A committed… and commit-able…  used-bookstore junkie, I always have my eye out not just for volumes of poetry, but also for old paperbacks with great covers. And though I usually read as much of the paperback books as I am able, it is purely for the sake of the cover art that I pick up the book. And art it is indeed…!

Here are some Western covers with a Montana theme that would be hard to leave on a shelf. 

Enjoy!

_____

A committed… and commit-able…  used-bookstore junkie, I always have my eye out not just for volumes of poetry, but also for old paperbacks with great covers. And though I usually read as much of the paperback books as I am able, it is purely for the sake of the cover art that I pick up the book. And art it is indeed…!

Here are some Western covers with a Winchester/rifle theme that would be hard to leave on a shelf. 

Enjoy!

_____

A committed… and commit-able…  used-bookstore junkie, I always have my eye out not just for volumes of poetry, but also for old paperbacks with great covers. And though I usually read as much of the paperback books as I am able, it is purely for the sake of the cover art that I pick up the book. And art it is indeed…!

Here are some Western covers with a pistol theme that would be hard to leave on a shelf. 

Enjoy!

_____

available at Amazon.com

There are many sides to literary Montana. One is the Montana of the poet and painter. That is the Montana of landscapes and mountains, of blue-ribbon trout streams and elk herds and wide-open spaces under a wide-open sky.

Another Montana is the Montana of the Western. That is the Montana of small tough towns, and cowboys, of people who live close to edge of the ever-present natural and human wilderness.

There is I suppose another Montana as well that has developed over the years. That is the Montana of literary carpetbaggers. It is the Montana of college-educated interlopers from tamer places who think it is fun to slum in a tough town bar every now and then, or to work their own boutique-herd of cattle purchased by hook or crook, by Hollywood exploits or New York-lauded literary sales. But in the end, their books always seem hollow because they know only part of Montana, the tourist part, the view out the window. Hence they do not know Montana at all.

They have never had to work someone else’s cattle, or build someone else’s fence-line. They have never sat in a town bar and known what it is like not to have enough money for another beer, or enough money on a Monday morning to put enough gas into their  pickup truck so they can work another day at a soul-killing job they hate. They do not know what it is like to have rich outsiders buying up all the ranches, driving up prices, wanting to change the way things are.

Montana is beautiful and it is violent. It is hard-fought high school football and basketball games that really matter to county pride. It is crushing rural poverty. It is back-breaking employment that takes a toll on your body and soul for a wage that would be laughable in any tamer place. It is a place where outside businesses and outside interests are always to be suspected because they see the place where you live as only a commodity, a place to be bought cheap and sold to the highest bidder

There are many ways to write about Montana. Gary Cook has chosen the hard-boiled way.

Cook creates the kind of characters that would be at home in a Carl Hiaasen novel or an Elmore Leonard one and then gives them one great stage to act on, the “real” Montana… or at least the gritty and noir-ish edge of the real one.

A Murder of Wolves is available at Amazon.

Here are the opening lines of the Chapter Two. Read them and you can easily see why I enjoyed A Murder of Wolves so much.

Enjoy!

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“A strange land we wandered to eastern horizons
Where blueness of mountains swam in their blue–
In blue beyond name.” 

Robert Penn Warren is probably remembered more today as a novelist than as a poet. While it is true that he did win the Pulitzer Prize in 1946  for his famous novel All the King’s Men, he actually won twice as many Pulitzers as a poet (in 1958 and 1979). He remains the only writer to win Pulitzers as both a poet and novelist.

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, a 64-page, book-length poem, was published in 1983 when Warren was in his late 70s.  It is about  ”the last Indian war,” about the Nez Perce’s fighting flight from Idaho into Montana and Yellowstone and north toward Canada.

To write a 68-page poem about an one-hundred-year-old  historical event in the west is, by any definition, audacious. For that reason alone Warren should be admired. That he succeeds so often in what he attempts should make us consider Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce one of the essential, late-20th-century works of American literature.

Warren makes demands on his audience. But it is not the kind of demands that Modernists make. Warren is not in his heart a Continental poet but an American one… but an American poet of a more intellectual kind. He is not Frost or Sandburg. I have thought of him at times as an American Auden, with less musicality. In the American literary tradition he is more Melville than Whitman, more mind than spirit.

In the most successful parts of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce we see Warren at his poetic best. That is the greatest merit I think of the long poem. It reveals poetic character because it so challenges poetic skill. It is the ultimate poetic risk.

