Legends of the Old West - BEAU L'AMOUR INTERVIEW | "Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures"

Episode Date: December 15, 2019

Beau L'Amour is the son of legendary author Louis L'Amour and he joins the show to discuss a project called, "Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures." Beau helped produce two volumes of stories from his fathe...r's vast collection of unfinished and unpublished works. He gives some insight into those stories, and the Lost Treasures project as a whole, and many other things in this unique interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi Legends listeners, it's Chris and I'm here with a special surprise episode. I recently had the opportunity to talk to Beau Lamour, the son of legendary author Louis Lamour. opportunity to talk to Beau Lamour, the son of legendary author Louis Lamour. Beau has spent years working on a massive project to bring more of his father's work to light. The project is called Louis Lamour's Lost Treasures, and as you'll hear in the episode, there are three parts to it. I spoke with Beau about probably the biggest part, the two-volume set of books that collects unpublished and unfinished works by his father. The second volume was released last month, in November 2019, for those of you listening in real time. And they use the word treasure appropriately in the titles. These books are treasure troves of work you've never seen before. I have both volumes right here, and I've
Starting point is 00:01:03 barely scratched the surface of all the material inside. So I hope you enjoy this interview with Beau Lamour. You'll hear some stories about the author himself, and the components of the project, and then of course, some questions about my favorite Louis Lamour character, Texas Ranger Chick Beaudry, and the audio dramatizations about him that I still listen to today. And one last note before we get to the interview. Don't forget, Legends of the Old West returns January 8th with the re-envisioned story of Jesse James. After that, we're going to tell one of the quintessential stories of American history. It takes place during the Old West time period, but it does not take place in the West.
Starting point is 00:01:45 You'll see what I mean. I guarantee you'll recognize the names. So, all right, that's enough from me. Let's get to the interview with Beau Lamour. Discover more value than ever at Loblaws. Like Fresh Promise. Produce is carefully selected and checked for freshness. And if it's not fresh, it's free.
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Starting point is 00:02:55 Other conditions apply. All right. Thank you again for joining us here, Bo Lamour. I certainly appreciate it. I'm very excited to hear about this. I was thrilled when the opportunity came across my desk. So thanks for being a part of the show. We appreciate it. It's good to be talking to you. So we're going to jump, as we were just talking about before we started the recording,
Starting point is 00:03:15 we're going to jump in with the basics. I want to make sure the audience hears first and foremost the overview of the Lost Treasures Project. It's basically three components. So could you walk us through what those components are? So first and foremost, there are the post scripts to many of Dad's classic novels that have been around for a long time. These are kind of like articles that I have added to the end of the books that sort of tell the story, behind the story, interesting things that were associated with that novel. They're all different.
Starting point is 00:03:55 I've done about 30 of them, and there may be a few more. And the one for Callaghan talks a great deal about Louis doing research out in the Mojave Desert. The one for Chalico deals with some of the research project, but a lot of the postscript for Chalico has to do with the making of the movie, which was very innovative at the time. The film was only so-so, but the way it was made was extremely innovative, and the way it was financed. And so all of these have different qualities. The one for Last of the Breed talks a lot about where that particular story came from historically, how it was related to the Gary Powers incident in the early 1960s,
Starting point is 00:04:54 and then tells the story of the never-made film and comic book version that we experimented with for a while. So each one of them has quite a few different pieces of my dad's life and interesting facts behind the story. The second prong of Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures is the two books, Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures Volumes 1 and 2, Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures Volumes 1 and 2, and those books have a few finished stories,
Starting point is 00:05:32 quite a few unfinished stories, and a number of treatments and other things that have to do with the publishing business. So a treatment is a description of a story that an author would send to a publisher to try and get a contract to write the novel. Or a treatment is a description of a story that a writer would send to a movie studio to try and get the contract to write a film script. And so after each one of these is offered in the book, I will do some comments that explain what was going on in Dad's life at the time and what we know about the story. And if it's unfinished, how he would have finished it.
