“The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour, Volume 4” (Bantam Books, 672 pages, $24)
The short stories in the latest collection by the late Louis L’Amour are primarily set in the Far East and tailor-made for a few James Bond feature films.
Yet the name L’Amour usually reminds us of his marvelous Westerns. Ninety of them were turned into feature films and movies for television, starring the likes of Tom Selleck, Yul Brynner, Alan Ladd and Katherine Ross. L’Amour is the only novelist to receive both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Not bad for a boy born in the farm country of North Dakota.
Born in 1901, L’Amour was always an avid reader with a particular bent for poetry, and he gave it a serious try. But when he failed to find a publisher for his poems, he turned to short stories based on his experiences as he traveled west to work on the docks and then to the Far East. Of the hundreds he wrote, 45 appear in Volume 4.
The setting of the first story is in the remote mountains of Tibet. Anna Doone had come to join her father, an American medical missionary and her uncle, a noted anthropologist. But both are dead, killed by the renegade army that once belonged to a native warlord. To survive, Anna has learned the dialect that the general in power understands. In “May There Be a Road,” a young man returns to claim his bride but first must cross a treacherous bridge, unaware of the danger that awaits him on the other side.
“By the Waters of San Tadeo” tells of a young woman who sailed with her dreamer father to a lonely inlet on the coast of Chile. But her father is not well, and Julie realizes their only hope of survival is to deal with Pete Kubeli, the unscrupulous trader.
The next major section of the collection features Ponga Jim Mayo. The first story, “In East of Gorontalo,” introduces Jim as he hangs out in the Celebes. Jim and a British officer discuss the possibilities of the rumor that while Eng-
land is busy in Europe, the Japanese will make a move to pick up some of her colonies in the Far East, maybe even the Dutch Celebes. They notices a ship riding high in the harbor and speculate about the cargo she will pick up. That night, Jim climbs on board, and the excitement begins.
Featured in the first story of the next section, “Ornament FPO,” is Britisher Turk Madden, who flies freight and lands his Grumman amphibian along the Eromanger coast and soon discovers how much business is changing.
The final hero is Steven Cowan who, in “Mission to Siberut,” taxies his amphibian plane on a patch of water into Siberut among the Mentawi Islands only to confront a Kawasaki 93 bomber-reconnaissance plane.
Every story in this latest collection comes alive with the details of place only L’Amour’s experience could provide. A classic L’Amour collection yet with a decidedly new and intriguing flavor.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who writes a monthly column on new regional fiction.
