By December of 1960 Louis had finished The Walking Drum, writing:
I am completing a western and researching the second vol. of the trilogy on Kerbouchard. Next to be on India. Reading SUMA ORIENTAL of TOME PIRES now. Later period but good stuff. Wrote DRUM in 60 days, 712 typ. Pages, but much thinking before. The next book, A WOMAN WORTH HAVING, will run perhaps 1,000 pages.
My father mentions the page count here not so much to brag about how fast he could write but to indicate that this was a very different kind of novel. In those days a healthy paperback original ran two hundred and fifty pages. Seven hundred to a thousand pages was hardcover territory, a distinct step up from what he had been doing. Though much of December and January were taken up rewriting Shalako, by mid-January of 1961 an opportunity to publish his new novel had presented itself:
Mailed THE WALKING DRUM to Doubleday today. Brief talk with Tim Seldes of the firm a few days ago when in town and hope to make a deal.
Within just a few weeks Seldes got back to Louis with a rejection letter:
“I am sorry to be returning THE WALKING DRUM to you. I feel the book is certainly better than most historical fiction being published today, but at the same time I think there is a general feeling among my colleagues which I share that the market for all historical fiction has been diminishing recently, and I know that you have a long-term plan in mind for which you want a long-term publishing proposal.”
The “long-term plan” Seldes is referring to relates to Dad’s intention that The Walking Drum would be the first of a trilogy.
Two years later, and likely after repeated tries with other publishers, Louis was ready to give up on the possibility of publishing the book in hardcover and garnering the associated prestige and reviews. For the most part, only hardcovers came to the attention of newspaper and magazine critics, who were vital not only in legitimizing authors but also in attracting new readers. Feeling he had exhausted his contacts in the hardcover world, Dad sent Drum off to Bantam, hoping he could, at least, manage a sale with the company that had become the exclusive publisher of his Westerns.
Given the following entry in his journal, it is clear they were not interested:
My historical didn’t make it and will be shelved temporarily. I shall go ahead with another. I still believe it is better than many, and a good book, but they shy away from the picaresque style, which Saul D. liked as well as I. It is different in some respects and that frightens them off.”
“Saul D.” is Saul David, the editorial director of Bantam, who had left a year or two earlier to take up a career in Hollywood.
Not long after The Walking Drum was returned, Oscar Dystel, the president and CEO of Bantam, visited Southern California. Dad commented:
Oscar Dystel…says my books are selling in great style but tries to talk me out of trying anything else, and of course, I see his point.
By this time in their lives, Oscar and my father had accepted one another as practical professionals. Louis was learning to appreciate that once a publisher had found a good thing it would be unlikely to accept additional risk. Dad also appreciated the chances that Oscar had already taken by agreeing to publish three of his books a year. However, none of this meant that Dad was going to compromise his own goals. Although he had mentioned shelving The Walking Drum, he promptly made one more attempt, sending it out to St. Martin’s Press. When that didn’t work, he pressed ahead with other non-Western projects, noting:
Starting next month I shall do 5 pages of a western every day, and the rest of the time on other things. Stories I would much rather do.
The period between 1962 and 1966 was one of the most productive in Louis’s career. He blasted out eighteen Westerns while still working on some of those “other things,” many of which appear in partial form in Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volumes 1 and 2. Never one to give up, he also rewrote The Walking Drum, and gave it a new title, May There Be a Road.
Eventually, Marc Jaffe, Bantam’s new editorial director, passed along the manuscript to LeBaron R. Barker at Doubleday, at the time one of the largest publishers in the United States. A Doubleday hardcover release followed by a Bantam paperback would have been a match made in heaven; I’m certain that Bantam would have been happy to get involved with Doubleday leading the charge. However, it was, again, not to be. In March of 1967 Marc got back a fairly scathing rejection:
“Dear Marc,
“I’ve now had a chance to read MAY THERE BE A ROAD! by Louis L’Amour and I’ve also had it read by one of my bright young associates. We both agree it would be pretty hard to do much with this book in hardcover and I think it may be of some help to tell you why.
“We have found in recent years that the old-fashioned, swashbuckling historical novel (which I’ve always called the rapier and G-string type) is no longer negotiable. What people apparently want in the historical field (at least in the hardcover market) is a very carefully researched novel which relies far more on history that it does on derring-do. In other words, the readers want to believe that this is the way it really was and they definitely want to learn something from the novel. Style also is important now and readers no longer seem to be interested in hastily written historical romances.
[…]
“It doesn’t mean that the picaresque novel is dead, but unfortunately, Louis L’Amour doesn’t have the horse to pull it. Also, he makes the mistake of needling in a lot of pretty girls, all of which seem exactly alike, and making his hero proficient in Greek, Latin, Arabic, navigation, medicine, geology, business, religion, and swordsmanship. He’s too versatile to be convincing and alas, he’s too wooden.
