The Hills of Homicide: The Detective Fiction of Louis L’Amour

No name is more associated with Western fiction than Louis L’Amour. Louis began his career writing Westerns in the old days of the Pulps. It shouldn’t be surprising that he wrote more kinds of fiction than just cowboy stories. Like many pulpsters he told stories of adventure, boxing and whatever paid the rent. These stories have been collected in one volume The Hills of Homicide (1983) and scattered among the later series of collections like With These Hands (2002). He also wrote several Westerns with mystery elements including the Texas Ranger series about Chick Bowdrie. L’Amour said that Bowdrie had the required skill to solve any of the mysteries in The Hills of Homicide. The Bowdrie stories and other Western-Mysteries will not be dealt with here but in a subsequent piece.

Louis L’Amour’s detective and crime stories appeared in the detective magazines like Thrilling Detective. “They were written in the so-called ‘hard-boiled’ style for magazines that also featured the work of writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich.” Louis explained his interest in these kinds of stories:

“The detective genre fascinated me right from the beginning of my professional writing career. I had traveled around cities a good deal all over the world and of course one of the major differences between the detective story and the frontier story is that the former usually takes place around a city. I’ve also known many police officers through the years from whom I learned a great deal, I met a lot of characters through my professional prizefighting days…In beginning to do detective stories, I just applied the situations that I knew and with which I had made myself familiar through experience or research.”

To L’Amour himself it was not surprising that he should write these stories: “When I wrote the original versions of the stories in this volume [The Hills of Homicide] there were times when I might be working on a detective story in the morning and a western story in the afternoon or vice versa…Although I am best known for my fiction about the American frontier, there’s no reason why a person who is known for stories about one area cannot write successful stories in another. Good storytelling can be applied to any area at any time.”

L’Amour’s best detective tales center around series characters. The longest series was about Kip Morgan, prize fighter turned private eye. Kip was named after an author his mother admired, Rudyard Kipling. Morgan first appears in the fight story, “Dream Fighter”, in which he dreams all of his boxing victories before they happen. This first story is not a detective tale, but a third person account of his rise to the championship title. Louis L’Amour, before his writing career had been a boxer, winning fifty-one out of fifty-nine fights. This love of the sport finds its way into almost every detective story, matching Kip or other detectives punch for punch with the bad guys. For some odd reason, Louis wrote some of the Morgan stories in the third person, and others in the first.

“Corpse on the Carpet” (Popular Detective, May 1948) is an intermediate tale told in the first person. Kip is not yet a detective but acts like one. His natural curiosity about a woman wearing very expensive jewelry drags him into a badger game that ends with the death of a new acquaintance. After discovering the murder victim, Kip tracks the killers to a house where the beautiful blonde and her young sister are being held by kidnappers. Morgan has several boxing type fights, a gun battle and eventually saves the day. It’s the beginning of a new career. The next time he appears, he’ll be a private detective.

“Dead Man’s Trail” (Thrilling Detective, August 1947) is a third person story, telling of Kip’s first case. Morgan is hired by the wife of a dead man who has been framed for the theft of fifty-thousand dollars. The detective uses the murderer’s guilt to flush him out. This result is his own kidnapping and failed murder attempt in a remote spot in the country. The hired thugs want to know who hired the detective. Only Kip’s boxing prowess saves him.  Kip is picked up by a trucker who turns out to be the killer who tricks him into telling all. It becomes a race back to town to save his client from the murderer’s hand. Like many of these stories, it begins with the classic opening of a beautiful woman walking into the detective’s office.

“With Death in His Corner” (Thrilling Detective, December 1948) is a first person tale. When L’Amour writes from Kip’s own point of view, his style becomes like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories. In this story Louis draws on his experiences in the ring. Kip Morgan gets called to L.A. to help an old sparring partner. When Rocky Garzo is murdered. Morgan takes it personally and goes after the man who killed Garzo’s brother, a gangster and former boxer, Ben Altman. As expected, the two boxers square off in the end.

