The Wide-Open Pages

By Helen Rogan

THE CALIFORNIOS

by LOUIS L'AMOUR 188 pages. Saturday Review Press.

Dutton. $5.95.

Writers about the Old West are the battery hens of fiction, their relative status usually assessed in terms of yield. Questions of individual flavor, style or craft are usually redundant. Thus Louis L'Amour, who has produced 60 or so novels to date, is a spring chicken compared with Zane Grey, creator of 89 extra-large books (approximately 9 million words) between 1904 and 1939, or Max Brand (Destry Rides Again), who could turn out 14 pages an hour, and managed a total of 25 million words and 13 pen names before his death in 1944.

L'Amour, with 48 titles currently in print as paperback originals and a clutch of doctoral students plodding through dissertations on his work, appeals to a wide, wide range of readers. The Calif ornios, his first hard-cover book in many years, shows off his talents especially well.

The story, set in California more than a century ago, is elegant and simple rather than wild and woolly: Eileen Mulkerin, an Irish widow, and her two sons, Sean, the roguish sea captain, and Michael, a nicely implacable monk, are fighting to keep their ranch at Malibu from assorted ruffians (mercifully free from squints, twitches or actual deformity). The villains do not stand a chance. They have to face the psychological weaponry of the Mulkerins' Indian friends (using ancient magical powers to scare the wits out of them). Those villains who survive face the actual hardware of other friends, "lean men and tall, with Mexican spurs and battered, flatbrimmed hats," in the inevitable shootout.

Well Rooted. What makes this more than just a pleasant trot is the obvious strong feeling that L'Amour has for the West as it really was. His great-grandfather was scalped by the Sioux (which may or may not have awakened young Louis' interest), and he was raised in North Dakota. He now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children. Not only has L'Amour done vast library research, but he also spends many days with his family hiking over mountain trails in California and Colorado. In addition, he is involved with a plan to build a replica of an old Western town near Durango, Colo. No other bestselling author of westerns seems as well rooted in his material. After all, Zane Grey was a Manhattan dentist when he started to write, and Max Brand, when persuaded by his publishers to visit El Paso and soak up some color, hated it so much that he locked himself in his hotel room and read Sophocles.

L'Amour's love for the frontier distinguishes him from these pulp merchants. His Indians could have stepped quietly from the pages of Carlos Castaneda, and his historical background has signs of sly humor: "Los Angeles, the tiny pueblo toward which they were sailing ..." Publishers report an increase in sales of western novels after a decline in the '60s, and they link this new interest to a nostalgia for the old America. No wonder, then, that L'Amour has become so popular. There is hardly a better trail guide. . Helen Rogan

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