I did a good deed recently. The best practice is to always do good deeds in silence, so I wont go into too many of the particulars, but it has to do with books. Anyone that reads my columns knows I love books, collecting them, reading them and talking about them.
Robert Williams, the former owner of the Times, had posted on social media that a friend of his was in need of some books. Westerns like those by Louis L’amour were his favorites. I posted a reply saying I could easily load him down with all the old Western paperbacks he needed.
As it happened, there was a stack of paperbacks I was done with sitting on one of the bookshelves in my office. I snapped a quick picture and posted it, saying they were ready to go and asked if they would do or if he needed more.
The stack of six or so books would be sufficient. I wasn’t sure. Western paperbacks tend to be slim volumes and the authors set a very brisk, very readable pace, especially Louis L’amour. They certainly never lasted me all that long. Most could be read in a day.
Robert came by the paper and collected the little care package of gunslinging adventure and headed back out to bring them to his friend. I sat at my desk, thinking back to when I had first discovered L’amour, Zane Grey, Elmore Leonard and their many, many compadres on the paperback adventure trail.
My father was stationed at Ft. Hood back in the day. I was only there to visit during the hot, dry summers and there wasn’t much to do. There were few kids in the neighborhood, my attempt to take up skateboarding met with limited success, and I was often left to my own devices. I was, in a word, bored.
You did not tell either of my parents you were bored. “Only the boring are bored” was the usual response. In my father’s case, two options were typically presented. Option one: I could go out to work in what was laughingly referred to as the backyard, a fenced in rectangle of cracked brown earth with some lonely scrub oaks and greasewood bushes growing out of said cracks.
Option two: I could plunder the closet in my father’s office and read whatever I found there— quietly. What I found was a lot of Louis L’amour. The Tall Stranger is the one that stands out in my mind, perhaps because my father was a tall, narrow man and in many ways he was a stranger to me.
L’amour’s prose was vivid, powerful and to the point. His writing was as lean and quick on the trigger as his heroes. There was a blood and thunder quality to his work that reminded me of the Conan paperbacks I loved so much. L’amour’s cowboys were a little more noble than the barbaric creation of Robert E. Howard (a Texan through and through), but they were just as tough with steel in their eyes and the strength of the wastelands was in them.
The scene from The Tall Stranger that still stands out in my mind after all these years was a desparate midnight ride over a mountain range in the middle of a violent thunderstorm shot through with lightning.
I remember reading that scene and wishing to God I could write like that someday. Years later, I still haven’t written any Westerns, but I could do the next best thing and pass some along to the friend of a friend.
That’s what makes books so powerful. Sometimes we find the words, ideas and even people we need between their covers. Wherever those books land, I hope their new owner finds what they need in them. I know I did.