I like Warren, even when he fails… and he does fail at times in Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. Failure though in a great undertaking is not the same as failure in a easy thing. Indeed, sometimes in poetry, failure is more admirable than success. It is certainly more interesting. And Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce is above all else an interesting poem and one of the best books written about Montana and the West.

Enjoy!

Some favorite lines

What does our blood,
in arteries deep, heaving with pulse-thrust
In its eternal midnight, remember?
We stir in sleep. We, too, belong
To the world, and it is spread for our eyes.

* * * * * * * * * *

But could he forget
The bones of his of his fathers, and the Old Wisdom?
Nor eyes of the fathers that watch from the darkness?

* * * * * * * * * *

Into a dark place my father had gone.
You know how the hunter, at dawn, waits,
String notched, where the buck comes to drink. Waits,
While first light brightens highest spruce bough, eyes slitted
like knife wounds, breath with no motion. My father
Waits thus in his dark place. Waiting, sees all.

* * * * * * * * * *

Remember your dead now lonely under
High stars with no names. Snow comes soon. In darkness, awake,
In new mountains, you stare up to see, bright as steel,
Stars wheel in unfamiliar formations. You know not
That sky. Nor that land, nor where foot leads.

* * * * * * * * * *

He knew– could see afar, beyond all night–
Those ancient eyes, in which love and judgement
Hold equal glitter, and, with no blink,
Strove always toward him. And he–
He strove to think of things outside
of Time, in some
Great whirling sphere, like truth unnamable. Thus–
Standing there, he might well,
Already in such midnight, have foreknown
The end.

 

 

_____

I have long had a weakness for certain kinds of pulp fiction. It is my literary undoing. I cannot browse thrift store bookshelves or charity book sales without picking up a few cheap old paperbacks for no other reason than the fact that they have “interesting” covers.

Attentive readers to MontanaWriter have no doubt noted over the years that a few of my links here have been to blogs that specialize in old paperbacks and paperback covers. It is a guilty pleasure that I share with many.

It was this cover for Gun Hand by Frank O’Rourke that originally caught my eye. Over the years I have picked up and read a number of old westerns that have had on their cover basically the same kind of picture…. the quintessential distillation of the genre I suppose.

According to Wikipedia, Frank O’Rourke wrote mysteries and westerns. Some of his book were turned into movies, including the movies The Professionals with Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster, The Bravados, and The Great Bank Robbery.

Gun Hand touches on noir western but ends on a more hopeful note. The blurb on the back cover describes Gun Hand this way:

“Charley’s Atchley called the shots in Nioebe. And asked the questions afterwards. Nioebe was Charley’s town, Charley’s territory. It looked like he had it sewed up too tight for trouble.
Then John McCabe set out to find the man who killed his partner. With a red head at his side and a gun on his hip, he rode into Nioebe… and all hell broke loose.”

The cover blurb declares: “Vengance and a redheaded woman led him into a town of killers.”

Neither blurb is accurate. McCabe helps escort the “redhead,” Elizabeth, and her brother, Adam, out of a crooked town where McCabe has just escaped jail and Adam is wanted on trumped-up charges. He helps the brother and sister get to Nioebe with the help of an honest drover. The drover and McCabe start a cattle business partnership but the partner is quickly killed. The blurbs have the essentials of the story… sort of, but just barely. Connoisseurs of old paperbacks are used to such misleading advertising. It is part of the allure.

The opening paragraphs pull you in like the opening of a good paperback should:

“He lay in his frowsty gray blankets on the hard bunk and listened to the night sounds and remembered the past when all the future lay bright and unexplored. He heard the restless, sloshing gurgle of the river below his cell window, and the mosquito hum rising from turgid backwater overgrown with hairy swamp grass that cast a thick, animal odor upon the wind. He reached forth in his mind and saw the land with the last of his caution break away. He was going out of here tonight and nothing would stop him; and then, adding steel to his resolution, the night deputy opened the hall door and came between the cells, jingling a key ring against the brass shell cases in his gun belt.

“McCabe,” the deputy asked, “you done with that belly ache?”

O’Rourke is a good writer and the story is paced well enough to keep you going, even when the basics of the story are fairly predictable.

All in all Gun Hand is that rarest of all paperback birds: an interesting cover that reads as well as it looks.

Enjoy! I did.

Some other favorite lines:

 

“He smiled pleasantly at the night, but he had no good thoughts, and his face was blank behind the smile.”

