The piled lumber Louis mentions often left gaps or overhangs, some well off the ground, which were shelter of a sort. But if you had a few cents, the vastly preferred place to spend the night was the Seaman’s Church Institute, sort of a YMCA for seamen. “Survival,” another story of that time, was based on a story that Louis had heard in his time around the Seaman’s Institute, but many gaps in the narrative have been filled with his own material, and it is populated with mostly fictional characters.
Louis left San Pedro on a voyage that would eventually take him around the world and “Thicker Than Blood” and “The Admiral” are drawn from that experience. I don’t know if the events in these stories are true in whole or in part, but buried in among Louis’s papers I found the following photographs…
To the right is Leonard Duks, first mate of the SS Steel Worker and Louis’s nemesis on a voyage that took them from San Pedro west to Japan, China, the Dutch East Indies, the Federated Malay States, Aden Arabia, the Suez Canal, and on into Brooklyn, New York. I don’t know if Duks truly lived up to his fictional reputation in “Thicker Than Blood,” but Louis didn’t like the man and appointed himself as a spokesman for the crew’s complaints about the unbelievably bad food and other various working conditions.
The ship did not call in Shanghai twice, so much of “The Admiral” may be fictional. However, the note on the back of the next photograph suggests otherwise. It reads, “Tony and Joe taken on the beach at Balikpapan (Borneo). Tony is the one in ‘The Admiral.’”
Additional photographs from Balikpapan include one of the Steel Worker at anchor with much of what looks like their cargo of pipe in the foreground…
And the following, which reads, “Luflander, Malay barber, myself at eighteen, Balikpapan, Borneo.”
“The Admiral” was originally published by Story, a magazine which was very prestigious at the time, and Louis’s being included raised some favorable comment. Dad, more than anything, wanted to continue in this vein. He imagined a cycle of stories about San Pedro and another cycle that took place in Shanghai, both utilizing loosely interconnected sets of colorful characters; hoboes and seamen, soldiers of fortune and gangsters, historical characters and working stiffs just trying to get by.
However, he also needed to get paid. The literary magazines paid on publication and while that was bad enough when the stories were scheduled months ahead of time, often they were not scheduled at all: the story was accepted but the editor had no idea when he would run it and thus no idea when he would pay. The pulp magazines, which published a far less literary fare, paid better and, more important, they paid faster, sending out a check the moment they accepted a story. Ultimately, Louis found this combination hard to beat. At times, though, he did wonder rather wistfully about what kind of career he would have had if he’d been able to keep writing in this more “personal adventure, personal experience” style.
“The Dancing Kate” seems to mix some of the more realistic elements of those “personal experience” stories with those of a pulp adventure while “Glorious! Glorious!” returns to the more anti-heroic style. Louis could not have participated in the Riffian War where the forces of Abdel-Krim fought both the Spanish and the French Foreign Legions but the Steel Worker did sail the Moroccan coast during its final days. “Off the Mangrove Coast” has a plot similar to a story that Louis told about his own life, a story where he and several others unsuccessfully attempted to salvage a riverboat that was supposedly full of the treasure that a rajah from the Federated Malay States took with him when some form of uprising forced him from power. “The Cross and the Candle” is also based on an actual experience, though I do not believe that Louis was there for the climax of the story or that he played a part in solving the murder of the man’s ill-fated sweetheart.
“A Friend of the General” is interesting because there is no indication of when it was written. I suspect that Louis wrote it quite late in his career, possibly in 1979 or ’80, in order to include it in the collection Yondering. Louis’s unit, a Quartermaster’s Truck Company, was based out of Château de Spoir, home of the Count and Countess Dulong du Rosney. The count and countess had indeed moved into a gardener’s cottage across the road from the château itself. The “cottage” (more appropriately, the home of the estate manager) was of a style and size that would have attracted notice even in Beverly Hills, so they were nicely housed even though first the German and then the American army had taken over the main residence. The Countess Dulong du Rosney has no memory of Lt. Louis L’Amour, Parisian black-market cafés, or the mysterious “General,” but she still may have been the model for the countess in the story. When I spoke to her a few years ago it was obvious that she had that same sense of unflappable self-assurance. The story of the ill-fated arms merchant Milton is one that Louis told many times as if it were true, suggesting that he was teaching boxing at a fencing and martial arts academy in Frenchtown (a section of old Shanghai) at the time.
With “East of Gorontalo” we bid adieu to the group of stories based closely on Louis’s life experience, and launch into three different series he created between 1938 and 1948 for Leo Margulies at Standard Magazines, a company that owned Thrilling Adventures and many others. Although there are few of Louis’s personal experiences in the stories of tramp freighter captain Jim Mayo and the “pilots of fortune” Turk Madden and Steve Cowan, many of the locations were places that he had visited during what Louis called his “knocking around” period. In fact, in his collection Night Over the Solomons, Louis claimed that in the case of Kolombangara Island in 1943, a story of his had closely echoed reality:
Shortly after my story [“Night Over the Solomons”] was published the Navy discovered this Japanese base of which I had written. I am sure my story had nothing to do with its discovery and doubt if the magazine in which it was published had reached the South Pacific at the time.
My decision to locate a Japanese base on Kolombangara was not based on any inside information but simple logic. We had troops fighting on Guadalcanal. If the Japanese wished to harass our supply lines, where would they locate their base?
From my time at sea I had a few charts and I dug out the one on the Solomons. Kolombangara was the obvious solution. There was a place where an airfield could be built, a deep harbor where ships could bring supplies and lie unnoticed unless a plane flew directly over the harbor, which was well hidden. No doubt the Japanese had used the same logic in locating their base and the Navy in discovering it.
