Before Louis L’Amour became the biggest selling paperback writer of westerns, he divided his time in the pulp mgazines between westerns, adventure, and crime fiction. This may be a surprise to some of you but he had a respectable run in the detective pulps in the 1940s.

The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour: Crime Stories Part 1 contains eighteen stories in the crime and also boxing genres.

Contents:

The first nine stories are a mix. “Too Tough to Kill” and “Anything for a Pal” are 1930s hard-boiled yards. The others are more like 1950s crime fiction. Stories like “Police Band” and “The Gravel Pit” are L’Amour’s attempt to do a Manhunt magazine type of story. The characters never quite plumb the depths as what I read in The Best of Manhunt. There is a deceny within L’Amour’s characters that they sometimes come out intact on the other side of a bad situation. Or they face up to what they have done.

The second group of nine stories revolve around boxing. These are among the best boxing stories I have ever read. There is a plot of corruption, organized crime, and fixed fights facing the fighter in addition to getting into the ring. L’Amour did some boxing and it shows. The fight scenes are great. I spaced these stories out about one per week. I like boxing, I just don’t want to read one boxing story after another.

The contents of this paperback were originally in a big hardback which has been broken up. I remember seeing a stack of these at a grocery store but passed at the time picking it up. Luckily the mass market paperbacks are in print. Bantam is keeping the price at $6.99 which is at the lower end of paperback retail cost.

The second paperback derived from the hardback is devoted to more traditional hard-boiled detective story. Stay tuned on that as it is in the “to be read” pile.