 

* * * * * * *

 

“There should be one good word for every man,” McCabe said quietly. “Think how lonely a man will be on the last day, with nothing left, with no one to speak for him. Could you do that to any man?”

 

* * * * * * *

 

“Why do we follow our own separate roads to perdition?” Vargas said. “One little word, a mistake, who can tell when it happens? I cannot be sorry for myself, or apologize, for my life is my own doing.”

 

* * * * * * *

 

“Once a thing has started, you can’t step back and let others shoulder your rightful load. A man must see his own affairs through to the end”

 

 

 

_____

Del Rockwall is a Texas horse runner working the high country of Montana for wild mustangs with his young partner Tie Taylor. On the day Rockwall first sees the most beautiful wild horse he has ever seen he also meets the most wild and beautiful woman (Aldis Spain) he has ever seen. Both the horse and the woman are claimed by one man, Kenny Graves, who will stop at nothing to possess them both.

All the ingredients that make a classic noir story are here: anti-heroes and moral ambivalence; a femme fatale and dark inescapable destiny. Black Rock Canon is classic western noir because it is classic Les Savage, Jr.

As a writer, Savage’s stories do at times require a willing suspension of disbelief. Yet there is something in his poetic prose and the strong, unrelenting undercurrent of fate that keeps you reading. It is a dark vision, but one you find difficult to put down.

One of the hallmarks of a noir story, western or otherwise, is this sense of inexorable circumstance and fate… characters locked into a grim battle they cannot ultimately escape . Savage, Jr., captures this well. His characters are haunted and hunted men and women, battling simultaneously the situation they find themselves in and one another.

The geography of Montana that Savage describes is an “idealized” one… or more properly an iconic one. It is a wild and mountainous place of great valleys and great ranches and violent boom towns. It is western mythic.

Black Rock Canon is available at Amazon in both paperback and kindle editions.

I end with some quotes from Black Rock Canon, courtesy of the kindle highlight function. Great writing? Perhaps not. Great classic western noir lines? Indeed!

Enjoy.

Some Quotes

“The parallel struck him. A man could want this kind of horse as intensely as he could want a woman.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

He gained the tamarack and poplars along the trickle of water. The timber was bunched in dense patches here, and beyond its tangled mat a sentinel peak had speared a falling ball of fire. Light spread in a crimson tide from this impaled sun as if it were flooding the world with its life’s blood, to form ruddy pools of the open glades and cover the forest floor with a sanguine dappling. The foliage of the poplars caught it up thirstily, till each slick olive-green leaf gave off a brazen glitter. It made a tawny illusion of the shadows, to close about Rockwall like a dark mist whenever he left the patches of light.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“The moon was a painter, splashing the earth with a pot full of yellow ochre. The wolves were singers, filling the night with their mournful chorus. The brush was an audience, applauding in ghostly whispers with each passage of wind.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

He knew a momentary disgust with himself that he could feel such desire for the wife of his friend. Then he knew how foolish that was. A man couldn’t help what he felt; he didn’t have that much control over his emotions. It was what he did about them that counted.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It was an odd habit of mind, he often reflected, to test the past against the future, when so many were content to let each experience fade so soon behind them. It had been taken for cynicism in him. But a man didn’t make the same mistake twice, very often, if he put things together this way.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Like a beautiful woman you can’t leave alone. We’re wound up with that horse, Kammas, and, if one of us can’t finish it, the next one has to, one way or the other.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *.

His head seemed empty now. He was left with the sense of awesome inevitability, as if following out some plan that had been ordained for him long ago.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *..

He tried to read defeat in the lines of her silhouette, standing there, watching the end of everything she had tried to gain by playing so many ends against the middle. But, somehow, he could not find defeat. She seemed as unbridled, as defiant as ever. She was like Blue Boy. One man could never hold her. Probably no man ever would.

Savage Jr., Les (2009-01-01). Black Rock Canon . Dorchester Publishing. Kindle Edition.

_____

This is the fourth installment in the Western Writers Series at MontanaWriter. Other writers in the series can be found at Western Writers Series.

While the last two western writers featured here (Les Savage, Jr. and H.A. DeRosso) remain obscure enough to not even have Wikipedia articles, today’s featured writer is quite well known… though not primarily as a western writer.