“The Street of Lost Corpses” (Detective Tales, January 1950) is an another third person tale. This time the beauty has hired Morgan to find her missing brother. Morgan’s not the first P.I. on the job. The last one ended up dead. Morgan quickly locates the bad guys, led by George Villani, his client’s boyfriend. Villani and his boys have been using the corpses of derelicts for insurance fraud. The finale is a shootout at an abandoned mine. The desert mine is reminiscent of L’Amour’s westerns, while the bad guy’s named “Villani” (stereotypically Italian in sound) is the word “villain” with the “i” at the end.

“Stay Out of My Nightmare” (Detective Tales, November 1949) is a first person tale. The plot involves an old war buddy of Kip’s who goes missing when he gets involved with crooked gamblers. It features one of the few instances of horror in L’Amour’s work, when Morgan goes to the house of an informant and finds the man dead. Only his mother is senile and doesn’t realize it. She has made him a sandwich for his supper. Later in the story, Morgan is trapped in a room that will flood with the in-coming tide. His realization of this is another horrific moment.

Cut from the same tough guy bolt of cloth is Neil Shannon, another private dick. Shannon is a veteran of the Korean War, and another hammer-fisted fighter. He appears in three stories in the 1950s. Like Kip Morgan, his stories change from first to third person.

“A Friend of a Hero” (G-Men Detective, Fall 1950 as “The Crime, The Place, and the Girl”) is a third person tale about Shannon avenging a murdered friend, the medical man who pulled him out of a firefight in Korea. The killers are the Bowen Boys who have some illegal trade in a barn on their property and the town sheriff in their pocket. As Shannon busts open their car theft ring he proves the better man with his fists when he takes on Steve Bowen hand-to-hand.

“The Vanished Blonde” (Thrilling Detective, December 1950) is another story told in the third person. This time Shannon is looking for a blonde woman who has inherited half a million dollars along with three other people. The private eye has been searching for her for months and is more than half in love with the missing Darcy Lane. Things turn bad when one of the other heirs tries to eliminate all the others.

“The Sucker Switch” (Thrilling Detective, December 1947) is a Neil Shannon story from the first person perspective. It is also a locked room mystery of sorts. An impenetrable vault filled with furs is found empty and the security guard, Pete Burgeson, is missing and suspect. Burgeson was recommended by Shannon’s security firm. Once Neil starts gathering clues, he finds the missing man dead and the answer to how the furs were stolen without breaking a single lock.

Two stories in The Hills of Homicide feature police detective, Joe Ragan. “…He was a big man, a shade over six feet, with wide, thick shoulders and big hands. His hair was rumpled, but despite his size, there was something surprisingly boyish about him.” A typical L’Amour hero, he was also once a boxer.  In his introduction to Joe Ragan, L’Amour tells us of his admiration for the police officers. “…even though they do not get a very good view of human nature, a great many of the police are honorable people.” L’Amour will show both sides in these two stories.

In “Collect From a Corpse” (Black Mask, September 1949) Ragan tries to clear the name of a safecracker who has gone straight. Robberies have been taking place, using the MO of certain thieves, but Ragan knows something’s up when a robbery with Slonski‘s MO is committed the night the thief has died in Kansas City. One of the robberies takes place at a club owned by Charlie Vent. Vent is in trouble because the stolen money was to pay his star attraction, Luretta Pace. Later Charlie ends up murdered. Joe has his suspicions and sets a trap with Luretta’s help.

“I Hate to Tell His Widow” (Detective Tales, July 1949) begins with Joe Ragan’s mentor being murdered. Ollie Burns and his wife, Mary, are his best friends. When Joe starts digging for clues at the Upshaw Building he quickly uncovers a blackmailing scheme that involved not only a dirty cop, but his own girl, Angie Faherty, too. Similar in many ways to “Collect From a Corpse” in plot, both stories involve bad cops who have a unique habit that gives them away.