Starting point is 00:06:15 And I have quite a few notes and pieces of correspondence and pieces of his journals. And so there's really a lot of evidence backing up some of the things that I'm talking about. So I'm talking, but there's a lot of it is in my dad's own words also. And then the third part of the project is No Traveler Returns, which was my father's first novel. It was unfinished, and it's part of his yandering series. So one of the earliest kind of series of stories or universes that my father wrote in was looking at his life and the life of other people that were like him in the 1920s who were hobos and merchant seamen and soldiers of fortune and all kinds of different nefarious characters who traveled all around the world.
Starting point is 00:07:18 And those stories are in Yondering, a short story collection, and No Travel Returns is a novel that very much belongs to that same grouping. And that's a novel that I finished and perfected and have now got on the market. So there you go. These two volumes are packed with material, packed with stories and treatments and articles. Like you said, they're fascinating. I've barely been able to scratch the surface of all of them, but my understanding from having read through them a little bit is that these stories collected here only represent maybe a fraction of the total
Starting point is 00:07:56 left behind by your father after he passed. Is that true? Well, they are only a fraction, but they are the most coherent fraction. So this is the stuff that other people can read and make sense of. There's definitely more, but I'm not sure how much somebody else would read some of the other stuff and then be able to make any sense out of it. Yeah. And this is what, I don't know why I got so fascinated with this and just reading through your introductions that open each book and looking through the pictures that you included and just
Starting point is 00:08:36 in trying to wrap my head around exactly how prolific he was. Everybody who follows his career knows how much he produced. I was not prepared for just exactly how prolific and how he was and his work ethic. So can you talk a little bit about your dad's seven-day-a-week working style? And we'll do a couple questions here that maybe peek behind the curtain a little bit based on some of the stuff you wrote in the intros. The man worked. There's no question. on some of the stuff you wrote in the intros. The man worked, there's no question.
Starting point is 00:09:07 Well, you know, Dad, a lot of his formative years were very difficult. You know, he lived kind of on the road and on the street in the 1920s, and he survived the 1930s by living with his parents in a little at a little farm that his brother owned and they they were doing better than just scraping by but they you know times were times were tough and so like a lot of people from that era, he had a very significant work ethic. To be able to work and to be able to earn any money at all
Starting point is 00:09:53 was something he looked at as a privilege more than anything else, and it was something he always felt like he had to make the most of. Also, not to be underlooked or not to be overlooked or however you'd say that, Dad succeeded in coming up with a process that worked for him of opening up his unconscious and being able to write directly from his unconscious. And it made the process of writing very easy for him and very pleasurable. And I think part of the magic of reading a Louis L'Amour novel is the reader is also swept along by the feeling of pleasure in writing that the writer had. Reading a Louis LaWorme novel was a lot of fun because Dad was having a lot of fun. But the process of opening up unconsciously is very, very difficult.
Starting point is 00:10:55 And if you don't stay in practice, it can become harder and harder. And I mean, I've had a little experience with this myself. It is difficult to recapture even after a couple of days of no work. So to keep the doors open, to keep that muscle available to him, he really felt like he had to work almost every day. he really felt like he had to work almost every day. And so he was very compulsive in sort of a non-psychological manner, but he was very compulsive about staying with it and not ever letting that muscle lose its power.
Starting point is 00:11:40 Yeah, that's what I gleaned from some of those introductions, that he worked basically seven days a week. And yes, you guys traveled, but they were, like you said in the intros, they were working trips. And he made sure to maybe sometimes at least take a small typewriter with him so he could work. It sounds like, yeah, he just he kept it turned on at all times. Yes. And then so following up on that, I would love for you to tell a little story again that's in one of the intros that I found delightful. Hopefully the audience will, too.
Starting point is 00:12:07 Of your younger years, you and your sister, it seems like, developed a strategy for how to get his attention while he was in his study, typing away, and you needed to talk to him about something. Can you repeat that story for the audience? Oh, certainly. Well, I'm not sure how we ever caught on to this. I'm not sure if he told us this or my mother told us this or something. But if Dad was working and you wanted his attention, we would always kind of come up and we'd stand just in his peripheral vision, so just off to one side.