“Cutting and rewriting would help but it wouldn’t help enough to our way of thinking. I admit that L’Amour has done considerable research which is certainly more interesting than the repeated scenes of violence, but he hasn’t learned to digest his research. Instead, it is dropped in in chunks. Also, he’s moved his hero around too fast and covered too many backgrounds.
[…]
“This is probably a longer answer than you wanted but since you were nice enough to let me have a chance at the manuscript, I thought I would let you know my thinking, which may not coincide with yours at all because the markets are very different. The book may do very well in softcover.
Cordially yours,
Lee Barker”
To his credit, Marc didn’t try to soft-pedal the news. He passed the letter from Barker along to my father, saying:
“There are some pretty negative thoughts here, but you are a pro and I know that you won’t be upset. And at the same time there are some very sound constructive suggestions which you ought to take into consideration either in revising your novel or going to work on a new one.
“I don’t subscribe to everything that Barker has to say, but I do have to admit that Doubleday does an excellent job with their historicals and, generally speaking, they know what they are about.
“What do you think? Do you want to revise the novel? Do you want me to submit it elsewhere in its present form? I am ready to do your bidding.”
I suspect that, pro or not, the Doubleday rejection hit my father pretty hard. He does not seem to have pursued either revising the Kerbouchard story or submitting it anywhere else for many years. He did not, however, give up on the idea of breaking away from writing Westerns. Among other projects he started in 1967 was a contemporary adventure set in China; seventeen chapters of this story can be found in Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 2, in the section titled “Ben Mallory.”
By 1972, lack of acceptance of any of this material caused Dad to develop a new plan to ease his way into other genres, subtly this time. He decided to intertwine his already successful Sackett series of Westerns with characters from fictional families named Chantry and Talon to create a tapestry of adventure stories tha
t would cover the history of the European era in North America. By recasting his writing as “Frontier” rather than “Western” fiction, Louis hoped to broaden what his fans and publishers alike would accept. If he couldn’t simply break away, he would stretch the genre until he had the opportunity to publish more of the sort of international and historical fiction that he wanted to write.
Walking the streets of our West Hollywood neighborhood, Dad could hardly have been unaware that times were changing. More and more the mythos of the West was showing up in the music and fashion of American counterculture. Both that and the oncoming Bicentennial created an opening for him to reinterpret the genre.
In the next decade, my father wrote The Ferguson Rifle, a Chantry novel set just after the Revolutionary War; The Californios, which takes place in Mexican California in the days when it was slowly being invaded by Yankees from the United States…and which contains some intriguing supernatural elements; and Rivers West, a Talon family novel that deals with steamboats, exploration, and political intrigue along the Missouri River in the 1820s. Most important, there is 1975’s Sackett’s Land and its sequel, To the Far Blue Mountains, which allowed Louis to spend a great deal of time in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, as well as the earliest colonies on the Carolina coast. Louis also wrote Fair Blows the Wind, a novel that starts in early North America but then spends the majority of its pages in England and Europe, and The Warrior’s Path, which deals with the Puritans and their paranoia regarding witches, as well as with the pirate stronghold of Port Royal.
The summer of ’82 finally brought some renewed interest in The Walking Drum. Marc Jaffe had left his job at Bantam and found a position at Random House, which, in those days, was a separate company. During a visit to Los Angeles, he and my father caught up with one another’s lives and discussed what their future plans might be. Here are some notes from Louis’s journal:
Yesterday Marc Jaffe dropped by…he had remembered a book submitted to Bantam years ago and put aside because they thought, and mistakenly I believed, that my career should be built around the westerns for which I was acquiring a reputation. He admitted yesterday it might have been a mistake as I had usually been right. And I was: I understood my career and the demands of the market better than they; I’d spent too much time in bookstores listening to buyers, talking to people. The editors were too much in their offices. However, despairing of getting any of my other books he has remembered the historical novel of the 12th century I had written years ago and wants to publish it. Well, not at the moment.
What Jaffe had remembered, along with the existence of The Walking Drum, was that Dad’s contract with Bantam was specifically for Westerns. Attempting to keep his options open, Dad had insisted on the “Westerns” aspect, and, at the pace of two to four books a year, the executives at Bantam probably couldn’t imagine that he would have time to write anything else. This did, however, leave other sorts of material up for grabs by other publishers…exactly as he intended.
But developing a competing publishing relationship was not exactly the plan. While my father respected Marc personally—indeed, at the time I doubt there was anyone else in the business he’d rather have worked with—Dad always had the long game in mind:
My contract with Bantam is almost up…THE WALKING DRUM, which was my working title, needs some fresh work…by Xmas time it will be a good bargaining piece. I shall have it and I shall sell it for a price, a good price, to one or the other…I have already been cutting (I over-write at times) months ago with something of this nature in mind, or to have it ready for the future. We shall see! I am pleased.
