Top flight short story collection. L’Amour was at his best in this milieu. ( )

War Party continues to be one of my favorite collections of short stories by this author. The story that gave this book its name was later expanded into Bendigo Shafter, in which one of the key characters is a strong and resourceful widow. The Gift of Cochise was eventually expanded into a full length story, Hondo, which is a good novel in itself but I prefer the simplicity of the shorter version. Even virtually unknown stories such as One for the Pot, about a mail-order bride's role in a land war, remain my favorite "comfort reads", to be read and enjoyed over and over. If you want to see why some of us enjoy Louis L'Amour's books so much, this would be a good place to start reading. ( )

As I said before, I like L'Amour's short stories --and I might say particularly the ones that come from the pulp magazines --more tan his more pretentious novels. ( )

Old Children's Book. Liked it as a kid, but haven't read it in years. ( )

War Party by Louis L’Amour is a collection of 10 short stories. L’Amour generally writes in a terse yet action filled way and this sparse prose shows to great advantage in his short stories. I originally picked up this book as I am reading the Sackett Family series and one of the stories involves this family. As with most short story collections, not all are of the same quality, but in War Party, I really can’t say there was a particularly weak one. The ones I most enjoyed were “One For the Pot”, ‘War Party” and the original inspiration for the John Wayne movie, “Hondo” called “The Gift of Cochise”. These stories may have been my favourites as they all featured women as the main characters.

While L’Amour’s characters don’t vary much, his women are usually the good, strong, helpmate or the frivolous, duty shirking flibbertigibbet although sometimes they start out as one and grow into the other. His men are the strong, silent yet righteous types with the bible in one hand and a gun in the other, or the dirty, low-down back-shooting bad guy. Of course these types of characters fit perfectly in the western genre.

While War Party will not blow the reader away with it’s literary acrobatics, it is nonetheless a good sampling of why Louis L’Amour was one of the foremost western writers of his day and why his writing remains so popular today. ( )