The Searchers by Alan LeMay

WARNING: SPOILERS, PARD, SPOILERS ...


Finished Alan LeMay’s The Searchers last night. I liked it. But I must be frank: it was a brutal read. Grim, gritty, and dark, much, much more grimmer, grittier, and darker than the John Ford – John Wayne film. As a result, I never knew what was going to happen at any given point in the story, despite watching the flick numerous times. And I didn’t have a gut sense of how I’d rate it when I finished.

So, I give it a solid A, though it traversed B and C territory as often as Amos and Martin travelled the deserts, plains, and mountains of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.

Instead of playing the Good Paragraph / Bad Paragraph game, lemme just bullet point stuff I found interesting –

(1) Amos in the book is Ethan in the film, John Wayne’s gruff and grumbly character (was there any other type?) Though most of Amos’ dialogue seems directly written for Wayne, the literary character comes off more of a single-minded humorless lunkhead than the movie version. But – I kinda liked him, enough to spend 223 pages with him.

(2) Barely 25 pages in the author comes out and says Amos loved his brother’s wife! Well, he has Martin Pauley recognize it for us. This is only hinted at in the film, however broad or veiled one may want to interpret such hints. I just found it a bit shocking at its explicitness, being used to the Ford version.

(3) The book is much, much, much, much more violent than the film, obviously because of what was allowed to be released to the general moviegoing public in the mid-50s. A little too-vivid descriptions of scalpings and settler massacres, and I was kinda surprised at the violence inflicted upon horses and cattle, by both man and Mother Nature. The 19th century frontier was no place for the weak of heart, male or female.

(4) LeMay’s work is gloriously – and uncomfortably – anti-PC. Indians are not the glorified, peace-loving, wise spiritual guardians of the earth that every single college campus history professor would like to convince you. Even I – as immune to PC as anyone, I like to think – even I felt weird reading LeMay’s descriptions of the “savages” and their behaviors, to the point where I would look up over my shoulder in case the thought police were recording me through some tiny bug in the base of the lamp by my chair.

(5) God, I love yellowed old paperbacks. This one was so yellowed and so old I think either Ford or Wayne – possibly both – may have pawed through it nearly sixty years ago.

(6) The book ends a bit different than the movie. SPOILERS: In print, Amos dies at the end, armed and galloping down on a squaw he thinks is the long-lost Debbie. Well, it ain’t, and Pocahontas unloads a pistol into his chest, and old Amos goes down hard, rolls over, dead. No final words of wisdom, though his final dialogue with Martin (and snatches throughout the book) are poignant. Truthfully, that surprised me.

(7) What also surprised me was how surprising the book in general was. Yeah, the plots pretty simple, but the trail was longer and harder, with more dead-ends, and taking a much more devastating toll on the searcher than what you experience in the movie. Kinda opposite of what’s the norm, I think, when you examine book-film duality. Something to think further upon.

(8) I found the humor of the film sorely lacking in the book. Now, I knew I was in for a grim, gritty, etc, journey through the Old West. What I now realize is how much of a genius John Ford was. A lot of characters from the book were morphed and combined to form the movie roles. What he and his screenwriters did to the captain of the Texas Rangers was amazing. They took a stodgy, boring, one-dimensional military dude and transformed him into a gun-wielding, badge-wearing Reverend played by John Wayne buddy and John Ford veteran character actor Ward Bond. He almost deserves his own movie, but he’s better here, a comedic foil to the aforementioned heavy thematic material.

(9) Took longer than I imagined it would to read, but I enjoyed every minute reading it. I think it ran me about seven or eight hours over ten days, when I was expectin’ to take a week with it. But that’s okay, just an observation for what it’s worth.

(10) Would I read it again? Maybe, maybe not. If I was a man who fancied playing odds, I’d lay them as 3-2 against. But – who knows? We only surf this globe for seventy or eighty orbits, so time has to be spent very, very carefully.

How about some immortal dialogue? Very well! The Searchers by Alan LeMay is filled with more than its rightful share:


***


“What if I walk out that door?”

Charlie glanced past Aaron at Laurie Mathison before he answered. “Now, you ought to know the answer to that.”

Laurie said distinctly, “He means he’ll put a bullet in your back.”

Charlie MacCorry thought about that a moment. “If he’s particular about getting his bullets in front,” he said to her, “he can walk out backwards, can’t he?”


***


Then she came to him and presented her back to be unbuttoned.

All through this whole thing, Mart showed the dexterity and finesse of a hog in a sand boil, and even the tequila knew it. It was very young tequila at best, as its raw bite had attested, and it couldn’t help him much after a point. One moment he was afraid to touch her, and in the next, when he did take her in his arms, he almost broke her in two. The girl was first astonished, then angry; but finally her sense of humor returned, and she felt sorry for him. She turned patient, soothing and gentling him; and when at last he slept he was in such a state of relaxation that even his toe nails must have been limp.


***


A dawn as cheerless as a drunkard’s awakening was making a line of gray on the eastern horizon …


***


Mart brought Amos his six-gun, and his cartridge belt, and checked the loading. Amos lifted a shaking hand, and hid the gun under his blankets. Outside they heard the “Prepare to mount!”

“I got to get on up there.” Mart groped for Amos’ hand. He felt a tremor in its grip, but considerable strength.

“Get my share of ’em,” Amos whispered.

“You want scalps, Amos?”

“Yeah … No. Just stomp ’em – like I always done – ”