Trivia / Louis L'Amour

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: In The Well of the Unholy Light, he introduces Japanese 2 man midget submarines, armed with 2 torpedoes. Thing is, nobody knew about those being a real thing until a few months after his story was published, during the Attack on Pearl Harbor.
• Creator Backlash: In 1950, L'Amour was hired to write four novels about the western character Hopalong Cassidy as a tie in with the very popular TV show. Since Hopalong was not an original character, restrictions were placed on him in order to align the books with the TV show. L'Amour was not happy with these stories and later in his career would deny ever writing them, even to his own family.
• What Could Have Been:
  • L'Amour died with several planned novels which never got to see reality, including one which would have covered Tell Sackett in the Civil War.
  • He also planned on expanding the Talon and Chantry series a lot more, with "forty-ish" books between the Talons, Chantrys and Sacketts. He finished with 17 Sackett, 4 Chantry and 3 Talon novels.
• Write What You Know: Apparently every single geographic feature in his books existed in real life and he saw them himself while Walking the Earth. His biography states that if there's any stream mentioned in one of his stories, you can find that stream exactly where he put it in Real Life, and the water will be good to drink. This probably explains why his descriptions of the land are so vivid and detailed, he described places he'd actually been and streams he'd actually drunk from.