Elmore Leonard  is a household name for gritty novels with great dialog like Get Shorty and Rum Punch. But his gritty style and his long writing career actually began in the 1950s with stories for western pulp magazines. It was not until the marketplace for westerns began to dry up in the early 1970s that Leonard made the switch to crime fiction for which he is now so famous.

What caused the marketplace for westerns to dry up has been greatly debated. Some have suggested that it was the ubiquity of bad western television-shows during the 1950s and 1960s that exhausted America’s interest in all things western. Some believe it was the 1960s and Vietnam that made the western mythos seem anachronistic and irrelevant, especially when the biggest star of the Western movie came to be synonymous with all things that were being rejected.

I suspect it is a combination of both combined with the rise of Louis L’Amour as a market force. The fact that L’Amour’s competent historical fiction came to represent the art-form of western fiction at every newsstand and bookstore ensured the end. Blase had won the day. The western was dead… at least for awhile. (Obviously, I believe in the resurrection of the dead.)

Westerns, as has been said before at MontanaWriter, fall along a continuum between mythic literature and historical fiction. Leonard shares much in common with is fellow Michigan writer, H.A. DeRosso. His West is not the historically accurate one. It is more the metaphorical/iconic one. That is why he is one of my favorite of all western writers… and to my mind the best..

Leonard honed his 10 famous rules for writing first by writing western short stories and then by writing 8 western novels, each of which would belong on any list of best western novels.

              Elmore Leonard’s 10 Tricks for Good Writing 

1.  Never open a book with weather.
2.  Avoid prologues.
3.  Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4.  Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.
5.  Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6.  Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7.  Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8.  Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9.  Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10.  Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Though Leonard has written that he kept a research notebook at his side as he began writing westerns so things would be accurate, his rules of writing indicate that accurate description was not his primary focus. There is none of the extraneous horse-talk and gun-talk that some historical-western writers feel compelled to throw-in just to show-off. He gets to the point of the story and sticks with it. And the point of a story is to tell a story. And he does it well… better than any western writer.

It is shame that Leonard felt he had stop writing westerns… a shame for the western art-form and for those of us who are readers. Think of all the great westerns that were never written.

Elmore Leonard Western Bibliography

• The Bounty Hunters (1953)
• The Law at Randado (1954)
• Escape from Five Shadows (1956)
• Last Stand at Saber River (1959)
• Hombre (1961)
• Valdez is Coming (1970)
• Forty Lashes Less One (1972)
• Gunsights (1979)
• The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard (2004)

____

This is the third installment in the Western Writers Series at MontanaWriter. Other writers in the series can be found at Western Writers Series.

Like fellow western noir writer H.A. DeRosso, Les Savage, Jr. does not, at the time of this posting, appear to have a Wikipedia article. It is more than a little interesting that two of the first three western writers I have chosen for the Western Writers Series do not yet have such articles. It certainly says something about the state of western noir and something about my reading tastes.

As is the case with De Rosso, what I know of Savage’s life is what I have read and  pieced together from various book introductions.

Les Savage, Jr. was born and raised in Los Angeles. He began writing at the age of 17 and sold his first story to Street & Smith’s Western Story magazine. He was a steady contributor to the pulp magazines for many years, writing close to 100 short-stories.

Les Savage Jr as a writer worked hard to bring realism and authenticity to his fiction. In the 1950s, this meant that his work was often heavily censored and reworked by editors and publishers that did not like his realistic depictions of  the various kinds of multi-cultural and non-traditional male-female relationships that would have been very common on the frontier. Most modern editors and publishers of his work have tried to restore his manuscripts back to their original forms.

Savage is a wonderful noir writer. His west is not the sun-lit hollywood backdrop of most of his contemporaries. It is a place of shadows and dark places where morally complex men and women live and fight and struggle. His work is often violent yet also has that touch of the poetic that is a feature of great noir fiction. That delicate balancing act between the brutal and beautiful seems to me to be one of the defining characteristics of noir fiction. To realistically portray life is to bump up against the beautiful, the brutal, and the banal. Savage portrays it all well.

As a western writer, his work has that essential quality of the mythic or iconic that is part of every true western. As has been said before on MontanaWriter, westerns are the essential American myth. The great challenge for the western noir writer, indeed any western writer, is to balance realism and myth. This balance may be one of the most difficult challenges for a writer of American Fiction to undertake. Yet when it is pulled off well, as Savage often does, it remains one of the most satisfying reading experiences you can ever have.

