One of my favorite Louis L’Amour quotes is:

“The idea that poverty is a cause of crime is a lot of nonsense. It is one of those cliches that is accepted because it seems logical. Crimes are committed by people who have some money and want more. More often they are committed by somebody who wants to have money to flash around, to buy fancy clothes, or spend on women, drugs, or whiskey.”

That is from the Bantam paperback The Hills of Homicide. Last summer, I wrote about the collected crime stories of Louis L’Amour Part 1. I read Volume 6 (Part 2) this winter. This collection contains the more traditional private eye stories from the pulp magazines in the late 1940s.

Contents:

Sixteen stories total, fourteen are detective stories, the last two are sports stories. The collection is weighed heavily towards series characters. Kip Morgan is a boxer turned detective. The stories have a fist fight as the climax. Joe Ragan is a police detective. Neil Shannon is a private eye.

I like Raymond Chandler’s original pulp stories. I return to Dashiell Hammett periodically if I have a run of especially bad prose reading. I have read a fair amount of other pulp detective fiction over the years. Raoul Whitfield’s “Jo Gar” stories rank up there after Hammett and Chandler. My all time favorite detective series though is Donald Wandrei’s “Ivy Frost” series.

I have to say that L’Amour wrote pretty credible detective stories. Raymond Chandler appears to be his model and he largely pulls it off. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe uses a Colt .38 auto (“super”) in the novels (Luger in the pulp stories). L’Amour has one of his detectives carry a Colt .38 auto in one of his stories. Colt .45 autos abound in this collection.

You could do far worse if you are looking for pulp era hard-boiled detective fiction. You can see that L’Amour was selling regularly to the detective pulp magazines in the late 1940s. He made the decision in 1950 to switch mostly to westerns. He could have easily wrote Gold Medal crime paperbacks had he chosen that path.