I've got a soft spot for L'Amour novels, but this one didn't quite work for me. There's two compelling storylines, the 'present' set (I think) of the coast of the Carolinas, with Tatton Chantry shipwrecked along with another group of castaways, and the flashback/past, describing Chantry's boyhood in Ireland and Britain. Either storyline would have worked well as a novel, but I felt like both got short shrift as L'Amour tried to squeeze them into a single narrative. ( )

Introduction of the Chantry lineage. More swashbuckler than his more numerous westerns. ( )

Over the course of his lifetime Louis L'Amour wrote many stories, and several series about fictional families that lived in early America. One of these series is about members of the Chantry family, and this particular volume is the first.

Tatton Chantry is a pseudonym, a name taken by a young man to hide his Irish heritage from those who would kill him. He survives in Elizabethan England by his wits and grows into a soldier and trader. And on one of his voyages he finds himself marooned on a barrier island of the Carolinas.

I enjoyed the story, though the flashbacks were a little confusing at times. ( )

variation on western theme ( )

Beginning caveat: I like L'Amour's books from the early period.
Complaint: as with any long-lived writer, he eventually reached the point where there is nothing new being said, and no editor would point that out.
The Hero of this novel (all his protagonists are Heroes*) is in the usual mold.
Although the setting of Elizabethan Empire is different on the surface (and not badly done), the plot and characters within the milieu are not very different from those of the Western volumes.
The literary name-dropping common to L'Amour's work is more intrusive than usual (although deliberately so, to make his usual point that Action Heroes are not illiterate clods), and the artless meandering through rhetorical questions is irritating; however, the bones of the story are good.
I personally do not like framed narratives, preferring to begin at the beginning and go on to the end, rather than starting at the near-end and flash-backing to the Hero's life-story.
*Footnote: it occurred to me, having re-read a Dick Francis novel recently, that one could take a hero out of L'Amour's world and drop him into Francis's without any problem and vice versa, and the same with Robert Heinlein's Cast.

Anyone want to add a writer to the line-up? ( )