Starting point is 00:12:40 And if you stood there and you waited while he was writing, eventually he would get to a point where I guess he felt like he was kind of in control of getting himself started again. And he would stop. And then, you know, you could have like 10 or 15 minutes with him. And he was pretty happy to interrupt his work and have a conversation as long as it didn't go on too long. And then he would kind of like, I've got to get back to work, and run along now, and he'd sort of shush you out of the room. But in some ways he was always available, He just wasn't necessarily available for long periods.
Starting point is 00:13:26 Yeah, exactly. I always loved that. I could picture you guys, you know, you did put some great descriptions in the books about hearing the typewriter keys, him banging away in the study, and you'd have to walk up and stand just inside the vision, and then eventually he would get to you and you could have your moments. And then there was a cutoff and it was time to go away. He had to get back to it. But I thought it was a great strategy.
Starting point is 00:13:49 Well played to you guys. Yeah, he was very generous in a lot of ways. He was actually a very terrific guy. And so then, skipping much further ahead in time, when he passed away, you said in the books again that the task, the gargantuan task of sorting through everything he left behind then fell to you to read through all these manuscripts and materials and everything he'd been collecting and writing and dabbling with and catalog them and categorize them
Starting point is 00:14:18 as you worked through that whole process and maybe you eventually were thinking of something like the lost treasures project might come about but just in going through all those materials, were there, was there one particular piece that you came across, or maybe a couple, that as you read them, that hit you harder than others, that there was something that stood out, you could hear your father's voice more forcefully, or whatever extent, was there anything else that just jumped out at you that hit you harder than some of the others? I think the last couple of stories in Lost Treasures Volume 1, so this would be Samsara and Journey to Aksu. So these are both, and Journey to Aksu. So these are both not, neither one of them are Westerns. Journey to Aksu is set in Central and Western China, and Samsara is kind of all over the place. So Samsara was a story about people who have been reincarnated, about people who have been reincarnated and they are attempting to regain their memories of past lives and they have set up this kind of almost like a secret society or a network
Starting point is 00:15:35 and there are hidden libraries where they can kind of catch up on it it's very very intriguing story and he started it several different times he started i think four different times with completely different approaches so one of them the character is a is a soldier for alexander the great um and then another one the main character character is a guy who has an antique store in Beverly Hills. And another one, the guy is the main character. I'm not even sure what culture that person lives in, some mysterious kind of prehistoric culture. mysterious kind of prehistoric culture. And then the final one has all kinds of autobiographical details that are very, very true to my father's life.
Starting point is 00:16:31 It's the only time he ever used a character that was drawn in explicit detail from his childhood. And so in that case, the character was really like him. And so these are just two very mysterious, intriguing, intriguing stories that over the years I have always wanted to know more about. And I knew about them even before cleaning up my dad's office. These were stories that he had talked about and I had read pieces of when I was younger. Man, it's really interesting. Was anything revealed about his early childhood through those characters? Did you learn anything new from it or was it just interesting to see
Starting point is 00:17:16 the insight that he was able to put in there? When I first read Samsaraara i definitely learned some things about my dad's uh you know youth in jamestown north dakota and his family's relationship with a group of gypsies or as they called them in those days syrians who came through there and uh and may have had a longer, deeper relationship to the family than, you know, has previously been acknowledged. So the first time I read that, I, you know, I found that to be interesting, and I asked him about it and got even more background on it. But that, of course, was before he died. Sure, sure. And so, as you just referenced, those two stories are at the end of Volume 1. And, of course, Volume 2 was just released.
