Readers who wish to get a full sense of Louis L'Amour's productions, for whatever purposes, must inevitably take on his two blockbusters, Bendigo Shafter and Comstock Lode. These two novels, in their separate ways, continue the historical mode that L'Amour launched into with Sackett's Land, Rivers West, and Fair Blows the Wind, with the exception that the main characters of the later two novels are not members of the Sackett, Talon, or Chantry families. Both are marketed as historical novels rather than as Westerns….

In their broader features they perpetuate the pattern of all of L'Amour's fiction: there is a superlative hero who fights through adversity to ensure that the country will be settled and developed properly. Good and evil are clearly distinguishable from one another, and the conflict is resolved unequivocally through violence. The plot resolution, along with a steady stream of narrative comments, affirms the broadly held values of the mass audience. And in these novels, as in all of L'Amour's fiction, there is a sprinkling of errors in grammar, sentence structure, and word usage—errors that are overshadowed by a profusion of corpses and a liberal fare of "authentic" historical and geographical detail.

In Bendigo Shafter, the titular hero tells his own story of coming to manhood. Wise beyond his tender years, he lavishes upon his reader many mini-sermons about the building of a country; almost innumerable lectures on frontier lore; occasional analogies between the Plains Indians and Arthurian Knights, Bantus, and Europeans; and prophecies about the passing of the Indians and the buffaloes, and about the probability of stellar travel. (p. 315)

All of this would be more tolerable if it were not narrated in the first person, a point of view that L'Amour has labored with frequently and without much success. It seems that when the narrator is not serving as the author's mouthpiece for lectures in history and civilization, he is telling the reader of the many compliments he receives for his strength, good looks, and acute mind. As a youthful narrator, Bendigo Shafter dwindles in comparison with Dickens' Pip, Twain's Huck, or Schaefer's Bob Starrett, even though he is not quite as risible as the narrators of L'Amour's Rivers West and The Proving Trail.

Comstock Lode is a less comprehensive, less visionary book than Bendigo Shafter; perhaps also because it is written in the third person, it is more readable. In Comstock Lode L'Amour introduces a new set of authentic details, the fruits of L'Amour's renewed research, as he reworks the melodramatic plot of such novels as Reilly's Luck and The Proving Trail—the story of a young man who avenges his parents' death (the two earlier novels had a father and a father figure killed, while in this one L'Amour sets the wheels rolling with two murdered fathers and two violated, murdered mothers). Val Trevallion, like some of L'Amour's other recent heroes, is an immigrant who soon becomes whole-heartedly American in his devotion to developing the country. (p. 316)

Like Bendigo Shafter and L'Amour himself, Trevallion marries an actress. Grita Redaway, as she has earlier told the villain, will leave the theater only for love of the right man. To complete the melodramatic scheme, L'Amour has a villain who is as despicable as the hero and heroine are virtuous. He commits arson, rape, robbery, burglary, embezzlement, and murder. He bludgeons, stabs, and smothers his victims, and hires out his shooting. Moreover, he doesn't believe that women can be intelligent. But even though Comstock Lode is excessive in its melodrama, it is well plotted and well paced, and the lectures on history and mining are less gratuitous than the disquisitions in Bendigo Shafter. (pp. 316-17)

These two novels are thus far the pinnacle of L'Amour's craft, and they demonstrate how the conventional Western can be expanded without having its basic form altered. They will gratify the reader who likes historical and moral lessons as part of his or her entertainment, but they will not buoy up the reader who is looking for improvement or artistic innovation in the craft of popular fiction. (p. 317)