The Haunted Mesa (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)

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The Haunted Mesa (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures) Page 36

by Louis L'Amour


  As much as I believe that the story of a skeptic forced to confront the paranormal is a very solid concept, I know that Dad also wanted to write a full-bore adventure story. He wanted to go to the other world and see it through the eyes of his hero. Given that fact, I have always wondered if my best advice might have been to suggest a character who was more of a man of action and who had a different personal issue to be resolved.

  Regardless, I worry that a reader of The Haunted Mesa can feel the conflict between these earlier and later versions: Is the story going to be about Mike the skeptic having to finally confront his personal fears or Mike the action hero heading off into an alien world to save his friend? There is no question that The Haunted Mesa eventually ended up following the latter path, but the more I think about it the more I wonder if that half-remembered or partially discarded early draft didn’t continue to cause Dad some concern about the overall direction of the story. I also wouldn’t be surprised if this sort of unresolved ghost of an idea doesn’t haunt countless manuscripts by many different writers.

  I realized much of this while working on my Haunted Mesa film and TV experiment. In the end, the version where Mike finds Eric cut in half by the closing of the portal between worlds would work wonderfully for a spooky feature with a modest budget. For a TV series, where Mike would spend many episodes on the “other side,” I chose to make Mike a retired Special Forces officer, a man dealing with PTSD and chafing from the confines of civilization—someone more capable of going solo into hostile territory and surviving.

  * * *

  —

  Throughout the fall of ’86, Louis forged ahead, but it was an agonizing process, full of the sort of misgivings from which his career had always been remarkably free. Here are some of his journal entries from that time:

  Anxious to complete MESA, hope it is good, and to get on with something else. My mind is not quite tuned to MESA right now. A few weeks one way or the other would have made a difference, I think. I needed to work on something else after BREED.

  I shall complete MESA this week, I think. Not a good job, however.

  Must finish this book, and get to clearing the decks here…I have 20 books I very much want to write…That is my problem: always there are ideas, they throng my brain, each demanding to be written.

  Even though The Haunted Mesa contains no small amount of that Louis L’Amour magic—that ability to fire the imagination and involve the reader—and even though it was eventually a number one bestseller, selected by the Literary Guild and beloved by many readers, Louis almost didn’t publish it. At one point, not too long before it was due, he wrote the following:

  May hold back on HAUNTED MESA. Am not sure if it is any good or not. I got off the deep end on this one and it may need some work. Too bad. Everybody set for it and a beautiful cover set for it with a painting by Clifford Brycelea, my Navajo friend.

  That may not sound like a particularly negative attitude, but for Louis, a constant optimist—and a man who always delivered on time—it’s pretty significant. He even considered asking Bantam to swap in another novel that he had stashed away. But in the end he decided that the possible replacement was even less ready for publication than The Haunted Mesa…so he agreed to move ahead.

  Though he was rarely happy with any book during the writing of its last few chapters, his last journal entry on the subject of The Haunted Mesa shows a continuing wistfulness:

  Book selling well. No. 2 on NY Times list. Some don’t like it, some do. I was unsure about this one, knew I was gambling, but wished to do it. Not as good as I wanted it to be…

  It might not have been as good as he wanted it to be, but many have found The Haunted Mesa to be an enjoyable read and one of the more intriguing explorations of the “Weird West” subgenre. More important, however, it was part of a highly significant set of personal milestones.

  For thirty years Louis had been trying to break away from writing traditional Westerns. He had attempted to write contemporary thrillers and historical novels in the 1950s and gotten nowhere. In the 1960s he managed to sell transitional works that dealt with Western Americans in Europe and Europeans in the American West—but it was unclear if doing so had actually bought him any freedom. By the 1970s Dad had managed to expand the definition of his genre from that of the mid- to late-nineteenth century to all of the early frontier. Finally, between 1984 and 1987, with The Walking Drum, Last of the Breed, and The Haunted Mesa, three very different novels in three completely different genres, he was able to prove he could be a bestselling author in any category he chose. Though he had many more planned, the success of those three titles defied expectations and fulfilled the dreams and aspirations of a lifetime.

  For more information on The Haunted Mesa and photographs of No Man’s Mesa and Johnnie’s Hole, visit louislamourslosttreasures.com and click on “Website Exclusives,” followed by “Additional Materials.”

