I'm a little embarrassed that I got the title wrong, but I heard it in the audiobook so that's just how it sounded to me.

You mentioned you got flack for NO TRAVELER RETURNS from some fans. What was the nature of it? I would have thought LL fans would have been prepared for such things, given the range of the type of books he was publishing before his passing. Very few traditional westerns in those last years...PASSIN' THROUGH is the last one I remember, and I recall having a hard time getting through it. Didn't the main character speak in formal English initially and then drawled through the latter half? I'm I imagining this? I'll have to pick up the LT edition and read the postscript...

There are a group of crabby fans who seem very unhappy with me for publishing anything that is not what they want out of a LL novel, meaning a Western. It's ridiculous because I KNOW THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT and that is why I pretty much gave them all the LL Westerns in existence in the 1990s! Now when they see a new LL book that is not a Western they complain ... some seem to buy the book without looking and then carp about that it wasn't what they expected.

So I get mail from people acting like I've ripped them off for daring to publish NTR. They bought it, ship on the cover and all, hallucinating it was a Western because LL's name is on it. I got some angry letters about the Law of the Desert Born Graphic Novel saying that they bought it then discovered it "was just a comic book" ... well it SAYS "a Graphic Novel" on the cover. There's also the people who blame me for writing the LL novels they simply didn't like, sometimes books that were published years before I was born or believe I wrote more than I did on, say, the Hopalong Cassidy novels.

In my opinion there is, so far, are only stories where I put in elements that were sort of out of style.

1) The character development of the female protagonist in By the Waters of San Tadeo. The ending needed some work and the best way to resolve the story was to have her transform herself into a bit more of a "shoot first" bad ass than Dad probably would have done.

2) The resolution of With These Hands where the protagonist returns from the wilds and is still haunted by his experience ... he's sort of not yet over it, not ready to return to his normal life. It created something more poignant than simply surviving. I think that Dad intended an ending like that but didn't figure out how to write it at the time.

There are PLENTY of times I've cut and written and added and subtracted but truly I couldn't tell where my voice started and his stopped, or where his resumed ... except for those two because, like I was saying about Skyring Water, it is my opinion that his STYLE was getting in the way of his INTENTION, and I went with what I hope was his intention. On the big moves (note that the two examples above were both endings) intention is the more important factor.

This is even true with The Diamond of Jeru where Most of the words (like 95%) are mine. Even though I changed the style of how the original story's plot was told (to something less campy) I was still able to keep it in a style that was very similar to LL and was able to stick with his intention for the story as a whole pretty well. I don't consider that one to have gone off the style reservation like the two short stories I mentioned did.

With NTR it was a different situation. Dad and I were co-authors. My name is on it. That said I did everything I could to stay consistent with his style and with his intention for the book. It was easy because in that case, as in many others, the two did not conflict. There's a LOT more LL detail in that book than LL put into it.

An extreme example (that no one but my mom or sister would catch) is the lights of the car coming up the hill on the ceiling of the Hollywood Hills bedroom on Dennis McGuire's last night in LA. That image is directly from my parents bedroom when we lived in West Hollywood. The lights of cars crawling up the steep hill would shine through the foliage outside and the shutters inside the house and make these great arcing patterns on the ceiling as they moved past. There are other bits but that's the most personal to me and to our lives. It's actually a very Los Angeles detail but I'm not sure why but that's why it's in the story, Dennis McGuire is leaving a life he could have had in LA ... a life Louis and my mother DID have.

peter

Thanks! I'm sure people would have fewer complaints if I was simply writing my own stuff ... but then the complainers probably wouldn't be reading it!

Those were all very different projects with different goals

- NTR was the missing story in the Yondering Series and the goal was to make it fit in that style.

- TDOJ is super complicated because I rewrote Dad's kind of campy (aimed at the 1950s "Men's Adventure" type of magazine) short story into the sort of thing that he might have written for the more sophisticated Saturday Evening Post or Colliers in the same era. Then we turned it into a movie and I expanded it a good deal to cover the story of the Lacklans more completely AND many others had various sorts of input. There's no "one writer" on a movie once you've included everyone who has the power to have input on the script. Then the audio expanded it once again, adding in the story of the Borneo natives (which explains how Jeru became JERU) and I tried to solve some of the problems that came up in the film as well as including many things I'd learned making the film.

- LOTDB was also complicated. We had originally intended to do Son of a Wanted Man, since I had a script ready to go. It was actually TOO ready to go because I was in discussions with a producer about making it into a movie. The producer was concerned that if a film company discovered the Graphic Novel rights were being exploited by someone else then they would no longer be interested in the film ... so we shifted to Law of the Desert Born. SOAWM ended up not being optioned as a film but it took many months to get to that point.

Now SOAWM (you can listen to the audio to hear the movie script) is a MUCH more traditionally written script. It's a Classic Western similar to Red River. LOTDB was intentionally turned into something very different a neo Western or Noir Western or something. The sort of "film" (because it was also a film script) that had a deeply "independent" and kind of edgy sensibility.

I had wanted to have several film scripts ready to go in differing styles. That sort of edgy Western seemed to be a good fit for the world of comics. Traditional westerns aren't accepted in comics at ALL in the USA (they, oddly, have more of a tradition in Europe) but Westerns with zombies and aliens and stuff like that does sell in the American market. So we weren't really bothered when we shifted to LOTDB. But some L'Amour readers were FREAKED out. We got a lot of blow back in social media even before the book came out and then when it did there was even more ... but it was sort of like "how dare you make a comic book."

That sort of response doesn't bother me that much because those people are just saying, "I am not ever going to be part of the market for this product." They didn't want it to exist in the first place ... which is odd because all they have to do is not buy it!

