This is turning into a series on ‘what I’ve been reading lately’, for better or worse. I’m continuing my exploration of the local library and branching out into authors and genres that I haven’t tried before, but I’m doing that partly because I’m going through a stage in my career where I’m not well-qualified to talk about writing and publishing, because the industry is changing so rapidly, so I might as well talk about what I’m reading.
Today’s entry into the list of what I’ve been reading lately is: the works of Louis L’Amour, the go-to example of the Western genre.
Before I go any further, have a necessary caveat: L’Amour wrote upwards of eighty books. I’ve read seven of them, and not in any particular order. I’m working with incomplete information; these are my thoughts based on what I’ve read so far.
I’ve tried to get into L’Amour’s books before, about ten years ago, and bounced off them pretty hard. Which was annoying- am I the only one who wonders if there’s something wrong with me when I can’t get invested in a book? They’re good stories; fast to read; the characters are people you can look up to; there’s usually a happy-ish ending. The scene descriptions are vivid, and it’s pretty clear that the author traveled extensively in the West and actually saw a lot of the settings he used in his books.
I get why L’Amour is a best-selling author, and has been for the past fifty years. But I’ve learned over the past few weeks that I have to read his works in a very specific mindset; for me, they’re instructive, not entertaining, and I wasn’t able to maintain that mindset until I’d been writing my own stories for a while.
His style isn’t what I’m used to, and the books feel like outlines (first they go to A and B happens; in the next chapter they go to X and Y happens; that goes on for large chunks of the book) interspersed with occasional forays into philosophy that use vocabulary and concepts that characters of that time and place probably wouldn’t have recognized, rather than a coherent and detailed story.
The author hits a bunch of romance beats throughout most of the stories, then drops that plot entirely; the hero appears to chase after the girl but doesn’t get her in the end- though I’ve just started Sackett, and I know where that one’s going, but that’s because, for better or worse, I’ve already finished The Sackett Brand, so I know how it ends. See above, about not reading them in any particular order. Not every story needs a romance, but it’s been jarring to see that plot set up, then abandoned. The most obvious example was in The Cherokee Trail, which I just finished. I kept wondering, ‘where’s the rest of it?’ or if I’d skipped a chapter. That book’s gone back to the library, so I’d have to take it out again to make sure, but I don’t think I missed the resolution. Since romance isn’t the point of these stories, I’ve had to set those ideas aside, and accept that that plot isn’t going where I thought it was going.
I can see, sometimes too clearly for entertainment, where the author is putting a thumb on the scales, usually to make the story flow better. Characters are extremely well-traveled, and the world seems to have a mid-1900s level of connectivity, instead of what I’d expect in the mid-1800s, approximately when most of the books are set. (To be fair, well-traveled characters aren’t impossible; people did make extensive and ‘round-the-world voyages in pre-modern times. It’s just startling when every single character seems to have done so.)
In To The Far Blue Mountains, Barnabas Sackett travels across Elizabethan England and Wales, and there are two glaring, impossible to ignore, improbabilities about this journey. First, there’s an unbroken string of friends and acquaintances who are willing and able to help him from London to North Wales. Even for a well-connected and well-traveled character, that’s unlikely. Second, they all speak intelligible English. There’s no confusion over accents or dialect words. That’s barely plausible in the modern British Isles; there are so many class and regional accents.
There’s a lot of compression of time and geography to make the stories flow; first the characters are here, then they’re there, then they’re back here, with very little sense of how long it took. And I’m pretty good at geography; I know the distances involved; these characters aren’t teleporting from London to Virginia or Texas to Montana, even if the journey only takes a couple of sentences. And some of it’s pretty rough country to go through on horseback, yet the characters all emerge unscathed- because there’d be no story if they died in a rock slide, flash flood, or any one of a zillion disasters that can strike a lone traveler in the wilderness. There’s that author’s thumb on the scales again.
To be fair, L’Amour doesn’t make the characters say or do anything that’s completely impossible. They’re, just, improbable enough at the wrong moments to throw me out of the story, and since I don’t have any emotional attachment to the characters, I take a moment to get back in to reading.
But if I go into it with an analytical mindset, that mental in-and-out of the story is normal, and doesn’t bother me as much. I may not be reading the story in the way the author intended, but I am reading it, and getting something out of it.
It’s also very obviously men’s fiction, written by a man, for men. There’s philosophy, but no navel-gazing; the characters are too busy fighting to survive against ridiculous odds- and usually succeeding. Since I’ve been reading a lot of female-directed genres for a while, the style switch was a bit surprising.