Starting point is 00:18:16 And it seems like there was a strategy from the very beginning with Volumes 1 and 2. But it also seems like you intentionally maybe didn't put the manuscripts or the entries into any kind of order. Was there a master plan for what went into Volumes 1 and 2 at all? Yes, definitely. Of course, they need to be roughly the same length. Right. And I wanted to alternate Western material because his traditional fans will want to read that
Starting point is 00:18:47 and non-Western material because I had a lot of that left. The non-Western stuff, of course, because he had had a lot of success selling Westerns, there were quite a few unfinished non-Westerns. finished non-Westerns. And Dad also experimented more with non-Western material. When I say experimented, I mean he tried things that perhaps didn't work out, or he didn't know how to finish them, or he felt like it wasn't the time to try and sell them. And so, you know, there was more perhaps exploration in his writing in those areas. So I tried to alternate. I tried to make them roughly the same length. I had a couple of pieces that were particularly interesting and interrelated. So like Journey to Aksu and Samsara are interesting and interrelated.
Starting point is 00:19:42 They went into the first one. I had a couple of pieces that were extremely long. So there's a book about Tibet set in the early 1970s that there's a great deal of it. There's 17 chapters of that particular book in Volume 2. So I put the longer ones in Volume 2. There's also 10 chapters of a sequel to his novel, Borden Chantry, a Western mystery that are in volume two. So there was just, you
Starting point is 00:20:16 know, sort of splitting things up and moving it around and trying to keep certain things that were related to one another close to one another, but also to have a balance and flow to the material. At the same time, I wanted both books to be unpredictable, because as I was exploring this stuff, as I was finding it, the thing that I found fascinating was its unpredictability. You never knew what the next thing you were going to read was going to be like. Sure. I'm sure to at least some degree, that journey through all of his unfinished or unpublished works must have been fascinating. Just like you said, just picking up stacks of papers, you had no idea what was going to come next. It was crazy. It was very exciting.
Starting point is 00:20:59 I can certainly imagine. And that's what I did want to point out very quickly to the listeners as well, that certainly if you pick these volumes up up and i highly encourage you to do so there are especially in volume one like you said there's tons of western stuff there's the beginnings of western novels there's treatments i believe there's there's some that have multiple chapters or at least a chapter of unfinished western work so there's tons of stuff stuff in the western genre but what you also find is that your father very much wanted to try other things, like you just mentioned. How much did he want to break out of the Western genre once he had become known for Westerns and try to do other things like
Starting point is 00:21:38 science fiction and some of these adventure tales that he really seemed to love? Yeah, well, he wanted to break away from Westerns quite a bit. That doesn't mean he wanted to stop writing Westerns. He just wanted the opportunity to do other things. And in the early days, in his magazine writing days, he was able to sell stories of almost any genre he wanted because there was a magazine for just about everything. In fact, there were 15 or 20 magazines for just about any particular genre.
Starting point is 00:22:12 But when he got away from the magazines and the magazines went out of business and he started writing paperback originals, they wanted you to stick to your category and after five years or so of writing quite a few paperback westerns that were fairly successful i mean he wasn't up until the mid to late 1970s he wasn't getting wealthy or anything like that. But he was doing okay. And he felt that he wanted to branch out and write other things. And the publishers and the bookstores and everybody involved were sort of like, no, you just started to succeed at writing Westerns. You need to stick with that. And he did. And then he slowly came up with this plan to sort of change the Westerns he was writing, maybe even change the whole Western genre a little bit so that he could write things that were more international, that took place in different time periods, and that's when he started writing the stories about the Sackett family
Starting point is 00:23:26 in the early days of the United States, you know, in the pre-colonial days, the days of earliest exploration, and writing stories that took place in the mountain man era and things of that sort. And he started sort of easing people into the idea that he might write something in other genres. And then right at the end of his life, he was able to sell Last of the Breed and Haunted Mesa, which is science fiction. Last of the Breed is a thriller. And The Walking Drum, which is his, you know, kind of 12th century historical novel, The Walking Drum, which is his, you know, kind of 12th century historical novel, which actually was written in 1960. It was written at the time he first tried to break away from writing Westerns,
Starting point is 00:24:13 and he wasn't able to sell it for another 25 years or so. Wow, yeah. And it seems like the strategy that he hit on there, if I'm reading it correctly, and if I understood some of the stuff in the books correctly, was that he would use the generational aspect of the characters. He would create a family with characters and backstory, and the characters would be able to lead him into other time periods that were not typical Western time periods, not the period of the American West of the 1860s to the 1880s, that time period. Is that roughly kind of what he did?
