Louis L'Amour & Beau L'Amour Novels
Louis and Beau L’Amour present a collaboration across time. The opening whispers of the story that became Skyring Water can be found in No Traveller Returns, my father's first attempt at a novel. No Traveller is a curious book, literary in its aspirations and part of Dad's extended "Yondering" universe, tying together several of the Yondering short stories as well as various elements of his early life.
Only partially finished, No Traveller Returns was stored away, almost forgotten, for eighty years. Eventually, I reassembled its various elements, discovered the throughline in the seemingly haphazard pile of scenes, and wrote the connective tissue needed to finally get it into print. But the story of the Chilean coast and the hidden treasure didn't end in 1938, or in 2018 when No Traveller Returns was published. However, to pick up that trail we have to go back in time to the middle of the twentieth century and the books that turned Louis L'Amour into a household name.
Dad was fighting a reoccurring case of pneumonia and hiking at high altitude was out of the question, I had been running around the southwest doing research on The Haunted Mesa. And whenever I was at the house, he and I spent a good deal of time talking about where he wanted to go in his career, and some of his unfinished stories, including Skyring Water.
Originally, he had conceived of it as a straight-up adventure story appropriate to its era. But Dad had never felt it lived up to its full potential — and that wasn't just because he had not been able to interest a publisher. His concern about Skyring was that it contained too many characters and too many complications. Additionally, there were a host of technical details that he had never been able to adequately research. After reading it, I agreed with him. Yet with Last of the Breed making its way up the bestseller lists, I wondered if Skyring Water might become a fitting follow-up, another novel of international suspense. The way I saw it, the story had the potential to be taken in that direction.
Lastly there is the website, skyringwater.com which describes the entire effort and offers additional materials along with photos, scans and video.
No Traveler Returns
S.S. Lichenfield
Fate is a Ship ... a tanker west-bound on the eve of WWII. Aboard are thirty-three officers and crew. Thirty-three lives intertwined, by friendship, respect, and a mysterious network of circumstance. Thirty-three lives held separate by fear and prejudice, social class and ambition. A deadly mixture of personalities made all the more explosive by the dangerous nature of their cargo.
No Traveler Returns has the distinction of being the earliest novel length work by Louis L'Amour. The first indication that he was working on this book is in a journal entry from June 9th, 1938. He mentions that he intends to "finish No Traveller Returns tomorrow."
It was a time when several different versions of Louis's professional and creative life were colliding. He was writing the semi-autobiographical "Yondering" style stories, of which No Traveller Returns is one, and he was promoting himself as a character similar to the protagonists found within their pages: a self educated yet blue collar adventurer and world traveler. He was making a name for himself in the Oklahoma poetry scene and other literary circles. And, much more important, he had just begun selling material to the pulps, high adventure and crime stories, that were more visceral and melodramatic than his other work. He rationed his time between one style and another, hoping more than anything, that both would take off.
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Skyring Water
A Novel of the Cold War!
From the sun-baked plazas of Barcelona to the frozen channels of Patagonia — a thriller where the Second World War never truly ended. An epic novel of Cold War suspense — a pair of unlikely heroes, a woman without a name, and the undefeated agents of the Third Reich find themselves locked in a deadly race to control the greatest secret of the twentieth century.
Skyring Water has the distinction of being the earliest novel length work by Louis L'Amour. The first indication that he was working on this book is in a journal entry from June 9th, 1938. He mentions that he intends to "finish No Traveller Returns tomorrow."
This novel is not simply a well-edited version of Louis L'Amour's original draft of Skyring Water. And unlike No Traveller Returns it is not a "time machine," a forensic re-creation duplicating my father's writing style from a particular era. Rather than either of those, it is my take on the sort of story that Skyring Water might have become if those dreams and speculations from the fall of 1986 had come to fruition. It is a partnership across time that hopefully delivers the book Dad and I had so much fun planning, but that he was never able to write.
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