Westerns
I have a wide definition of a “western” as a work of fiction. James Fenimore Cooper’s last Leatherstocking novel, The Prairie (1827), is a Western in even a modern sense of the category. The Dime Western of the post-Civil War period, and the sensational “yellow” Westerns that overlapped the end of the wars with the American Indians of the West created and strengthened the stereotypes and conventions that later generations of writers had to deal with.
What is important and interesting, however, is that those later generations of writers are good, sometimes great. From Zane Grey (Ohio-born) to Louis L’Amour, A.B. Guthrie to Larry McMurtry, Dorothy Johnson to Paulette Giles, Elmer Kelton to Elmore Leonard, Thomas McGuane to Edward Abbey to N. Scott Momaday - so many writers have faced and continue to face the West and its history and its landscape.
I have a Westerns section in the store in the far frontier of the North Room, but I have other Westerns scattered in different areas, outposts in other literatures. I will work to gather them on this page, an ongoing building of community. Audiobooks of Western writers, including Zane Grey and A.B. Guthrie, Jr., are listed on my Audiobooks - Fiction, Poetry, Drama page.
A note on Louis L’Amour’s books: they are listed in alphabetical order by title with the exception of the 17-volume Sacketts titles, which are clustered at the end and numbered according the rough chronology L’Amour intended (it was flexible by his intention and unfinished at his death).
Listed here alphabetically by author.
Skyring Water
Skyring Water
Louis and Beau L’Amour present a collaboration across time, 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.
“I tip my hat and bow to the amazing talents of Louis L’Amour and Beau L’Amour.”—C.J. Box, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Crossroads
“A masterful Cold War adventure.”—Elliot Ackerman, New York Times bestselling author of Sheepdogs
1961. The world is on the brink of nuclear war. Empires are crumbling. And in Barcelona, chaos is unleashed when a rogue officer of the East German Stasi attempts to blackmail a pair of struggling arms dealers. The secret—thirty tons of stolen gold hidden in an icebound wilderness at the end of the world.
Mike Fowler is a former Navy salvage diver and OSS assassin. Anton Voss is an expatriate German scientist whose past grows darker the closer anyone looks. Once they might have been enemies, yet the two share an inseparable bond: They have saved each other’s lives. But all of that is put at risk when Mike discovers Anton standing over a midnight visitor with a gun in his hand.
Now they’re on the run, allied with gangsters, pursued by the CIA, Israeli intelligence, and a shadowy cabal bent on creating an invisible empire. The trail leads from the rain-soaked docks of Marseilles to the futuristic towers of Caracas and the ruins of a secret island laboratory in Argentine Patagonia. The only way for Mike Fowler to save his oldest friends, and the woman he loves, is to unlock a decades-old mystery buried in his partner’s Nazi past . . . before it destroys them all.
Includes a special postscript by Beau L’Amour detailing the history of the original unpublished manuscript and the process of collaborating with his father both before and after his passing.