L'Amour was known primarily as a churner-outer of westerns, but one of his most popular and enduring characters is Ponga Jim Mayo, the rough-and-ready, Nazi-baiting East Indies freighter captain who speaks with his right fist and punctuates with his left. The nine Ponga Jim stories form the cornerstone of this fourth volume of L'Amour short fiction. Dubbed The Adventure Stories0 --accurate up to a point but really just another way of saying nonwesterns--these tales showcase L'Amour's gift for compact, straightforward storytelling outside of the confines of his usual genre. Ranging from tales of train-hopping hobos to Himalayan tribes fighting to keep their distance from the modern world, the stories usually feature a tough hero shrugging off all odds for survival against hellish elements and zero-dimensional villains. The action is fast, hard-hitting, and a ton of fun. Every campfire should come with its own built-in Louis L'Amour to regale away the hours. Failing that, this volume adds a necessary touch of breadth to an already essential collection. --Ian Chipman Copyright 2006 Booklist

The fourth volume of the late L'Amour's short stories takes the author out of his familiar American frontier setting and into desolate and dangerous locales around the world, from "a narrow fjord at the end of the earth" on the southern coast of Chile to a "lonely isolated spot in the Coral Sea." While the characters are not traditional L'Amour, as "men of quick wit and valor" they share similar characteristics and values; freighter captain Ponga Jim Mayo, who plies the treacherous waters of the Indian Ocean during World War II (and is featured in nine of these 45 stories), succinctly sums up their worldview: "I'll make my own rules and abide by the consequences." The stories reflect the author's own youthful wanderings-as seaman, soldier and professional boxer-and, having been mostly written for pulp adventure magazines, are predictably formulaic. L'Amour's first publication, "Death Westbound," a Depression-era hobo story, crackles with his trademark prose: "Sometimes the shacks were pretty good guys, but a railroad dick is always a louie." No L'Amour fan will want to miss this collection. Afterword by L'Amour's son, Beau L'Amour. (Nov. 7) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Workmanlike action tales from prolific author L'Amour (1908-88; Beyond the Great Snow Mountains, 1999, etc.). From the 1920s to the '40s, L'Amour wrote great numbers of magazine stories, glad to find a serial that paid on acceptance, even when the publication was a little risqu. (Of one magazine he writes, "It pays rather well but is somewhat sensational. The magazine...is generally illustrated by several pictures of partially undressed ladies, and they are usually rather heavily constructed ladies also.") This volume, part of an ongoing project to collect L'Amour's scattered serial publications, gathers pieces that likely otherwise would have been lost, published in long-extinct magazines such as 10 Story Book and Thrilling Adventures. As L'Amour's son Beau writes in the afterword, L'Amour worked under the influence of Jack London, Eugene O'Neill and John Steinbeck, and these tales are marked by a kind of bare-chested realism that is not without its poetry ("I'd had my share of the smell of coal smoke and cinders in the rain, the roar of a freight and the driving run-and-catch of a speeding train in the night, and then the sun coming up over the desert or going down over the sea, and the islands looming up and the taste of salt spray on my lips and the sound of bow wash about the hull"). The realism gets a touch less believable with a nicely plotted sequence of stories surrounding "pirates with wings" Steve Cowan and Turk Madden, soldiers of fortune loyal to nothing but the American way of life, with a talent for operating knife and machine gun, and with a definite dislike for the "sons of Nippon." Literary archaeologists will prize this sequence as an insight into the American mindset at the time of World War II. L'Amour was not a consciously literary writer, not by any stretch, but with a little fine tuning, his story "The Man Who Stole Shakespeare" could pass for Borges. In all events, the stories are more than competently rendered, and fuel for a hundred old-timey Buster Crabbe serials. Potboilers, to be sure, but good fun, and just the thing for fans of L'Amour's better-known Westerns. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.