“The Unexpected Corpse” (G-Men Detective, November 1948) follows a private eye in a first person story where the narrator is identified only as “Jim”. He comes to an old girlfriend’s rescue when a dead body is discovered in her apartment. The body belongs to Larry Craine. Jim’s investigation leads him to Texas and New Orleans and a high-scoring crime that Craine paid for with his life.

“Under the Hanging Wall” (Thrilling Detective, June 1949) features Bruce Blake. Blake is hired by the brother of the murder victim to investigate the killing in the mining town of Winrock. The arrested suspect, Campbell, has been seen leaving the mine after the murder and is wrongly accused. In true Noir style, the dead man’s wife is a knock-out and the seedy truth comes out, finishing with Blake and the local lawman being trapped in the mine. Only their knowledge of mines saves them from suffocating. L’Amour was familiar with mines, having been a mine security guard for three months in the 1930’s. His knowledge of mines and mining is evident in this story.

L’Amour breaks his own rule about city locations again in “The Hills of Homicide” (Detective Tales, May 1949). It follows a “nameless” private detective hired by a ruthless criminal, Blacky Caronna, to clear his name of a murder in the small town of Ranagat, Nevada. When the gangster fires him, the detective joins up with the local law to save an heiress and himself from a twisted murder plot. Louis’ knowledge of the desert and local traditions are the only hints at his roots in Western fiction. His experiences in the Far East, and in carnivals also play a part in the solution.

Louis L’Amour was familiar with headliners of the pulp magazines. He wrote three stories in the tense style of Cornell Woolrich, who specialized in crime rather than detective tales. The emphasis in this kind of a tale was to put character into a bad situation and watch them try to escape. Often in Woolrich’s work the main character was a criminal and would fail. L’Amour’s outlook on life was more positive, lacking the underlying sadness of Woolrich. Louis’ characters usually find some way to solve their terrible predicaments.

“Police Band” (filmed as an episode of City Detective called “Man Down, Woman Screaming” featured Beverly Garland, Jack Kelly, future western film star Lee Van Cleef, and Frank Ferguson) follows a former military intelligence officer, Tom Sixte, who foolishly aids a mysterious woman. The result is that she and her thug boyfriend kidnap him, waiting for the moment to kill him. Sixte begins to lay down a trail he hopes the police are following. Officers Frost and Noonan pick up the trail and arrive in the nick of time to support Sixte’s last ditch effort to escape.

“Time of Terror” (unpublished until 2000) features an insurance man, Dryden, who sees a man named Marmer who he thought was dead, and his company paid out the insurance on. Marmer begins to mess with Dryden’s mind by telling him that he put money in an account under Dryden’s name. Marmer has also murdered his wife. Dryden must prove the better liar, weaving a net of falsehoods that work on the guilty man’s mind. Forced into the killer’s car, Dryden crashes on purpose to capture Marmer.

Louis describes “Unguarded Moment” (Popular Detective, March 1952) in the intro: “Arthur Fordyce is very much an ‘average’ man who in an  ‘unguarded moment’ is confronted with some terrible acts of crime and violence.” The ball starts rolling when Fordyce picks up a fat wallet at the track. He keeps the money but is seen by an unscrupulous person. The witness, Bill Chafey, puts the squeeze on him but dies accidentally when Fordyce punches him. The blackmailer’s girlfriend picks up where her Chafey left off, squeezing Fordyce for murder. He contemplates actual murder but can’t go through with it. In the end, he cunningly engineers a solution. In this detail L’Amour departs from the noir master. In a Woolrich tale the ending would have been grimmer. L’Amour’s innate optimism allows the Fordyce a way out.

“The Gravel Pit” (unpublished until 1999) is probably Louis’ suspense story most like Woolrich’s. Similar to “Unguarded Moment” it features a man who commits a crime and is blackmailed. This time the thief proves a killer as well. Cruzon steals the payroll from a shipping company but is seen by a blackmailer, Weber. He is forced to murder Weber and leave his body in the gravel pit of the title. Later he finds his stolen money is only newspaper and covered in red dye. Unlike Fordyce and the other suspense characters, Cruzon is guilty of both murder and theft and pays in the end.

