In reply to Mike.

I came by L’Amour honestly:
When you’re in the dotMil sitting in the middle of nowhere, you’ll read anything. MRE wrappers. Anything.
And as luck would have it, the first book (out of everything he wrote) I happened to grab off the rack at the PX was the one western that wasn’t one, and set in modern times (the 1960s, when he wrote it), and only touched on the frontier stuff in flashbacks. And it was, in fact, a murder mystery. Horses and saddles were involved, but so were station wagons.
What are the odds, right?

After that, the second one was indeed a western, but I was literally at the places he was mentioning, and could see the ridges and canyons.
I was in the Mojave Desert at 29 Palms, and reading a Sackett novel, Mojave Crossing.
I gotta say, reading a western when you’re looking at the peaks and valleys he’s talking about in a novel makes it a lot more interesting.

After that, I picked up The Walking Drum.
Princess Bride by way of Treasure Island and Lord Of The Rings: i.e. epic medieval adventure, from Normandy to Persia, and back.

That hooked me enough to read everything else he wrote, until his death. The pity is that he never wrote a sequel to TWD. It was epic.

The only book he wrote that sucked was the last one released before he died. The butter was slipping off of his waffles by that point.

You can’t get free downloads, give a holler; I’ll send you some hard copy paperbacks.

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