Fair Blows the Wind

by Louis L'Amour

1988

Status

Available

Publication

Bantam (1988)

Description

His father killed by the British and his home burned, young Tatton Chantry left Ireland to make his fortune and regain the land that was rightfully his. Schooled along the way in the use of arms, Chantry arrives in London a wiser and far more dangerous man. He invests in trading ventures, but on a voyage to the New World his party is attacked by Indians and he is marooned in the untamed wilderness of the Carolina coast. It is in this darkest time, when everything seems lost, that Chantry encounters a remarkable opportunity. . . . Suddenly all his dreams are within reach: extraordinary wealth, his family land, and the heart of a Peruvian beauty. But first he must survive Indians, pirates, and a rogue swordsman who has vowed to see him dead.

User reviews

LibraryThing member librisissimo

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?

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LibraryThing member fuzzi

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.

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LibraryThing member Whiskey3pa

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

LibraryThing member TheGalaxyGirl

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.

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LibraryThing member eenerd

I was in the mood for a pirate story, so I came across this book. L'Amour is my dad's favorite author, so I figured I'd give him a shot. It was a pretty good book! Well paced, with a good storyline . The main character, Tatton Chantry, is a wandering swordsman in Elizabethan England who fled from

his home in Ireland as a boy when his father was murdered by the English. He makes his way around northern England & Scotland, looking for fencing teachers along the way to avenge his father. During this time he meets the evil young man who becomes his arch nemesis, Rafe Leckenbie. Chantry & Leckenbie run into one another throughout the rest of the story, and their final clash sets the stage for the books big climax. Chantry grows into a young man in search of his fortune, and this allows L'Amour to bring us to a wide array of settings, including the Carolinas, British Isles, Spain and France. This also allows for a range of characters, from Guadelupe Romana-the beautiful half-Peruvian, half-Spanish captive in the Carolinas, to Jacob Binns, the mysterious courier of an unnamed European secret society. The only negative I found is that the multitude of spelling & grammatical errors were somewhat distracting--but I guess this was also published before the advent of spellcheck.

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LibraryThing member DragonFreak

Tatton Chanty arrived in the New World (America) with his father. At age fourteen, he's been with his father all his life until unexpectedly, his father was murdered. And a whole new life began for him.

While he's at America, he meets quite by chance a terrible teenager named Rafe Leckenbie. When

Rafe almost killed Tatton, he vows to beat him again someday.

So he practiced his not-too-good swordsmanship for the climax of the story in which he has all to lose and everything to gain.

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LibraryThing member lamour

This is a roaring bodice ripper with not too many bodices since most of the yarn is female free. Tattom Chantry is an Irishman who flees his homeland at the age of 14 for adventures in England, Spain, France, and on sailing ships. Eventually he ends up castaway in Florida wilderness where his sword

fighting prowess gets him a fortune and the girl. I did not enjoy this as much as his early westerns. Too much coinincidence and mythology in here for me. Imagine the King of France interviewing a defeated opponent and then giving him a horse & freedom to get home. Too much. Not in the vein of L'Amour's best.

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