Raymond Chandler meets King Arthur in Lou Aguilar’s rollicking ‘The Camelot Trail’

When I reviewed Lou Aguilar’s “The Washington Trail” two years ago, I ended with a line from its hero, Mark Tristan, contemplating a poster of the John Wayne classic “El Dorado” hanging in his apartment.

“They don’t make ’em any more,” he lamented. “Too triggering.”

Women are beautiful, men notice, and nobody apologizes. Masculinity is generally treated as a virtue rather than a medical condition.

He had a point about Hollywood. But Aguilar’s novel suggested that the old-fashioned hero was alive and well.

The wisecracking former Army Ranger and his considerably more civilized partner, Neil Cork, belonged to an older tradition of detective fiction — tough men, beautiful women, actual villains, plenty of sex appeal, and little apparent concern about whether any of this had been approved by a