The unfinished works of Louis L’ Amour
While most readers associate Louis L’ Amour with the Western novels he wrote after World War II, few know that his first published works were actually of poetry. Those were followed by magazine stories of travel and adventure, based on his peripatetic life as a sawyer and miner, hobo and prizefighter, merchant seaman and soldier. Then, after decades of prolific obscurity, his big break finally came in 1953 with release of the John Wayne film adapted from his short story “The Gift of Cochise.” By the time of his death (from cancer, at age eighty) in 1988, Louis L’ Amour had published 91 novels and over 200 short stories, had earned both a National Book Award (in 1979) and a Presidential Medal of Freedom (in 1984), and had sold over 200 million copies of his books worldwide. Today, with translations in more than 20 languages, that number approaches an astonor ishing 330 million.
His impact on the genre, and on today’s Western novelist, is less easily quantified. Santa Fe writer Johnny D. Boggs, a seven-time Spur Award winner from the Western Writers of America (WWA), said, “They say he wrote as if he were at a campfire or sitting on a stone, telling a tale. He made the land a character, and his descriptions are usually deadon. I’ve never opened a Louis L’ Amour novel that I stopped reading until I was finished. And that says a lot about his skill and talent.” According to Kirk Ellis, president of WWA, “Louis L’ Amour probably did more to popularize the Western novel than any writer before — and many since. He casts a very long shadow. In the minds of many readers, the Western and Louis L’ Amour are synonymous.”
Whether you’ve read the entire L’Amour canon or know him only as a name glimpsed on a bookstore shelf, Louis L’ Amour’s Lost Treasures, Volume 1 — a compendium, published last fall, of unfinished manuscripts, treatments, notes, and other L’ Amour ephemera, all of it edited and extensively annotated by L’ Amour’s son and estate manager, Beau L’ Amour — provides a compelling glimpse into the mind and method of the man who’s rightly been called America’s storyteller.
“Lost Treasures grew out of the material I was organizing for a much more comprehensive Louis L’ Amour biography,” Beau said during a phone call from his home in Los Angeles. “I have always wanted to make Dad’s papers available to the public rather than allowing them to be locked up in a library somewhere, accessible only to scholars.”
As Beau cautions in the introduction to the book, however, “This book may drive you crazy.” That’s because the bulk of the material — 16 of its 21 entries — consists of the first few chapters of novels stories that L’ Amour simply stopped writing, somein times mid-sentence. But before you dismiss the entire effort as crass exploitation of authorial detritus, it’s important to understand the reasons for his abandonment of these texts. L’ Amour, it seems, yearned to expand his brand beyond the horse-opera Western for which he was celebrated. “As this book will show, some of his most interesting material came to a halt after a few pages or a few chapters,” Beau writes. “In some ways, this is the archive of his most ambitious work ... and, of course, that is why it was difficult to write. In my opinion, what Louis was unable to complete is often more revealing than what he did complete.”
More revealing, indeed. Who knew, for instance, that L’ Amour was deeply spiritual and fascinated with the subject of reincarnation — an idea that, Beau writes, his father “experimented with in different forms for nearly 30 years”? With a chapter titled “Samsara,” Beau shows us several beginnings to a mystical novel of adventure centered on characters who, “at some point in their lives, realize that they have been reincarnated and that the knowledge from their past lives can be recovered.” In a plot that hews more closely to Philip K. Dick than Zane Grey, these chosen few, reborn over the course of centuries, come to recognize one another and to fulfill their manifest destinies.
This, clearly, is not your father’s L’ Amour. Take, for another example, “Jeremy Loccard,” a story that, while Western in both setting and sensibility, is actually a tale of supernatural horror. Or “The Golden Tapestry,” a treasure-quest novel of Turkish intrigue. “A Woman Worth Having,” “Where Flows the Bangkok,” and “Jack Cross” are all swashbuckling tales of foreign adventure, while “Java Dix,” “Citizen of the Darker Streets,” and “China King” are classic hard-boiled noir. Many others, of course, are quintessentially Western, including “Shelby Tucker” — perhaps the highlight of the collection — a beautifully crafted fragment that showcases some of L’ Amour’s finest writing.