Starting point is 00:24:43 That's one of the things that he did. But he also, you know, he experimented with writing. He wrote a contemporary Western. So he wrote The Broken Gun, which takes place, I guess, I think in the late 1950s. It's about a mystery whose roots are in the pioneer period. So it's kind of a melding of traditional Western and modern Western. He wrote Riley's Luck, which is definitely kind of an epic Western, but a fair amount of adventure takes place in Europe in the 1870s. And so he experimented with a number of different approaches, probably the most far out. And one of the earliest ones was the Californios, which took place in California in the 1830s. So
Starting point is 00:25:38 Mexican California that was being, you know, slowly invaded by illegal aliens from the United States. And it also had an element of science fiction and mysticism to it. So it had a number of different qualities where he was sort of stretching the genre or stretching his place in the genre to see if he could get away with it. And when he did, he definitely started writing other things. Right. And so I want to try to wrap up here with three questions that are selfish on my part. So I'm going to get into a little bit of the stuff that I loved and my family loved.
Starting point is 00:26:20 One of the reasons this is such a treat is that I think I was introduced to your father's work in maybe a different way than a lot of people, though potentially the same, I'm not really sure. But our family loved the audio dramatizations that were produced of your father's short stories. We loved those. And there was, to peek behind the curtain here, maybe I've said this on the podcast before. I can't remember. I'm horrible at that kind of thing. I know I've had this conversation with others, but it was exactly one hour from our family's house to our uncle's farm where we spent a lot of time. My dad's brother still lived on the family farm where they grew up. So it was one hour from our house to the farm and we'd throw on a Louis L'Amour audio dramatization that would get us there and another one would get us back and
Starting point is 00:27:03 they were perfectly timed. So we listened to tons of these and you know we started out with the cassette tapes graduated up to the cds i then bought them in digital form along the way so that was how i was first introduced to to louis lamore and so the the favored son of the wimmer family was the texas ranger chick beaudry right we loved the Chick Beaudry stories. So I want to wrap up with some selfish Chick Beaudry questions and audio dramatization questions. If you can answer them, fantastic. If not, I at least want to ask because this is a great opportunity.
Starting point is 00:27:35 So first of all, how many people do ask you about the character of Chick Beaudry? I'm sure we can't be the only ones who love that character. No, no, Chick Beaudry. I'm sure we can't be the only ones who love that character. No, no, Chick Beaudry is very popular, and he was popular at the time that my dad wrote about him in the magazine stories, and certainly a lot of people have listened to those stories on cassette, so he's definitely, you're not the only one. I had no doubt. I knew that there were probably legions of fans out there, but you know, growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, and then driving into southwest Iowa, we felt like the only ones who knew about Chick Beaudry.
Starting point is 00:28:09 And he was part of the family as we would drive back and forth. And any time the family went somewhere, there were always these stories that we would play. So what can you tell us, if anything, about the creation of the character of Chick Beaudry? Did you have any insight into how that character came to be? No, I just know that Dad very much liked, I mean, writing series was a tactic to get, if it was successful, to get the publisher to buy more. And so, you know, in this case,
Starting point is 00:28:44 these were published in Western story magazines in the pulp magazine era. And so Dad created several different series, and some of the editors didn't like it because they could feel themselves getting beholden to that particular writer. And of course, they beholden to that particular writer. And of course, they were always nervous that the writer was going to then ask for more money or one of these things that they couldn't do because all of those operations were kind of run on a shoestring. But, you know, it was a good business tactic.
Starting point is 00:29:18 And if you could create something that was, you know, popular. It just helped out in many different ways. Sure, of course, of course. So kind of my last selfish question here is about the audio dramatizations themselves. Can you give any insight into the behind the scenes of the production of them? How did the idea of these come to be? How did it come into fruition? We're many decades after the old radio westerns used to be? How did it come into fruition? We're many decades after the old radio westerns used to be popular. So how did someone even have these ideas?