In 2008, The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour added a sixth volume, one collecting all his crime stories. This book added four more tales to the list I mentioned above.

“The Hand of Kuan-yin” (Star Weekly Magazine, September 1960) features Gavagan, an art gallery owner in Hawaii who can throw a punch. When the body of an old Hawaiian turns up on the beach clutching a priceless Chinese artifact, the cops call in the art expert. The dead man is Teo, an old fisherman whose sons grew up with Gavagan. The trail leads to thieves, missing treasure and a beautiful heiress who wants to solve her uncle’s disappearance. This story appeared in an obscure Canadian magazine.

“Sand Trap” (Unpublished until 2003) follows Monte Jackson, a young prospector, who wakes up in a burning building next to a dead man. Monte escapes the flames only to find himself suffering a terrible head wound and suspected for the crime. He calls Homicide and explains. He also explains why he can’t give himself up. Instead he returns to his remote desert mining digs. The killers follow him there, hoping to kill him since he can identify the wife and her boyfriend as the criminals. Monte leads them on a hot, dry tour of the desert, willing to exchange water for a confession. This story features Joe Ragan of Homicide as a secondary character. “Sand Trap” feels like one of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Whispering Sands stories from Argosy in the early 1930s, with a longer set-up. L’Amour, also, comments on the beauty and power of the desert.

“Too Tough To Kill” (Detective Short Stories, October 1938) begins after Pat Collins and his new bride witness the gang slaying of Augie Petrone. The three men who did the killing highjack the police car, taking the witnesses to safety, knocking Pat out and throwing him off a bridge to drowned. Luckily, there is a barbed wire fence across the stream and Pat survives. Borrowing a car and a gun from a farmer, he drives to the Cedars, the gang’s hideout. He knows they are there because of what one of the men said before they tried to kill him. They have taken Pat’s wife, Ruth, for company. Pat sneaks up, takes out a gangster and using two guns has a shoot out that will decide their fate. Incredibly terse, this story almost reads like a first draft.

“Anything For a Pal” (True Gang Life, October 1935) is an O. Henry twist ending tale about a mob hitman getting ready to kill a witness in a trial. This slight tale still packs a lot of chartacterization for its few pages.

Louis L’Amour saw the detective story and the Western story as close kin. He explains the difference between the two genres thus: “…The detective protagonist does not usually come to fear the land as much as the characters in a frontier story. A man traveling in the West finds himself off the beaten track many times and away from any help or any aid that he couldn’t devise for himself. When he was lucky, he could find a few other people like himself. In detective stories, the characters come to fear the PEOPLE they have to associate with in the city. Of course, the character strengths that the men and women in these detective stories draw upon to resolve their conflicts would stand them in good stead in the struggles of survival that I write about in my frontier stories…”

When I first discovered L’Amour’s detective stories, I was a little worried. Would it read like a Western with gangsters? I’ve read many of Louis’ books and know his smooth style anywhere. Could he pull off pseudo-Hammett? Would it sound like a bad parody? Louis’ L’Amour’s talent rescues him from any such fate. The writing is tight (as always) but in no way false or unL’Amour-like. “Good storytelling can be applied to any area at any time” plays out well in his detective and crime stories.

NB: Just an observation. I love the Bantam collections of Louis’s works. These are well done and with the assistance of Louis’s son, Beau L’Amour. The one thing that these books do that bugs me though is they don’t include any bibliographic details about which Pulps the stories came from. Almost as if the editors wanted to ignore or down-play the Pulp heritage they came from. If this is the case I think it unfortunate, for many of Louis’s fans are also Pulp fans and would welcome such inclusion. Consequently, I have included as much info as I felt relevant partly to counter this.(Hey a book cover credit or two would be nice, too.)