From Booklist
L'Amour published 90 novels, 27 short story collections, a memoir, 2 nonfiction books, and even a volume of poetry. He is the only novelist to win both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. This is the second volume of his western stories to be released posthumously. The 30 tales collected here reflect the qualities on which L'Amour's timeless popularity is based: memorable protagonists, excellent plots, moral clarity, and plenty of action. About half of these tales feature Chick Bowdrie, a tough-as-nails Texas Ranger with a Holmesian ability to analyze a crime scene. Bowdrie solves a 20-year-old kidnapping, ends a nascent range war, and brings to justice the killers of 14 outlaws slaughtered in an ambush, among other heroics. Beyond the Bowdrie offerings, the standout tale in the collection may be "Law of the Desert Born," in which Shad Marone, on the run for a crime he didn't commit, draws his pursuers into a trap in which only one man will survive. Great reading from a genre master. Wes Lukowsky
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Review
"L'Amour never writes with less than a saddle creak in his sentences and more often with a desert heatwave boiling up from a sunbaked paragraph. A master storyteller.... for reading under the stars."
--Kirkus Reviews
 

FROM THE PUBLISHER

With more than 120 titles still in print, Louis L'Amour is recognized the world over as one of the most prolific and popular American authors in history. Though he met with phenomenal success in every genre he tried, the form that put him on the map was the short story. Now this great writer - who The Wall Street Journal recently compared with Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson - will receive his due as a great storyteller. This volume kicks off a series that will, when complete, anthologize all of L'Amour's short fiction, volume by handsome volume.

Here, in Volume One, is a treasure-trove of 35 frontier tales for his millions of fans and for those who have yet to discover L'Amour's thrilling prose - and his vital role in capturing the spirit of the Old West for generations to come.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

L'Amour is well known for Western novels about strong characters in hard situations. Names like Sackett, Hondo, and Bowdrie are synonymous with fast-drawing, straight-shooting Western heroes. This second collection of short stories falls into the same pattern: 19 of them deal with Texas Ranger Chick Bowdrie, a frontier lawman who combines fast thinking with fast shooting. The best story overall is "More Brains Than Bullets," in which Bowdrie has to solve a murder, a bank robbery, and a frame-up all at the same time. Other stories are pure Western romance, e.g., "Trail to Pie Town," in which a wandering cowboy rescues a woman in trouble. All of these stories have seen print more than once before, though here a few authorial notes and a brief biography of L'Amour add to the reader's enjoyment. Those who appreciate well-told tales with plenty of action, Western lore, and local color will enjoy.-Ken St. Andre, Phoenix P.L. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

For reading under the stars. The unimaginably prolific L'Amour-120 books still in print, 45 works filmed as movies or TV shows, over 270 million books sold worldwide-carries on from the grave. This second in a projected four-volume series (The Collected Stories of Louis L'Amour: The Frontier Stories, Volume One, 2003) reprints 30 more stories, this time featuring L'Amour's popular hero Texas Ranger Chick Bowdrie (Bowdrie; Bowdrie's Law).Though never a fancy stylist, L'Amour never writes with less than a saddle creak in his sentences and often enough with a desert heatwave boiling up from a sunbaked paragraph. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for the next two volumes.

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