Starting point is 00:29:52 In the earliest days of audio publishing, so there had been prior to the mid-1980s, there had been books for the blind, and occasionally someone would make a had been books for the blind, and occasionally someone would make a recording of someone reading a book. And even in the days of radio drama, there were certain dramas that were basically a group of actors who just got together to read a book. But, you know, obviously 30 years had gone by since that. But, you know, obviously 30 years had gone by since that. And in the mid-1980s, the people who were starting up the Bantam Books audio publishing division came to my dad because almost anything that Bantam wanted to experiment with,
Starting point is 00:30:39 they came to him first because they knew that if they could get his fans on board, it wouldn't fail. It might not be the most popular thing in the whole world, but it wouldn't be like no one showed up at all. Because Dad had a very loyal fan base. And so they came to him and they wanted to experiment with doing some audiobooks. And so they came to him and they wanted to experiment with doing some audiobooks. And because they felt like it was the least expensive way of getting involved in it, they said, we want to start off doing short stories. We want it to be small. We want it to be controllable.
Starting point is 00:31:20 We don't want to get in too deep. And then things got a little weird because Dad said, well well if you're going to do my short stories i'm not sure that a lot of my short stories are really all that good and i don't want to present that as the cutting edge of where i'm at now in the 1980s so what can we do with them to make them more exciting, to give them more, you know, more value? And they cooked up this idea of doing them like radio dramas or like an updated version of a classic era radio drama. And somewhere along in those first couple of shows, I got involved and became one of the producers because I was the person in the family who had been working in the film business and had also been working in audio recording and knew kind of little edges of all the different things we were doing. I certainly was no expert in those days,
Starting point is 00:32:26 but ultimately, very quickly, what happened was is that they discovered that there were very few of the stories that they could simply have a cast read and then add sound effects and music and things like that, and it would be exactly 60 minutes. So, you know, quite quickly they learned that they had to have a script that was written, you know, that was not the exact text of the story, or they would never make that precise time limitation. And so I got more and more involved as the script writing process evolved, because that's the kind of thing that I was doing in those days in other ways. I was working in the film business to a certain extent.
Starting point is 00:33:19 And so I got more and more involved in that, and it was a ton of fun. I mean, it was just great. I think we did our last production like four or five years ago. Oh man, I didn't realize they were continuing until that point. We did six productions a year all through the 1980s and maybe almost to the end of the 90s. And then we did four for quite a few years, and those were one-hour dramas. And then in 2004, we did a two-hour Son of a Wanted Man adaptation of Son of a Wanted Man.
Starting point is 00:34:01 And then about, I don't know, seven or eight years after that, you know, so big long wag in there, we did a three-hour adaptation of The Diamond of Jeru. That's the most recent one. And those two took a very long time because I just did those almost as a labor of love. I mean, we weren't really making any money off of them or anything. And because of that, they had to be done very slowly whenever I and the guy that I work with had some spare time. So we would end up working maybe one week a month, about 10 months of the year. week, a month, about 10 months of the year. And so production on Son of a Wanted Man took about, it took about four years to get enough days, you know, to the point where we had that show in the can. And I think, I think the production of, uh, uh, The Diamond of Dru, I think took,
Starting point is 00:35:00 took about seven years. Wow. You're, you're committed. There's no question. It took us about seven years. Wow. You're committed, there's no question. Yeah, it was, but you know, you just grind away at it. On both of those shows, we probably spent seven to ten days in the recording studio with the actors right in the beginning, and then there's just all of the editing and creating the sound effects and doing all that stuff, and to just do the kind of work that was good enough so that we could have fun doing it, it took a long time. Yeah, I only have a tiny little slice of experience in that world myself,
Starting point is 00:35:36 but it's actually kind of funny. Part of the reason I ask is as I daydream about the future, I'm sitting in the studio where I hope to sometime in the near future create a Western audio drama for the podcast medium that is now so popular and right you know it's it's go it's driving into fiction and it's good we're going right back to those old uh radio drama days just with modern technology and so I'm on a one-man mission to bring back the western audio drama and so it's funny I've actually looked up some of the the people who played those old characters from the Chick Beaudry stories, Rethel Bean and some of the others,