Rereading what I just wrote, this is a very critical little essay; it reads like I hate these books. I don’t. They’re interesting; they’re also not in my usual line for entertaining reading. Which is probably a good thing; reading the same authors and genres with no variation, isn’t usually conducive to good writing.
If you haven’t read L’Amour’s works, you should try them out. Don’t start with To The Far Blue Mountains or The Walking Drum. I’ve liked Sackett so far; I can tentatively recommend that one as a starting point.
If you’ve already read his works, leave suggestions below for the newbies- which books do you think they should start with, and which should be left for later?
Mad Genius Club 
9 responses to “Looking Westward”
Everything you said about Louis lamour’s books is true, but I enjoy them anyway despite their numerous plot holes and occasionally losing track of a character entirely. They were written as pulp fiction at an extremely rapid rate and he dif not seem to spend a lot time editing them. I think he had a contract to turn out like one a month. Specifically however in the case of the Cherokee trail it is my understanding that this was written as to make a television show out of it and the romance plot that is set up and not resolved makes sense if you’re going to make a TV series out of it.
So far, I’ve only read Killkenny, and I understand where you are coming from. I tried them as a research project, after I’d started figuring out how to write stories of my own.
It struck me immediately that he was breaking (really, ignoring or not even knowning) every single rule of novel writing, and it did not matter because I wanted to know what happened to the characters.
It is a reminded that, the rules are useful only as a framework, but they aren’t what make the story compelling to read.
There are a lot of improbable scenarios in his books. But I find that true in quite a lot of stories, as it wouldn’t make sense to have the main character die halfway through the story.
There are two books that do come to mind where the main characters almost don’t survive. The first one is in The Walking Drum where he is severely injured during battle and only survives hiding out in the weeds and by the surreptitious kindness of a friend he just happened to run into fighting on the other side. Implausible, but still a near death experience. The other is in Jubal Sackett where he breaks his leg in the wilderness and only survives through the help of an indian that becomes his friend.
They’re not all Westerns. Last of the Breed is a good one, set as a Cold War escape from a Siberian prison camp, for example. Man vs Man vs Wilderness (a common theme for him).
Even the Westerns read in part more like historical novels to our modern eye. The Sackett series (17 books) is in many ways more interesting at the start, when the family leaves England (Bks 1-4 are
1 – Sackett’s Land
2 – To the Far Blue Mountians
3 – The Warrior’s Path
4 – Jubal Sacket )
— available as a single volume “The Sacketts”
I recommend these as a good intro, besides the famous individual (often filmed) Westerns.
Yes, the Romance element clues are often mistakes of our reading assumptions (different writing period, different genre expectations) — there’s often a rescue-of-a-female that leads nowhere, or she may end up pointlessly dead later, surprising our theories about how hero and victim will get together.
He’s a very workmanlike writer at a time when the modern Western genre flourished, and he sets the standard for quite a bit of male behavior plot structures (just as the noir detective writers did).
I read a lot of them before and am trying to re-read. Perhaps I’m not in the mood, I’m having trouble getting into them.
I’ve never been able to get into his Serious Historical Novelist works, including the Sacketts saga, but I like some of his earlier, pulpier (and usually shorter) work like The Key-Lock Man.
It’s a funny thing, but I had the same original impression of Andrew Wareham’s several long series set in the (circa) Georgian/Regency, where the hero has to figure out how to make a life and flourish in whatever social environment he can aspire to — the same ambitions, unsentimental marriages, political & business maneuverings, and so forth.
I bounced hard off of that stuff decades ago, but I’m now fascinated by the close looks into the practical decisions of clever, unsentimental, ambitious characters, who are moral on their own terms (unlike the satirical novels within the period), intelligent observers, and determined to better themselves.
I enjoyed the Westerns in movie form, but had no interest in Lamour as a writer until recent decades. I blame the sentimentality of the movies (marriage as romance, rather than as practicality, for example). These days, I’m much more aligned with the morally practical than the sentimentally soft.
Kudos to Peter Grant for continuing that theme and POV.
For my part, I feel like I get enough unsentimental pragmatic [minced oath] IRL. For fiction reading, I prefer escapism.
I’ve read every L’Amour book written. I bought them as they came to hand–in no particular order. Most I have read at least three times.
One helpful thing I figured out quite early is that Louis was not an author, he was a storyteller. Imagine sitting around a campfire and listening to him speaking the words. Each chapter was, literally, told on one day. Every morning, at breakfast, he would hand the previous day’s output to his wife (his copy editor) and retreat to his office. Kathy typed the final draft with little or no input from her husband.
Plot holes are just part of the charm.