Bold Legend

by Gordon D. Shirreffs

Responding to his government's orders to assist the invasion of New Mexico, estate owner and frontiersman Quint Kershaw finds his greatest challenge in his wife Lupita and her fierce loyalty to her Spanish ancestry. Reprint.

320 pages, Paperback

First published July 12, 1982

About the author

Gordon Donald Shirreffs was an American author of Western and young adult novels.

Reviews

[Alton Motobu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Second in the Quint Kershaw trilogy following THE UNTAMED BREED. New Mexico, 1846, mountain man is caught between Mexico (via the love for his Mexican wife) and loyalty to the US as the US Army invades New Mexico seemingly to claim lands that are part of Texas. He enlists as a scout for the US then fights off Mexicans and their Indian allies. Seems like an action-packed western, but action takes up only a quarter of the book and the rest are interminable passages about New Mexican history and culture, the land and landscapes, Mexican politics, architecture and ranching, buffalo hunting (killing, skinning and butchering), and other subjects from a history book. This mars the story line and makes the reading an ordeal.

Author must have had a large cache of research materials, and at the end of his writing career he must have wanted to use everything, so he came up with a method of interspersing non-fiction materials into a plot line. He also tried his hand at writing a Harlequin romance as there are several near X-rated sex scenes in this book. I enjoyed the author's early westerns from the 1950s to the 70s, but works from later in his career (in the 1980s) like this one are below average. Final book in the trilogy is GLORIETA PASS.