Louis LAmour - The Hills of Homicide

Contents

This book is dedicated to
honesty in publishing.

Foreword

One evening in the Brown Derby on Vine Street in Hollywood I was introduced to a former convict who had written a book. Several of us were talking but I believe it was that gentleman who told the story of a man who had been arrested a number of times for petty crimes. For each he served but a few weeks or months in jail.

Someone got the idea that if this man were taught to read and write he would then get a job and live a decent life.

He was taught to read and write, became an excellent penman and within months was back in jail, for forgery!

Only that time he got three years.

T HE HILLS OF Homicide is a special collection that I have put together of my detective and crime stories. They were written in the so-called hard-boiled style for magazines that also featured the work of writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich. Although I am best known for my fiction about the American frontier, theres no reason why a person who is known for stories about one area cannot write successful stories in another. Good storytelling can be applied to any area at any time.

The detective genre fascinated me right from the beginning of my professional writing career. I had travelled around cities a good deal all over the world and of course one of the major differences between the detective story and the frontier story is that the former generally takes place around a city. Ive also known many police officers through the years from whom I learned a great deal, I met a lot of characters through my professional prizefighting days, and of course, during recent years, I suppose everybody has become increasingly familiar with crime since its happening everywhere. In beginning to do detective stories, I just applied the situations that I knew and with which I had made myself familiar through experience or research.

One of the questions most often asked of an author is: Where do you get your ideas?

The obvious reply is that one must have ideas if one is to become a writer, but that would be only half the truth.

Story ideas can come from anywhere and everywhere, but one must be quick to perceive them. They can be derived from a chance remark, a happening, a word, a place, or a person. To become successful as a writer one must become story-minded, that is, he must become able to perceive the story value of what he sees, hears, or learns. An idea that offers riches to one might be useless to another. Hence the idea is less than what the writer brings to the idea.

Each writer brings to his profession his personal viewpoint and experience. Ten persons given the same idea would come up with ten entirely different stories. Hence it is what one does with the idea that matters.

When I wrote the original magazine versions of the stories in this volume there were times when I might be working on a detective story in the morning and a western story in the afternoon or vice versa. As I mentioned above, there are differences in the approach to the two kinds of writing. The detective protagonist does not usually come to fear the land as much as the characters in a frontier story. A man travelling in the West finds himself off the beaten track many times and away from any help or any aid that he couldnt devise for himself. When he was lucky, he could find a few other people like himself.

In detective stories, the characters come to fear the people they have to associate with in the city. Of course, the character strengths that the men and women in these detective stories draw upon to resolve their conflicts would stand them in good stead in the struggles of survival that I write about in my frontier stories in previous collections like BOWDRIE, BUCKSKIN RUN, and THE STRONG SHALL LIVE. For that matter, Chick Bowdrie, the Texas Ranger featured in all of the stories in BOWDRIE would have the skills to solve many of the cases in this book with surprisingly few adjustments for the difference in period. Ive been encouraged to put this collection together from many of the readers who responded favorably to my only previous collection of essentially non-frontier stories, YONDERING.

I hope you enjoy THE HILLS OF HOMICIDE.

Louis LAmour

Los Angeles, California

July 1983

THE HILLS OF HOMICIDE

THE IMPOSSIBLE MURDER

T HE STATION WAGON jolted over a rough place in the blacktop, and I opened my eyes and sat up. Nothing had changed. When you are in the desert, you are in the desert, and it looks it. We had been driving through the same sort of country when I fell asleep, the big mesa that shouldered against the skyline ahead being the only change.

Ranagats right up ahead, about three, four miles. Shanks, who was driving me, was a thin-faced little man who sat sideways in the seat and steered with his left hand on the wheel. You wont see the town until we get close.

Near that mesa?

Right up against it. Small town, about four hundred people when theyre all home. Being off the state highway, no tourists ever go there. Nothin to see, anyway.

No boot hill? Nearly all of the little mining towns in this section have a boot hill, and from the look of them, shooting up your neighbors must have been the outstanding recreation in the old days.

Oh, sure. Not many in this one, though. About fifteen or twenty with markers, but they buried most of them without any kind of a slab. This boot hill couldnt hold a candle to Pioche. Over there they buried seventy-five before the first one died of natural causes.

Rough place.

You said it. Speakin of guys gettin killed, they had a murder in Ranagat the other night. Old fellow, got more money than you could shake a stick at.

Murder, you say?

Uh-huh. They dont know who done it, yet, but you neednt worry. Old Jerry will catch him. Thats Jerry Loftus, the sheriff. Hes a smart old coot, rustled a few cows himself in the old days. He can sling a gun, too. Dont think he cant. Not that he looks like much, but he could fool you.

Shanks put a cigarette between his lips and lit it with a match cupped in his right hand. Bitner, his name was. Thats the dead man, I mean. He jerked his cigarette toward the mesa. Lived up there.

On top? From where I sat, the wall of sheer, burnt-red sandstone looked impossible to climb. Howd he get up there?

From Ranagat. Thats the joker in this case, mister. Only one way up there, an that way is in plain sight of most of Ranagat, an goes right by old Johnny Holbens door. Nobody could ever get up that trail without being seen by Johnny.

The trail goes up through a cut in the rock, and believe me, its the only way to get on top. At a wide place in the cut, Johnny Holben has a cabin, an hes a suspicious old coot. He built there to annoy Bitner because they had it in for each other. Used to be partners, one time. Prospected all this country together an then set up a company to work their mines. Bitner and Holben, they called it. Things went fine for a while, an they made a mint of money. Then they had trouble an split up.

Holben kill him?

Some folks think so, but others say no. Bitners got him a niece, a right pretty girl named Karen. She came up here to see him, and two days after she gets here he gets murdered. A lot of folks figure that was a mighty funny thing, her being heiress to all that money, an everything.