Les Savage, Jr. who suffered from diabetes died at St. Johns Hospital in Santa Monica, California on May 26, 1958, at the age of 35. In his short life he wrote novels, a few hollywood screenplays, and short stories. Some of his work is available again electronically as well as in reprints, most redacted to reflect his original intent. He may be little known but he is not, thankfully, completely lost to us… yet.

     * The Bloody Quarter [Nov 1999]
     * The Cavan Breed [June 2003]
     * Coffin Gap [May 1997]
     * Copper Bluffs [Jan 1999]
     * Danger Rides the River [Aug 2002]
     * The Devil's Corral [Jan 2003]
     * Fire Dance at Spider Rock [Nov 1995]
     * Gambler's Row [Feb 2002]
     * Hangtown
     * In the Land of Little Sticks: North-Western Stories [Aug 2000]
     * The Lash of Senorita Scorpion [July 1998]
     * The Legend of Senorita Scorpion [July 1996]
     * Medicine Wheel [Aug 1996]
     * Phantoms in the Night [Nov 1998]
     * The Return of of Senorita Scorpion: A Western Trio [July 1997]
     * The Shadow in Renegade Basin: A Western Trio [June 2001]
     * Silver Street Woman [July 1995]
     * Table Rock [Nov 1993]
     * The Trail
     * Treasure of the Brasada [Jan 2000]
     * West of Laramie [May 2003]

(source: Ultimate Western Database)

This is the second installment in the Western Writers Series at MontanaWriter. Other writers in the series can be found at Western Writers Series.

There is currently no Wikipedia article for H.A. DeRosso. Because he is my favorite of all western writers, this has led me to consider undertaking the task myself. What I know though about DeRosso’s biography is limited to what I have read in Bill Pronzini’s excellent introductions to volumes of DeRosso novels and short stories that he has edited. (Bill Pronzini does have a Wikipedia article, by the way.)  I can only  assume that the information Pronzini provides is accurate.

H. A. DeRosso (1917-60) lived and wrote in Hurley, Wisconsin, which is just over the state line from the Upper Pennisula of Michigan. The UP of Michigan is as close to the west as the Midwest can ever be. Pronzini tells us that from the beginning of his writing career DeRosso struggled to be published, apparently sending out 79 manuscripts before the Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine picked up his first story in 1941.

DeRosso’s struggles with getting published were part learning his craft and marketplace. But it was also the inevitable outcome for someone trying to bring the moral ambiguity of noir into the sunny genre of the western. The work of fellow western writers like Noel M. Loomis and Les Savage, Jr. and four years of war and the Holocaust made Post-World War II America more open to more realistic fiction.  From 1945 until his death by suicide in 1960, DeRosso was a professional writer.

DeRosso is the high priest of the western noir story. No one does it better. As I have said elsewhere at MontanaWriter ( in my review of DeRosso’s masterpiece, .44) his style is classic noir: ” austere, hard-boiled, grim, lonely and yet,… poetic at times.” To further quote myself (always a risky thing):

There are, admittedly, more realistic western writers and much more historically accurate ones. And yet with the possible exception of Cormac McCarthy there are no western writers that are as satisfying as DeRosso in the end.

DeRosso is satisfying because his work is so mythic. Westerns, after all, are suppose to be mythic. To quote Maxwell Scott in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

DeRosso’s novels and short story collections can easily be found at Amazon.com or at Abe.com. As mentioned above, most of his short story collections have been edited by Bill Pronzini. I have been able to compare the pulp version originals of a few stories with Pronzini’s later edits. As far as I can see he tightened those stories up well. I can only assume that is the case with all the stories he touched.

Also, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, British publisher Anthony Rowe Ltd., reprinted in England a number of DeRosso’s novels under the Gunsmoke imprint in fine library-bound editions. I have have a number of these.

The current copyright holder for DeRosso who was a life-long bachelor is Marquette General Hospital. It seems to me that it would be in the hospital’s best interest to make sure there was a Wikipedia article on DeRosso and  to do more to get his work recognized here in the United States. It would certainly be in the best interest of all who really love westerns. Maybe I will do it after all.

H.A. DeRosso Partial Bibliography

• .44
• End of the Gun
• The Gun Trail
• The Dark Brand
• Tracks in the Sand (edited by Bill Pronzini)
• Riders of the Shadowlands: Western Stories (edited by Bill Pronzini)
• Under the Burning Sun (Short Stories)
• Those Bloody Bells of Hell (Short Stories)

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