  Beau L’Amour

  October 2019

  Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour

  NOVELS

  Bendigo Shafter

  Borden Chantry

  Brionne

  The Broken Gun

  The Burning Hills

  The Californios

  Callaghen

  Catlow

  Chancy

  The Cherokee Trail

  Comstock Lode

  Conagher

  Crossfire Trail

  Dark Canyon

  Down the Long Hills

  The Empty Land

  Fair Blows the Wind

  Fallon

  The Ferguson Rifle

  The First Fast Draw

  Flint

  Guns of the Timberlands

  Hanging Woman Creek

  The Haunted Mesa

  Heller with a Gun

  The High Graders

  High Lonesome

  Hondo

  How the West Was Won

  The Iron Marshal

  The Key-Lock Man

  Kid Rodelo

  Kilkenny

  Killoe

  Kilrone

  Kiowa Trail

  Last of the Breed

  Last Stand at Papago Wells

  The Lonesome Gods

  The Man Called Noon

  The Man from Skibbereen

  The Man from the Broken Hills

  Matagorda

  Milo Talon

  The Mountain Valley War

  North to the Rails

  Over on the Dry Side

  Passin’ Through

  The Proving Trail

  The Quick and the Dead

  Radigan

  Reilly’s Luck

  The Rider of Lost Creek

  Rivers West

  The Shadow Riders

  Shalako

  Showdown at Yellow Butte

  Silver Canyon

  Sitka

  Son of a Wanted Man

  Taggart

  The Tall Stranger

  To Tame a Land

  Tucker

  Under the Sweetwater Rim

  Utah Blaine

  The Walking Drum

  Westward the Tide

  Where the Long Grass Blows

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Beyond the Great Snow Mountains

  Bowdrie

  Bowdrie’s Law

  Buckskin Run

  The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour (vols. 1–7)

  Dutchman’s Flat

  End of the Drive

  From the Listening Hills

  The Hills of Homicide

  Law of the Desert Born

  Long Ride Home

  Lonigan

  May There Be a Road

  Monument Rock

/>   Night Over the Solomons

  Off the Mangrove Coast

  The Outlaws of Mesquite

  The Rider of the Ruby Hills

  Riding for the Brand

  The Strong Shall Live

  The Trail to Crazy Man

  Valley of the Sun

  War Party

  West from Singapore

  West of Dodge

  With These Hands

  Yondering

  SACKETT TITLES

  Sackett’s Land

  To the Far Blue Mountains

  The Warrior’s Path

  Jubal Sackett

  Ride the River

  The Daybreakers

  Sackett

  Lando

  Mojave Crossing

  Mustang Man

  The Lonely Men

  Galloway

  Treasure Mountain

  Lonely on the Mountain

  Ride the Dark Trail

  The Sackett Brand

  The Sky-Liners

  THE HOPALONG CASSIDY NOVELS

  The Riders of High Rock

  The Rustlers of West Fork

  The Trail to Seven Pines

  Trouble Shooter

  NONFICTION

  Education of a Wandering Man

  Frontier

  The Sackett Companion: A Personal Guide to the Sackett Novels

  A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, compiled by Angelique L’Amour

  POETRY

  Smoke from This Altar

  LOST TREASURES

  Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1 (with Beau L’Amour)

  No Traveller Returns (with Beau L’Amour)

  ABOUT LOUIS L’AMOUR

  “I think of myself in the oral tradition—

  as a troubadour, a village taleteller, the man

  in the shadows of the campfire. That’s the way

  I’d like to be remembered—as a storyteller.

  A good storyteller.”

  It is doubtful that any author could be as at home in the world re-created in his novels as Louis Dearborn L’Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally “walked the land my characters walk.” His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L’Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.

  As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family’s frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.

  Spurred by an eager curiosity and a desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L’Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs, including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, miner, and officer in the Transportation Corps during World War II. He was a voracious reader and collector of books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.

  Mr. L’Amour “wanted to write almost from the time I could talk.” After developing a widespread following for the many frontier and adventure stories he wrote for fiction magazines, Mr. L’Amour published his first full-length novel, Hondo, in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 120 books is in print; there are more than 300 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.

  His hardcover bestsellers include The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel), Jubal Sackett, Last of the Breed, and The Haunted Mesa. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L’Amour stories are available from Random House Audio.

  The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L’Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life’s work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.

  Louis L’Amour died on June 10, 1988.

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