“I want freedom, not power,” Lesley remarks at one point. We don’t buy it and I doubt Paterson did, either. They wind up, of course, in each other’s arms. For over 350 pages, she leads her audience along through the on-again, off-again relationship between Lesley and Chan Herrick, the millionaire’s nephew who gradually evolves from lounge lizard to stalwart entrepreneur. This economic realism makes it hard not to notice how artificial Paterson’s attempts to at romanticism are. There is something so grossly material about money as to resist the strongest doses of philosophy.” Paterson’s hard-nosed view of money and its importance in a capitalist world comes from her many years of living from payday to payday, earning every step of her own way. “Everything,” she adds, “in this sense includes everything but money. “Society,” Paterson writes, “is run on the Berkeleian theory that everything exists only in the imagination. ut then the Duke’s great-grandfather’s grandfather was simply the most successful cattle thief on the border.” Her grandfather was a crofter, turned out to make more room for deer on the Duke’s grandfather’s Scotch estate…. McConach this afternoon was almost in tears of ecstasy because the Duke of Inverarie is buying an estate somewhere hereabouts. Like Paterson, Lesley is clear-eyed about social hypocrites and always keeps a pin handy for bursting bubbles: Raised on farm by a long-suffering mother and ne’er-do-well father, Lesley works her way up from clerk to journalist at one of the local papers in the fictional version of Calgary, Alberta, where the novel takes place. Lesley Johns, who wins the prize of protagonist after a neck-and-neck race with several characters through much of the book, is clearly Paterson’s avatar. It is doubtless a true saying I only wonder what one does with the flies after having caught them. There is an old proverb which says that one can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

The book’s epigraph deserves a place alongside any of Dorothy Parker’s best quips: Yet despite its limitations–wooden characters and sometimes even stiffer prose– The Shadow Riders has a few rewards for the reader who pulls it off the shelf every decade or so. Frankly, in comparison to her masterpiece, Never Ask the End or even The Golden Vanity, The Shadow Riders is easy for anyone but a completist to neglect. Mencken reviewed Isabel Paterson’s first novel, The Shadow Riders, he concluded that despite “a certain readableness”, it would soon be “dead and forgotten.” And so it has remained, along with all the rest of Paterson’s novels, even with her rediscovery as a Libertarian icon.

Shadow riders series