After World War II, Louis L'Amour began writing for Western pulp magazines; most of this was originally under pseudonyms like 'Jim Mayo' and 'Tex Burns'. In 1951, however, he began publishing under his own name, and his career was to change forever when in 1952, he wrote a short story, "The Gift of Cochise", which was published in Colliers. In it, a woman named Angie Lowe faces down the Apache warrior, Cochise, with some help from a man named Ches Lane. The story caught the eye of the film producer, Robert Fellows, who had just teamed up with John Wayne and was looking for stories that would work well for Wayne on film. They bought the film rights from L'Amour and hired Wayne's friend and vertean screenwriter, James Edward Grant, to rework it into a screenplay. Ches Lane became Hondo Lane.
So far, an ordinary story of publication. However, when he sold the film rights, L'Amour cleverly retained the novelization rights to the film. He wrote a novel based on Grant's heavy reworking of the story, with the same title, Hondo. The novel Hondo was published in 1953 on the same day the film came out, and, Wayne and Fellows understanding how publicity worked, did so with a blurb from John Wayne himself on the cover. The movie was a success, which made the novelization a bestseller, which contributed further to the success of the movie. L'Amour, of course, was able to leverage this beginning to become the twentieth century's greatest novelist in the Western genre.
The fortnightly book, then, will be Hondo, Louis L'Amour's novelization of James Edward Grant's screenplay inspired by Louis L'Amour's short story. I have a copy of "The Gift of Cochise" somewhere, so I will read it as well.
