yield, they only cause the forces of evil to grow stronger. Greed feeds greed, and crime grows with success. Our giving up what is ours merely to escape trouble would only create greater trouble for someone else.

L’Amour gives us a couple of his classic homespun turns of phrase to enjoy as well:

He don’t care whether school keeps or not. The way he sizes up to me, he’s the kind would charge hell with a bucket of water.

They could be shot like frogs in a tub.

Finally, there is a nice little scene where Noon stops by a small, poor ranch, and is welcomed warmly by the Mexican family there. As he leaves, Noon tells the father “You are fortunate. I would say you are richer than you know. You have a house, some cattle, you have food, and you have each other.” Nicely put. It reminds me of what I told our little daughters once, when they asked if our family was rich: “We have each other and we have all we need. That makes us rich.”