Review: "The Captive" by Carter Travis Young (Louis Charbonneau)

 

The Captive as by Carter Travis Young (Louis Charbonneau) Manor Books   reviewed by Mike Baker   Louis Charbonneau wrote one of my favorite action novels Night of Violence (aka The Trapped Ones) about a motel and its occupants trapped with a desperate criminal fleeing his boss’s wrath and the two hard cases sent to kill him. I cannot sing this book’s praises enough. It’s a slim taut thriller. Most people know Charbonneau for his science fiction, which I’m sure is great but I wouldn’t know because I don’t read science fiction. I found out though, in early April, that he also wrote westerns under the pseudonym Carter Travis Young. I immediately bought five of them. The Captive is about freshly married Ter and Jaine Bryant as they optimistically sojourn west from Natchez, Louisiana on their way to recently opened California. Their wagon train stops at Bent’s Fort where they lose their escort of Dragoons and shortly thereafter, Jaine is kidnapped when their train gets attacked by the Iron Nose band of Comanches somewhere out on the trail. Ter teams up with the father of another white girl stolen by the Comanches and Tom Brock, a black scout Ter befriended on the wagon train, and the trio head out to get their kin or get their vengeance. Jaine gets raped a lot and then stolen by a Cheyenne and raped some more. Meanwhile, mountain man Angus Haws loses his Apache squaw Wo-man to a bear attack and, having seen the ethereal Jaine Bryant at Bent’s Fort, obsesses about her as he wanders into the wilderness pining for a white woman of his very own. Shenanigans ensue. The first act is in real time up through the abduction. The second act is a Rocky style montage of events over the course of about a year: Ter and Tom became a scout team for the Cavalry, Angus buys Jaine from the Cheyenne who murdered Iron Nose and Jaine gets raped some more. The third act is in real time as Tom and Ter close in on the increasingly more insane Angus and the beleaguered and aggrieved Jaine. The writing is crisp and the suspense, where the story calls for suspense, is tight. The rapes are low key if there’s such a thing as a low-key rape and there’s a lot of them. The gun-play and violence is sparce but explosive and effective.

The Captive was originally published as a hardcover in 1973 by Doubleday & Co. The edition our intrepid reviewer, Mike Baker, read was the mass market edition published by Manor Books. Come back the first Monday of each month for Mike Baker’s latest journey into 20th Century paperback fiction.