A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I prefer shorter fantasy books over the enormous epic fantasies that have become so typical for the genre—and for the most part, that is still true. However, my recent experiences with Louis L’Amour are prompting me to rethink some of that, or at least to recognize that for some authors, longer is better than short.
Of course, Louis L’Amour is not a fantasy writer. He wrote mostly westerns, though he also wrote some thriller and historical adventure. In fact, the two books that I think are his best (Last of the Breed and The Walking Drum) are a thriller and a historical adventure respectively. They are also about three times as long as his westerns, which are typically between 4-6 hours in audiobook format.
(As a side note, almost all of L’Amour’s books are available in audio from my local library, so I’ve slowly been working my way through all of them. At first, I put a bunch on my holds list, since there’s a wait for almost all of them, but since then I’ve found that there’s usually at least one or two that are available now at any given time, and that all (or at least most) of his books tend to cycle through this list. So right now, I’m just checking out whichever audiobook happens to come available when I’m ready for a new one, and hoping to get most of them that way. After that method dries up, I’ll put out holds for the more popular ones that never become available on their own.)
I’ve already written about Last of the Breed, which is certainly good enough to deserve its own blog post. The Walking Drum is also that good—perhaps even better—but I’ve read so many L’Amour books recently that I figure I’ll just roll up my thoughts on all of them here. And what I’ve found is that with L’Amour, there’s an almost perfect correlation between how long his books are and how much I enjoy them. Of the short stories of his that I’ve read, most of them are forgetable. And of the novels, the shorter ones tend to be good, but not great. But the longer ones invariably become my favorites—not just Last of the Breed and The Walking Drum, but Jubal Sackett (my favorite of the Sackett books so far), Fair Blows the Wind, and some of his relatively longer pulp westerns, like North to the Rails (which clocks in at 7 hours) and Westward the Tide (which isn’t my favorite, but it’s also the first western he ever wrote—if you read enough L’Amour, you can definitely see how his writing skill improved over time, though his earlier works like Westward the Tide and Hondo still have just as much passion as his later works, perhaps even more.)
Then again, perhaps it’s not a question of length so much as economy of words. In other words, could a better author write the same story in fewer pages, without losing anything of the story? For most midlist fantasy authors, the answer is almost always “yes.” Even for the greats like Tolkien and Jordan, there’s probably room for improvement (especially Jordan’s later Wheel of Time Books, though I haven’t gotten there yet—the first three books in the series are really good, even at their current length).
Some authors, like Brandon Sanderson, tend to lost economy of words when they write longer. That’s probably why my personal favorite Sanderson novel is The Emperor’s Soul, one of his shortest books. In fact, this may be true of most fantasy authors: the longer they write, the more they tend to sprawl. Don’t get me wrong—I still enjoy Sanderson, and think he’s a great fantasy writer, but it’s always the last 100 pages of his books that are the best—whether those books are 100 pages long, or 1,000.
But L’Amour is a master of writing with an economy of words, whether he’s writing long or writing short. Even when he pauses the narrative to go off on lengthy descriptions of the western landscape, or ruminations on the nature of history and human civilization, the story loses something if you cut any of them out—in fact, those are often the best parts. He always starts right where the meaningful action begins, and his stories never linger much after they’re over. As for the middle, he never pads them out with filler, like some fantasy authors tend to do. And because he writes with such a brilliant economy of words, the longer his books are, the more meat they have on them—which is probably why I enjoy them so much more.
So really, I don’t think it comes down to how long or how short a book is, but whether the author can write with an economy of words without sprawling out too much. Most fantasy authors can’t, which is why Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber has been such a breath of fresh air for me. But L’Amour? He’s the master.
Louis L’Amour was born in Jamestown, North Dakota. He left school at 15 to travel the world. While in his thirties, he began writing novels about life on the Western frontier. His first big success, Hondo, was made into a John Wayne movie. L’Amour is the only novelist in history to receive both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. He has published ninety novels; twenty-one short-story collections; two works of nonfiction; a memoir, Education of a Wandering Man; and a volume of poetry, Smoke From This Altar. There are more than 260 million copies of his books in print.
