|
In reading these books we have to be careful not to have expectations higher than LL had for himself. It is totally true, Dad liked writing better than rereading. It is also true that fans often have higher expectation for Dad's "historical accuracy" than he did himself. My father wrote three books or more a year. He lived and worked in a house crowded with two kids, a wife, two dogs, a bird, and sometimes a housekeeper. He kept a journal, documented his work outs, and kept up a lively correspondence with people all over the world.
He studied history, but he did not check his work. He used history as a back drop and as inspiration for his work but he was an entertainer not a slave to accuracy. These same issues played out when referencing his own work.
It is also important to know that, at least until the late 1970s, he never expected his books to remain in print. Most authors of paperback originals saw their books disappear from existence, go out of print, within months of their release. "The backlist" a publishing term for an author's old titles, was something that barely existed for middle of the road genre authors in those days. For example it was commonly thought (and likely true) that only the movies kept Ian Fleming's James Bond novels on the shelves, while his Chitty-chitty Bang Bang was a perennial (at least for awhile) because it was aimed at generations of kids.
So worrying too much about what you had written, even in a series, was thought to be a bit of a waste of time ... at the time. It is also true that editorial standards were pretty lax. Today it is impossible for the publisher to keep an editor employed (given that they can't just work on the L'Amour books) long enough for them to even read the whole catalog, let alone become familiar enough to remember the details. That's where I come in. In those days Dad dealt with a senior editor on the big issues, but the details were handled by a junior guy or gal and they didn't last long in their jobs either.
The Sackett Companion, if memory serves, wasn't entirely written by Dad. Some of it was pulled together by Bantam Editors. Dad just wrote the bigger sections. I don't know if that means if he screwed up these details or if they did but it was a collective work. I tried to stay out of it and still generally ignore it because it was never as buttoned up as I'd have liked but I wasn't in a position to deal with it at the time. I was in school and working on other things.
Dad's work is definitely better if you just try to enjoy rather than analyze it ... at least until you get to the point where you are looking at it through the lens of publishing history or the life of a middle class author of the era.
When I go into the weeds of actual history, which the Western genre has never really been serious about, I get lost trying to work out all the issues with most Westerns. As much as Dad fought the distinction, it's a genre separate from Historical Novels because it has different rules ... it's kind of an American Fantasy like a lot of the "Fantasy" genre is sort of European Fantasy. Each relies on the basic history or conventions of one culture or the other, but each plays out tales of freedom and morality and exploration according to a different set of rules.
A good example of Westerns (in general) having only a general connection to history is the fact that classical or traditional westerns take place in a period that lasted less than 30 years. They often portray multiple generations growing up in this brief era. They tend to compress the history of earlier or later events to push them into this era. Odd, but that's what has happened. In the last 50 years the genre has expanded it's historical envelope slightly. Dad had something to do with that, and with getting the history to be a bit more accurate. But it wasn't something he wanted to do with every story. He also liked to play in the world of the traditional Western. He didn't think about it all that much, not like I do, he just sort of did it. Later in his career he didn't want to be tide down to traditional westerns, he occasionally wanted to play by the rules of Historical Novels, but he didn't worry about it all that much.
|
