An Unfinished Novel

Borden Chantry II - Chapter 1
Here we present in serialized form, Louis L’Amour’s last, unfinished novel. Several chapters of the exciting sequel to the Louis L'Amour classic Borden Chantry.

He frowned, watching a distant buzzard against the sky. Something was wrong in his town, something he should know about but did not. He was a sensitive man, and he felt an uneasiness that should not be there. He shook his head, irritated with himself. He was becoming a fool, imagining things that were not there.

The Freeze - Given his interest in science and various phenomena it is actually kind of surprising that Louis didn’t try to create more stories like this one which seems a perfect melding of his love for wilderness survival and the great mysteries of pre-history.

We should have known, all of us. It had happened before and there was nothing to prevent it happening again. We had the evidence...a dozen times mammoths or bison had been found frozen and completely preserved, even with green grass in their stomachs. The last time it had happened, a chap from Columbia University had established the time by carbon-dating...28,000 years before.

Continued . . .

Complete Story Treatment

Investment in Character - Although Dad liked to write a story out end to end without knowing exactly what was going to happen, occasionally he would write a treatment in order to explore where a story might go or to try to convince someone to buy it before it was written.

He has been cheated!

Then it all adds up, the old man on the train, his own free talk about what he was going to do, his plans, ect.. The arrival in town, introduction, and the game. He is enraged, but suddenly, he has a plan.

Continued . . .

Louis' Notes on the Novel

To the Far Blue Mountains - Dad’s hand written notes where he set down some of his ideas for the second Sackett novel.

Continued . . .

Adventure Travel Article

The Lost Golden City of Manos - Lands of Romance was a competitor to National Geographic that lasted only a few years. The Lost Golden City of Manos was one of a series of travel articles that Dad wrote for Lands of Romance.

Somewhere, in a vast, lonely region of Brazilian jungle, in a curious blend of beauty and sudden death, is a ruined city. The fabulous Golden City of Manos, the lost religious capital of a vanished civilization.

Continued . . .

To understand what the materials in this site mean and to understand what role they played in Louis's creative process you must know a bit about how he worked and what his methods were.

First and foremost, Louis L'Amour's talents were shaped by the economic realities of the 1930s. In those days there was a tremendous market for short stories. They were mostly published in magazines and they were broken up into roughly three categories; the quality or literary magazines, which ran the more cutting edge or "arty" stories; the "slick" (so called because of the glossy paper they used) magazines, which ran all the best stories written by the most popular authors; and the "pulps" (using rough pulp paper like a newspaper or paperback book) which ran the widest variety of material to a more man-on-the-street type of audience.

Because the quality publications rarely paid anything at all and the slick magazines didn't pay until the story actually came out, Louis wrote mostly for the pulps. The rates were low, often very low, but if they accepted your story they would pay right away and, for a man living on the edge of poverty, right away was important.

Continued . . . .