Buckskin Westerns is proud to have unearthed Louis L'Amour's original pulp magazine version of Showdown Trail. When L'Amour's agent sold film rights to the movies, L'Amour offered to novelize it for Fawcett Gold Medal Books, a prominent paperback publisher of the era who had published the novelization of Hondo which had proved a bestseller for them. Then, as now, a movie meant a strong paperback sale for any book. Many fans believe the taut magazine versions of his novels are the best. You can see for yourself by reading the Buckskin Editions reprint of Showdown Trail, which was first published in Giant Western magazine Winter 1948.
The lengthened paperback version, titled after the filmscript, The
The film is considered one of the finest western movies of its time. And no wonder, in addition to McCrea it featured Virginia Mayo, Michael Ansara, John Mitchum, and Whitt Bissel, while the screenplay was by no less a literary light than Christopher Knopf.
The Tall Stranger has a 4.5 star rating at Amazon. The plot concerns Bannon, a Union officer wounded in battle, who joins up
