Louis L'Amour's engine was unrivaled.
The man never stopped working.
There’s a line in Louis’s autobiography where he talks about his unbridled creativity, and the fact that he can’t stop his mind from trying to craft stories whenever he learns something new. He said he would go to his deathbed with a hundred stories hammering at his skull, trying to get out.
Aside from the fact that he wrote hundred of published pieces in his lifetime, this is further attested by the massive amount of unfinished stories left in his office after his death. His son Beau has been sorting through it all for the last couple of years and publishing it all under the banner of Lost Treasures.
I’ve been working my way through this 600-page beast for over a month, whenever I get a chance. I’ve already dog-eared and underlined tons of pieces, which kind of goes against my ethos with regular fiction, but in a sense this is a textbook for me. I’m reading this to improve my own writing.
The stories he’s tackled so far have made me want to do more reading, to the surprise of no one. Here’s a short rundown of the unfinished stories I’ve read so far:
JEREMY LOCCARD: This one only has four chapters written, it’s about a guy who stays in a cabin on a cattle trail in California. The previous occupant disappeared and nobody knows where he went. There are Indians that live nearby and keep warning the whites to leave, but the house exists as a stopping point for drovers to rest. There’s some kind of huge monster that leaves sign in the area. Nobody has caught it and the Indians seem to think it’s invincible. That’s about all we get. Would be awesome to know how it ended, for now it exists as a prompt to the rest of us.
TRAIL OF TEARS: An historical novel about the actual event, based on fictional characters who approximate the figures thereof. Beautiful writing, excellent protagonist, strong backstory with the antagonist, and from Beau’s notes it sounds like Louis meant for this to be a “goes native” kind of tale, where the hero (whose job it was to help escort the Cherokee off their land) decides ultimately to buck his orders. I’m going to read about the real Trail of Tears now.
A WOMAN WORTH HAVING: Based on a real man, a French explorer of the Middle East, who wins over a local woman through manly and adventurous means. Very Indiana Jones/Doc Savage type story, would have made a fun screenplay.
JOHNNY BANTA: This was cool because it showed how he wrote the beginning of a Western three different times, sometimes using the same words, other times abandoning a thread and replacing it with a new direction. I’ve done the same thing myself. SLEEPLESS HOLLOW went through several iterations before I got it right, and it’s so far from its original seed as to be a different book altogether. I know how that feels.
JAVA DIX: A crime story set in Indonesia. He inserted little details about places he’d lived or traveled into his stories and this was one of them. I do the same thing whenever I write stories set in Spain. (None of which I have published.) One of the Intrepids novels will take place there, though.
THE GOLDEN TAPESTRY: I didn’t really get into this one, it was another semi-globetrotting adventure novel, but didn’t tickle my imagination a whole lot.
LOUIS RIEL: I had never heard of him, but he was a real man in the 19th Century, up in Canada. He belonged to the “Métis” people, an ethnogroup of mixed French/Euro and Indians who effectively formed their own nation, culture, and popular bloc. L’Amour was very interested in Riel and took several runs at writing a film treatment about him, only to return the money because he couldn’t tell it right. His research kept teaching him new things about the man and he wanted to be fair with the story. (IRL Louis Riel was executed by the Canadian government for treason, so he must have been pretty based.) I found a book about him that I’ll read this year.
That’s it for now, like I said I’m halfway through. I’m taking a break to read one of those Crichton/Lange novels I got from the library. See you soon.