Starting point is 00:36:08 see, man, what are they doing now? Is there any chance that they're still around and I might be able to get one of them to sign on to this thing if we get it off the ground? So the daydreams are strong. So I totally get it. Well, if you have any questions about technique, give me a call. I'm more than happy to help out. I was going to say, I would certainly have to. I will need lots of advice. So I'm probably going to have to give you a call. To wrap it all up, Volume 2 of The Lost Treasures just came out,
Starting point is 00:36:35 so I want to hear very quickly at the end, what's next? What are you wrapping up? You mentioned this before we started recording, but what's left on the docket as far as the Lost Treasures Project goes? The last few pieces of the Lost Treasures Project will be some more of the postscripts that are going to go into the novels. I intentionally left all of the work that I would do for the Sackett novels till the end, because as I write these things, I discover elements that I will want to put into other postscripts. So as I do the research, I learn things about other stories. So the Sackett series will probably have three or four books in it that will have
Starting point is 00:37:21 postscripts. And so I have that material sort of laying in a pile on my desk right now. I have to go through that and figure out how I'm going to, how many stories I'm going to break it into and what's going to be included in each. And there's just a, you know, there's just general work on the Lemoore franchise that has to be done. There's still some books to be recovered, you know, book covers. And my producer and I are re-editing a couple of our old audios.
Starting point is 00:38:02 And so we're going back into Unguarded Moment and Murano of the Dry Country. Oh, yeah. I know that one for sure. Yeah. We are re-editing those because we had all the pieces laying around. And so we really could update them and make them more modern shows. A lot of the shows that we have, we don't have all the discrete elements, but those two we had at all.
Starting point is 00:38:30 So there'll be an editorial process on those that'll go on for quite a while. So there's plenty to work on. Yeah, it sounds like it. But thank you for your time. I certainly appreciate it. And I guess to say this again, louislamourslosstreasures.com also has a ton of information. You can get lists of what's going on.
Starting point is 00:38:53 There are, I think, what did you say? There were more than 30 books now that have postscripts attached to them? I don't know exactly how many of those are currently for sale, but I have written around 30, and I still have a few more to go. And so I generally don't pay too much attention to what's hitting the market. I'm more focused on the things that I'm writing and are going back and forth between myself and the editor. And sometimes, you know, I'll write something and sometimes it'll be a year before it, or two years before it comes out.
Starting point is 00:39:28 So I don't pay too much attention to what's coming out at any one moment. So I'd have to say, check the Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures website for all of the postscripts that are currently available. Right. Well, there it is. That's the advice to everybody listening. Check it out if you're a huge fan of Louis L'Amour like like i am you've got a lot of stuff coming your way uh so thank you
Starting point is 00:39:48 very much again for your time and hopefully we'll talk to you down the road you're so welcome thanks for listening as always and before i you go, I have two more quick reminders. First, our merchandise shop is finally up. Man, that was a chore like you wouldn't believe, but it's finally done. If you go to our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, you'll find a link to the store. It has the t-shirts you've seen us wearing and much more. And finally, while you're on the site, please sign up for our monthly newsletter. It gives you a peek behind the curtain at Black Barrel Media.
Starting point is 00:40:31 Each month I throw in a nugget about the production of our shows, and we have a listener spotlight section and a section that features some of the other great people who have made these shows what they are. And there's a lot more, don't worry. You can find all this stuff at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Thanks again, and we'll see you very soon for Jesse James. I'm deal. The highest cash back. The most savings on your shopping. So join Rakuten and start getting cash back at Sephora, Old Navy, Expedia, and other stores you love. You can even stack sales on top of cash back. Just start your shopping with Rakuten to save money at over 750 stores. Join for free at Rakuten.ca or get the Rakuten app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N.

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