Louis LAmour - Big Medicine

by Jon Tuska

L ouis Dearborn LaMoore (1908-1988) was born in Jamestown, North Dakota. He left home at fifteen and subsequently held a variety of jobs although he worked mostly as a merchant seaman. From his earliest youth, LAmour had a love of verse. His first published work was a poem, The Chap Worth While, appearing when he was eighteen years old in his former hometowns newspaper, the Jamestown Sun. It is the only poem from his early years that he left out of Smoke From This Altar, which appeared in 1939 from Lusk Publishers in Oklahoma City, a book which LAmour published himself; however, this poem is reproduced in The Louis LAmour Companion (Andrews and McMeel, 1992) edited by Robert Weinberg. LAmour wrote poems and articles for a number of small circulation arts magazines all through the early 1930s and, after hundreds of rejection slips, finally had his first story accepted, Anything for a Pal in True Gang Life (10/35). He returned in 1938 to live with his family where they settled in Choctaw, Oklahoma, determined to make writing his career. He wrote a fight story bought by Standard Magazines that year and became acquainted with editor Leo Margulies who was to play an important role later in LAmours life. The Town No Guns Could Tame in New Western (3/40) was his first published Western story.

During the Second World War LAmour was drafted and ultimately served with the U.S. Army Transportation Corps in Europe. However, in the two years before he was shipped out, he managed to write a great many adventure stories for Standard Magazines. The first story he published in 1946, the year of his discharge, was a Western, Law of the Desert Born in Dime Western (4/46). A call to Leo Margulies resulted in LAmours agreeing to write Western stories for the various Western pulp magazines published by Standard Magazines, a third of which appeared under the byline Jim Mayo, the name of a character in LAmours earlier adventure fiction. The proposal for LAmour to write new Hopalong Cassidy novels came from Margulies who wanted to launch Hopalong Cassidys Western Magazine to take advantage of the popularity William Boyds old films and new television series were enjoying with a new generation. Doubleday & Company agreed to publish the pulp novelettes in hard-cover books. LAmour was paid $500 a story, no royalties, and he was assigned the house name Tex Burns. LAmour read Clarence E. Mulfords books about the Bar-20 and based his Hopalong Cassidy on Mulfords original creation. Only two issues of the magazine appeared before it ceased publication. Doubleday felt that the Hopalong character had to appear exactly as William Boyd did in the films and on television and thus even the first two novels had to be revamped to meet with this requirement prior to publication in book form.

LAmours first Western novel under his own byline was Westward the Tide (Worlds Work, 1950). It was rejected by every American publisher to which it was submitted. Worlds Work paid a flat 75 without royalties for British Empire rights in perpetuity. LAmour sold his first Western short story to a slick magazine a year later, The Gift of Cochise in Colliers (7/5/52). Robert Fellows and John Wayne purchased screen rights to this story from LAmour for $4,000 and James Edward Grant, one of Waynes favorite screenwriters, developed a script from it, changing LAmours Ches Lane to Hondo Lane. LAmour retained the right to novelize Grants screenplay, which differs substantially from his short story, and he was able to get an endorsement from Wayne to be used as a blurb, stating that Hondo was the finest Western Wayne had ever read. Hondo (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1953) by Louis LAmour was released on the same day as the film, Hondo (Warner, 1953), with a first printing of 320,000 copies.

With Showdown at Yellow Butte (Ace, 1953) by Jim Mayo, LAmour began a series of short Western novels for Don Wollheim that could be doubled with other short novels in Ace Publishings paperback two-fers. Advances on these were $800 and usually the author never earned any royalties. Heller With A Gun (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1955) was the first of a series of original Westerns LAmour had agreed to write under his own name following the success for Fawcett of Hondo. LAmour wanted even this early to have his Western novels published in hardcover editions. He expanded Guns of the Timberland by Jim Mayo in West (9/50) for Guns of the Timberlands (Jason Press, 1955), a hardcover Western for which he was paid an advance of $250. Another novel for Jason Press followed and then Silver Caon (Avalon Books, 1956) for Thomas Bouregy & Company. These were basically lending library publishers and the books seldom earned much money above small advances paid.

The great turn in LAmours fortunes came about because of problems Saul David was having with his original paperback Westerns program at Bantam Books. Fred Glidden had been signed to a contract to produce two original paperback Luke Short Western novels a year for an advance of $15,000 each. It was a long-term contract but, in the first ten years of it, Fred only wrote six novels. Literary agent Marguerite Harper then pursuaded Bantam that Freds brother, Jon, could help fulfill the contract and Jon was signed for eight Peter Dawson Western novels. When Jon died suddenly before completing even one book for Bantam, Harper managed to engage a ghost writer at the Disney studios to write these eight Peter Dawson novels, beginning with