He went on to note that while his hero reached the island from a torpedoed ship, both an American pilot and John F. Kennedy had been stranded in the vicinity of Kolombangara under circumstances that would have fit his fictional story to perfection.
Louis’s knowledge of the operation and layout of Mayo’s ship, the Semiramis, came from the time that he had spent as an able-bodied seaman on similar ships and his years of working as a longshoreman and then a Cargo Control Officer at San Francisco’s Port of Embarkation during the early days of World War II. The interest in aircraft and the appreciation of the freedom of a tramp flier was gleaned from his good friend Bob Roberts who had lived that life, though never in the Far East.
As Louis moved on through the next two stages of his career, writing crime stories and then westerns, many of the elements found in these early adventure stories continued to appear. His fictional Far East was crowded with types modeled on American gangsters, similar to the crooked sports promoters and gamblers in his stories of the boxing ring, and the Semiramis and its crew could almost stand in for a more racially diverse version of one of the beleaguered cattle outfits that his western characters later rode for. In a way his transition from one genre to another was more of a blurring of the lines or a recombining of elements.
For a more in-depth look at all of these stories and more information on this collection visit us at louislamourgreatadventure.com.
Over the next three years we will continue this program with the publication of The Frontier Stor
ies, Volume Five in 2007. The following year we will bring out a collection of crime and boxing stories and then, finally, one last collection of westerns, The Frontier Stories, Volume Seven. I certainly hope you enjoyed this collection and that you find these next few equally pleasurable.
Beau L’Amour
Los Angeles, California
2006
About Louis L’Amour
“I think of myself in the oral tradition—as a troubadour, a village taleteller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That’s the way I’d like to be remembered—as a storyteller. A good storyteller.”
It is doubtful that any author could be as at home in the world recreated in his novels as Louis Dearborn L’Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally “walked the land my characters walk.” His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L’Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.
Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L’Amour could trace his own family in North America back to the early 1600s and follow their steady progression westward, “always on the frontier.” As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family’s frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.
Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L’Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs, including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, miner, and an officer in the transportation corps during World War II. During his “yondering” days he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies, and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.
Mr. L’Amour “wanted to write almost from the time I could talk.” After developing a widespread following for his many frontier and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L’Amour published his first full-length novel, Hondo, in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 120 books is in print; there are more than 300 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.
His hardcover bestsellers include The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel), Jubal Sackett, Last of the Breed, and The Haunted Mesa. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L’Amour stories are available on cassettes and CDs from Random House Audio publishing.
The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L’Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life’s work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.
Louis L’Amour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the L’Amour publishing tradition forward with new books written by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam.
Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour
ASK YOUR BOOKSELLER FOR THE BOOKS YOU HAVE MISSED.
NOVELS
Bendigo Shafter
Borden Chantry
Brionne
The Broken Gun
The Burning Hills
The Californios
Callaghen
Catlow
Chancy
The Cherokee Trail Comstock Lode
Conagher
Crossfire Trail
Dark Canyon
Down the Long Hills The Empty Land
Fair Blows the Wind
Fallon
The Ferguson Rifle
The First Fast Draw
Flint
Guns of the Timberlands
Hanging Woman Creek
The Haunted Mesa
Heller with a Gun
The High Graders
High Lonesome
Hondo
How the West Was Won
The Iron Marshal
The Key-Lock Man
Kid Rodelo
Kilkenny
Killoe
Kilrone
Kiowa Trail
Last of the Breed
Last Stand at Papago Wells
The Lonesome Gods
The Man Called Noon
The Man from the Broken Hills
The Man from Skibbereen
Matagorda
Milo Talon
The Mountain Valley War
North to the Rails
Over on the Dry Side
Passin’ Through
The Proving Trail
The Quick and the Dead
Radigan
Reilly’s Luck
The Rider of Lost Creek
Rivers West
The Shadow Riders Shalako
Showdown at Yellow Butte
Silver Canyon
Son of a Wanted Man
Taggart
The Tall Stranger
To Tame a Land
Tucker
Under the Sweetwater Rim
Utah Blaine
The Walking Drum
Westward the Tide
Where the Long Grass Blows
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Beyond the Great Snow Mountains
Bowdrie
Bowdrie’s Law
Buckskin Run
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour (vols. 1–4)
Dutchman’s Flat
End of the Drive
From the Listening Hills
The Hills of Homicide
Law of the Desert Born
Long Ride Home
Lonigan
May There Be a Road
Monument Rock
Night over the Solomons
Off the Mangrove Coast
The Outlaws of Mesquite
The Rider of the Ruby Hills
Riding for the Brand
The Strong Shall Live
The Trail to Crazy Man
Valley of the Sun
War Party
West from Singapore
West of Dodge
With These Hands
Yondering
SACKETT TITLES
Sackett’s Land
To the Far Blue Mountains
The Warrior’s Path
Jubal Sackett
Ride the River
The Daybreakers
Sackett
Lando
Mojave Crossing
Mustang Man
The Lonely Men
Galloway
Treasure Mountain
Lonely on the Mountain
Ride the Dark Trail
The Sackett Brand
The Sky-Liners
THE HOPALONG CASSIDY NOVELS
The Riders of the High Rock
The Rustlers of West Fork
The Trail to Seven Pines
Trouble Shooter
NONFICTION
Education of a Wandering Man
Frontier
THE SACKETT COMPANION: A Personal Guide to the Sackett Novels
A TRAIL OF MEMORIES: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, compiled by Angelique L’Amour
POETRY
Smoke from This Altar
THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF LOUIS L’AMOUR
The Adventure Stories: Volume Four
A Bantam Book / November 2006
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2006 by Louis and Katherine L’Amour Trust
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90307-2
v3.0
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four Page 85