The bad news is: Louis L’Amour is still dead.
The good news: I’ve made my peace with it — a necessary healing because, after all, I’m the guy who killed him.
It was a terrible burden to bear. But eventually the guilt became too much to handle and I had to confess, to lift the burden from my shoulders and tell all.
I killed Louis L’Amour.
If the name isn’t familiar to you, it should be. Louis L’Amour wrote more than a hundred novels. His books sold in more than thirty countries, a total of 225 million copies. And that doesn’t count his short stories and film credits.
And I killed him.
The Saturday Review, a publication that keeps track of such things, claims that he was the third top seller of books in the world, all-time. He was the first novelist to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the greatest writer of Westerns and frontier fiction ever, ahead of luminaries such as Zane Gray.
And I killed him.
Oh, his death certificate and his biography will tell you that he died quietly of cancer on the evening of June 10, 1988, but I know better. I know the awful truth.
I killed him.
I didn’t mean to. It wasn’t murder, I swear it. It was — well, I don’t know what they’ll call it at the trial. That’s not for me to decide. Not here, in my confession. I just had to tell the story, to lift this terrible burden that has haunted my days for all these years.
You see, I am an avid reader. I never meant any harm by it, but I just can’t help myself. I read just about anything — histories, comedies, tragedies, mysteries, experimental fiction, science fiction, fantasies, you name it. I’ll give almost anything a shot for three hundred pages or so. Almost anything.
Except Westerns. I don’t know why — I like the American West, and I like history, and I even watch Bonanza and Gunsmoke on cable TV when Baywatch reruns aren’t on. But I’ve never been much interested in books written about mule skinners or sheep shearers or whatever it is that those Western books are about.
But if you call yourself a reader and you haven’t read even one book written by the third most popular novelist of all time — well, that’s like calling yourself a true sports fan and never watching a soccer game. And who wants to be that kind of hypocrite?
And so, in the summer of 1988, when I saw that Louis L’Amour had recently written a novel about an American aviator downed in the wilds of Siberia, facing the challenge of surviving not only the war but also the wilderness, well, I figured it was time to finally get a taste of Louis L’Amour without having to learn about chaps and saddle sores. After all, I was an English teacher and school had just ended for the year, so it was time to get going on my summer reading.
And so, on the evening of June 10, 1988, I eased into a comfortable chair right after supper and cracked open The Last of the Breed.
I was sleepy, so I read only sixty or seventy pages that evening, but I went to bed feeling good about the book and about myself. It was shaping up to be a good read, and I took comfort in attending to business that should have handled long ago.
But the next morning’s news told that Louis L’Amour had died the evening before — at exactly the same time that I cracked open his book!
Oh, nobody suspected me. They blamed the cancer, but I knew. I knew. The awful truth is that Louis L’Amour was doing just fine until I went and poked my nose into his business. And when I did, he went and got all dead on me. Call it coincidence if you like, but prisons are filled with evildoers convicted on evidence no more damning than that.
I finished the book, just to pass the time until the police knocked on my door, but they never came. It was a good book, but I couldn’t enjoy it much. I just kept thinking of Louis, and how sorry I was that I had done him in.
I didn’t have the heart to read another Louis L’Amour book ever again. It just wouldn’t seem right. For a long time, I limited my reading to writers who were already dead, folks like Steinbeck, Twain, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, guys who are about as dead as they’re going to get. I didn’t want to do any more damage. It’s bad enough that I killed Louis L’Amour. And so I left the living writers alone.
But a couple weeks ago, in a used book store, I found a packaged set of six of L’Amour’s paperbacks, tracking the Sackett family’s migration from England to the wilds of America, starting in 1599 and spanning centuries. It was only two bucks for the whole set, so I bought it and started reading.
And now, with the first of the books behind me, I can report this breaking news to you: Louis L’Amour is still dead. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that I’ve made my peace with my guilt over bumping him off, and I’ll work my way through the other five books. Then maybe I’ll go out and buy some more of them. We’ll see.
I only hope that my reading doesn’t stir up the ghost of Louis L’Amour — or if it does, that he forgives me for killing him.
Because, judging by the two-fisted prose in his novels, he’s not the kind of guy you’d want to mess with, alive or dead.
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