Then there were those who were horrified at the language. There are cuss words in it. I've gone into this before but, quickly: the first paragraph of the short story actually describes one of the characters cussing, but doesn't say the horrible offending words. We kept it pretty PG (and mostly in Spanish) in the Graphic Novel but as soon as you move away from the purely imaginary prose text and into pictures and dialog you have to get more "real." Same with a movie or audio. Sometimes you can do that without "realistic" language and sometimes you can't. It depends on the style you are setting ... again, SOAWM was much more traditional.

On the comics (meaning non LL fans) side the reaction was a mixed bag too. The younger and really out there comics fans were never going to be interested in a Western. The older and more sophisticated aficionados seemed to really get into it. We got a LOT of good press, "One of the Years Best" at the Village Voice, a nomination for an Eisner Award (like an Oscar in comics!) and some really good reviews. It did what we wanted to do, it moved LL's work out of its comfort zone and in to a very different realm.

In the end adaptations and the like are like "covers" in the music business. A "cover band" may end up playing at weddings but the covers that are interesting and get all the airplay are the new take on an old favorite. Think of the instrumental version vs the rock version of Clapton's Layla! Listen to the album version of Concrete Blonde's Ghost Riders in the Sky, it probably horrifies traditional audiences but it REALLY communicates the damned, Sisyphean, fate of the riders, and the moral of the song. Different mediums and different interpretations explore different aspects of a work of art.

Check out the Jamestown Revival Louis L'Amour album in the link at the top of this page. THOSE guys really get it. Every song is a different perspective yet still something a traditional fan would enjoy.

Peter

There was pretty much no cussing in SOAWM, we designed it to be "traditional," but there was in LOTDB. It was intended to be a bit more radical with its fractured flashback structure and race fluid protagonist ... who you don't even realize is the protagonist at first. LOTDB was a much more experimental concept.

Through the bulk of Dad's career, the late '50s to the early '70s, the approach that both he and his publishers followed was, "if you liked one you'll like them all." That's good marketing and it's most obvious in all those titles that are the name of the character. For awhile it was present in the cover art and for a shorter time in the actual stories.

But no writer wants to keep doing the exact same thing. A lot of the LLLT postscripts document LL's attempts to both break the mold yet keep his audience. In keeping with that concept when I started putting together movie projects I did one traditional, SOAWM, one radical (or semi radical) LOTDB, and one from the Adventure genre, TDOJ. Those were made as audios, one got made as a film, the another as a Comic.

I also put together a TV Series from Haunted Mesa and The Californios, so SciFi and "Weird West" genres, that have yet to be exploited. I also have the first of a four episode Last of the Breed Graphic Novel written (set in the early 1960s rather than the 1980s), as well as a super brief but comprehensive plan for The Walking Drum and the first step, an exploration of themes and story elements, for Reilly's Luck (a version that stays in Europe longer). The idea behind all of this was to have a bit of everything but also to point out all the extremes of Dad's creativity.

It's all sort of a plan, the original idea was to do movies, but there is no controlling what happens of doesn't happen in that world, so I branch out whenever I get the opportunity.

peter

peter

I had missed the part about Reilly's Luck so I've been reading it. Got to the part where Anatomy of Melancholy stopped the two bullets. I looked it up and it's 1382 pages. No wonder the bullets didn't go all the way through. LOL I agree with the Louise and Pavel relationship. It's definitely weird. I haven't read the book in a few years so I don't really remember that part of the story. Is there even any reason for her to continue to be in the story? You could just have Pavel come alone, unless his hope is to hook her up with some rich American guy and thus manage to get money that way. Anyway, that's a very detailed investigation of Reilly's Luck. Makes me want to dig it out of wherever I have it and read it again.

peter

As I mention in the beginning of my Reilly's Luck Notes, these aren't plans, though they may become plans someday, they are thoughts. It's what taking all the details seriously made me think. That said, casually reading the book about 20 times, prior to getting serious and taking these notes, didn't lead me to having those realizations. Reading for fun you just get what you want to get out of it and then you move on. What's in that breakdown is the first step of a professional disassembly. It's done to study what the raw material really is, says, whatever.

If Louise does stick with Pavel and comes to the US with him it really says something about her, she's really stuck in a role. That's okay if that's what an adaptation of a story needs to say. In a story where you are examining the roles available for women at the time it gives you an interesting range:

Louise will "sell herself" for the family (hopefully just once) even though it's a lousy family, she's traditional in an ancient European tradition and men probably including her father exist at a distance.

Myra will "sell herself" often, for herself, to get ahead. Men are to be used, possibly an aggressive or self loathing response to an abusive father. She has more autonomy, but she's evil and damaged.

Boston has a positive father and brothers, she has grown up in a world of close relationships with good men, but men who value (because their wife and mother is dead) a woman for being a woman. She sits at the healthy end of the spectrum, a balance of male and female energy. She never has to "sell herself" it probably has never occurred to her as an option.

As the child of a prostitute who abandons him to death, Val (Valentine!) needs someone like her to complete his story in a positive way.

Val also has 3 "fathers." There's Durrant, who leaves him a legacy that becomes valuable (copper in my interpretation) that is the key to a future full of electricity and telecommunications. We never know him but his gift is sort of objective and scientific. There is Van, who is emotional and caring, but weak, dominated by Myra. And there is Will, perhaps too much of a man's man, the teacher, but Val opens him up to the world.

You don't always get this much when you dig, but it this case it's kind of amazing!

You should take a look at the Lost Treasures edition. It dives into the original unfinished short story in which Will is a cold hearted cheat and Val the crippled boy he manipulates for profit. In a COMPLETELY different way it is also a fascinating character study.