As part of the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures series, this edition contains exclusive bonus materials! Ben Cowan and Bijah Catlow had been friends since they were boys. By the time they grew to manhood, Catlow had become an outlaw and Cowan a U.S. marshal. So when his old friend rode to Mexico to pull the biggest robbery of his career, it became Ben Cowan’s job to hunt him down. While trailing Catlow south of the border, Ben meets Rosita Calderon. Intelligent and beautiful, her presence further complicates what is already a dangerous situation. While trying to protect his friend from Mexican soldiers and place him under arrest, Ben realizes that the price of getting Catlow back across the border might be more than he is willing to pay. Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is a project created to release some of the author’s more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives. In Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volumes 1, Beau L’Amour takes the reader on a guided tour through many of the finished and unfinished short stories, novels, and treatments that his father was never able to publish during his lifetime. L’Amour’s never-before-seen first novel, No Traveller Returns, faithfully completed for this program, is a voyage into danger and violence on the high seas. These exciting publications will be followed by Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 2. Additionally, many beloved classics will be rereleased with an exclusive Lost Treasures postscript featuring previously unpublished material, including outlines, plot notes, and alternate drafts. These postscripts tell the story behind the stories that millions of readers have come to know and cherish.

A WORD FROM LOUIS L’AMOUR “Almost forty years ago, when my fiction was being published exclusively in ‘pulp’ western magazines, I wrote several novel-length stories, which my editors called ‘magazine novels.’ In creating them, I became so involved with my characters that their lives were still as much a part of me as I was of them long after the issues in which they appeared became collector’s items. Pleased as I was about how I brought the characters and their adventures to life in the pages of the magazines, I still wanted the reader to know more about my people and why they did what they did. So, over the years, I revised and expanded these magazine works into fuller-length novels that I published in paperback under other titles. “These particular early magazine versions of my books have long been a source of great speculation and curiosity among many of my readers, so much so of late, that I’m now pleased to collect three of them in book form for the first time. “I hope you enjoy them.”

After the massacre Hardy and Betty Sue were left with only a horse and a knife with which to face the long battle against the wilderness. A seven-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl, stranded on the limitless prairie. They were up against starvation, marauding Indians, savage outlaws, and wild animals. They were mighty stubborn, but the odds were against them—and their luck was about to run out. From the Paperback edition.

Louis L’Amour’s long-lost first novel, faithfully completed by his son, takes readers on a voyage into danger and violence on the high seas. Fate is a ship. As the shadows of World War II gather, the SS Lichenfield is westbound across the Pacific carrying eighty thousand barrels of highly explosive naphtha. The cargo alone makes the journey perilous, with the entire crew aware that one careless moment could lead to disaster. But yet another sort of peril haunts the Lichenfield. Even beyond their day-to-day existence, the lives of the crew are mysteriously intertwined. Though each has his own history, dreams and jealousies, longing and rage, all are connected by a deadly web of chance and circumstance. Some are desperately fleeing the past; others chase an unknown destiny. A few are driven by the desire for adventure, while their shipmates cling to the Lichenfield as their only true home. In their hearts, these men, as well as the women and children they have left behind, carry the seeds of salvation or destruction. And all of them—kind or cruel, strong or broken—are bound to the fate of the vessel that carries them toward an ever-darkening horizon. Inspired by Louis L’Amour’s own experiences as a merchant seaman, No Traveller Returns is a revelatory work by a world-renowned author—and a brilliant illustration of a writer discovering his literary voice.

In Ride the Dark Trail, Louis L’Amour tells the story of Logan Sackett, a cynical drifter who changes his ways to help a widow keep her land. Logan Sackett is wild and rootless, riding west in search of easy living. Then he meets Emily Talon, a fiery old widow who is even wilder than he is. Tall and lean, Em is determined to defend herself against the jealous locals who are trying to take her home. Logan doesn’t want to get involved—until he finds out that Em was born a Sackett. Em is bucking overwhelming odds, but Logan won’t let her stand alone. For even the rebellious drifter knows that part of being a Sackett is backing up your family when they need you.

The first of its kind, a unique volume of twenty-one unpublished gems from one of the twentieth century’s most popular and prolific writers Using his father’s handwritten notes, journal entries, and correspondences, Beau L’Amour uncovers how and why many never-before-seen manuscripts were written—and speculates about the ways they might have ended. These selections celebrate L’Amour’s vision and virtuosity, including the first seven chapters of a powerful novel about the Trail of Tears, a chilling Western horror story, and a tale of the American Revolution featuring a character related to L’Amour’s well-known Sackett family. At the other end of the spectrum are classic adventures, such as The Golden Tapestry, set in 1960s Istanbul, as well as several uniquely different attempts at what would have been the most profoundly intimate of all of L’Amour’s novels, a saga of reincarnation that stretches from a time before time, to the period of Alexander the Great, and on to Warlord-Era China. Illustrated with rare photographs, this book reveals the L’Amour you have never known, his personal struggles as a writer, and the contest between mortality and a literary legacy too big for one life to contain. “Lost treasures indeed . . . a behind-the scenes look at the unpublished work and unrealized aspirations of an iconic writer of Westerns.”—Kirkus Reviews “A valuable addition to [L’Amour’s] literary legacy.”—Booklist Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is a project created to release some of the author’s more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives. In Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volumes 1, Beau L’Amour takes the reader on a guided tour through many of the finished and unfinished short stories, novels, and treatments that his father was never able to publish during his lifetime. L’Amour’s never-before-seen first novel, No Traveller Returns, faithfully completed for this program, is a voyage into danger and violence on the high seas. These exciting publications will be followed by Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 2. Additionally, many beloved classics will be rereleased with an exclusive Lost Treasures postscript featuring previously unpublished material, including outlines, plot notes, and alternate drafts. These postscripts tell the story behind the stories that millions of readers have come to know and cherish.

A collection of mysterious stories, lost notes, and unfinished manuscripts from one of the world's most popular novelists.