“Pleased” may have been too mild a way of putting it. Dad had been working for ten years to set the stage for this moment: an opportunity to publish material outside the Western genre. He had been planning many of the books he wanted to write for more than twice that long. Of course, he could always have taken The Walking Drum or any other non-Western book to a smaller publisher, and very likely he’d have gotten it released. His goal, however, was not to just do it to prove it was possible, but to get the chess pieces set up so that the move would grant him more success, advance his career artistically, and preferably do both with the team that already knew how to sell his work best.
The next move occurred by wintertime. At a dinner one night with Lou Wolfe, CEO of Bantam, my mother strategically mentioned Louis’s historical novels and, in particular, The Walking Drum. Wolfe showed a great deal of interest, and either because it was sincere or simply because Louis had let it be known that others might be in the market, a lucrative deal was promptly put into the works.
Though my father’s popularity had been increasing since his earliest days at Bantam, the most critical years had been the previous ten; Louis hadn’t simply weathered the storm of the 1960s and ’70s, he had thrived. For several years Bantam had also been producing its own hardback books; so the hurdle of an additional publisher, one that did not have an ongoing investment in Louis L’Amour, was out of the way. With a new contract in the works and a book that could go elsewhere virtually finished, my father was, for the first time in his career and at seventy-five years old, in a position to dictate terms.
On May 28, 1983, he wrote:
Mailed THE WALKING DRUM away yesterday after rewriting original version and cutting substantially. Written sometime ago but a valid story and a lot of fun for me. I believe I will get new fans but some of the old ones will not like anything but the westerns. It may fall right on its face, but we shall see. It is something I like doing, and nothing ventured nothing gained. I have always believed in pushing a little further.
Though he had high hopes, the years of rejection had prepared Dad for some blowback. At some point before publication, he jotted down the following explanation, as if he needed one, which he briefly considered including in the book:
WHY I WROTE THE WALKING DRUM:
Contentment is not a house on the way to success, and nothing is more dangerous to a writer than to be satisfied with what he has done. Each book may be pleasing in its way (that was the intent) but each should only be a step on the way to something better.
I write stories I would like to read. The European adventurer has ever been the swashbuckler, but in Asia he is more apt to be the conniver, the man who can out-wit the others, and I decided to write of a man who was both.
The 12th century was a time of beginning. The Renaissance was only a few years away but the things that were to bring it about were already happening. The people of the time, and this includes many of the scholars, did not have our knowledge of civilizations that had gone before, so when in southern Italy and elsewhere statues were unearthed of surpassing beauty, many were filled with amazement. Of course, such statues and sculptures had been seen on old buildings, but these new found figures had been buried.
What had happened? Only a few had access to books of history, and the average man had little or no conception of what had gone before. Now he was not only astonished, he was uneasy.
Moreover, Crusaders were returning from the Holy Land and places en route with stories to tell of marvelous things seen, felt and tasted. They encountered silken garments and spices, many of them for the first time, and were suddenly aware of other worlds, other places, other peoples.
Perhaps one of the greatest factors leading to the Renaissance were the merchant caravans that moved across Europe carrying goods to be sold at the fairs at such places as Provins, St. Denis, Cologne and elsewhere. These merchants were rarely such men as we know today; most of them were landless men, former mercenary soldiers, pirates, men who literally belonged nowhere. A landless man in those days was outside the law, beholden to nobody, respected by nobody. Then they began to band together using capital resulting from some pirate voyage or loot from the wars.
Of necessity they spoke many languages, for their trade covered all of Europe and the outer limits
of Asia. Latin and Arabic were the two most widely used languages but a half-dozen tongues were spoken in Moslem Spain on a regular basis. Aside from the Iberians and Goths who had made up much of the population conquered by the Arabs, there were Berbers from North Africa, Jews and Franks.
The merchant caravans passed over borders, in and out of countries, trading wherever they went, buying goods, selling what they brought and buying the goods of the country they visited. This brought about a great inter-change of ideas, as well as the exchange of exotic dress materials, spices, perfumes, weapons, gems, everything in which a customer could be interested.
Unhappily our schools have concentrated on Europe and America, almost as if the rest of the world did not exist. We were a reading family with books always about with my sister a teacher and librarian, my oldest brother a newspaperman, so fortunately I had a better background in history than many. Like my brothers I had inherited a number of historical novels by G. A. Henty from an uncle and I read them all, which may have something to do with my subsequent writing interests.
Even so, it was not until I was in what is now Indonesia as a merchant seaman that I made what to me was a revolutionary discovery. I was briefly in port on the island of Celebes, now called Sulawesi. I heard some talk of an interesting ruin on a small island off the coast and hired an Arab boy to sail me over. En route I asked him how long he had been in the Indies, and he said his family had been there for 400 years. I was astonished, for nothing had prepared me for such an idea. I plied him with questions, then began to read all I could find. During a brief stop in Singapore I found quite a library of such information and spent as much time as possible reading.
The Walking Drum (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures) Page 46