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)

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

Every now and then, I am asked to recommend a western writer or a western novel to someone unfamiliar with the genre. In most cases as I probe to see what they may have already read and hence what may be a good fit for them, I find that they really only know: two names, Louis L’Amour and Larry McMurtry… and one book, Lonsesome Dove.

Over the next few weeks, MontanaWriter will be highlighting some good western writers that may be household names as far as western fans are concerned, but are relatively unknown to most other people.

Will Henry, the pen name of Henry Wilson Allen (1912-1991), was a prolific writer: novels, short stories, and screenplays… western and otherwise. His work garnered him five Spur Awards. (For the un-initiated, Spur Awards are the western equivalent of a Hugo or an Edgar.)

Most of his acclaimed work – Chiricahua, The Gates of the Mountains, From Where the Sun Now Stands, Tom Horn –  tends toward the historical-fiction end of the western spectrum. While solid research and real life-experience as a cowboy and a gold miner ensure that all the little western details are correct, in the end it is his strong writing style and wonderful story-telling ability that won him his awards… that make him worth reading.

Allen (Will Henry), like most of the writers of his day, lived and wrote in the shadow of L’Amour who so dominated the western marketplace that in the end it was probably not much different than what it is like writing westerns today: what you publish is virtually invisible. Allen spoke of this phenomenon in an interview:

Louis L’Amour, for the past many years, worked for the same company Will Henry has worked for, namely Bantam Books, and if you think standing second in line to Louis L’Amour is any great riot of fun or delight, try again. After Louie, the fall to number two place would kill anyone; would kill an ant or an elephant. And yes, Will Henry has certainly been affected by the presence of Louie L’Amour at Bantam Books. There are, or have been, other authors: Luke Short, Jack Schaefer, all types of name brand authors at Bantam Books through the years–the Louie years–who have been affected by him. But that’s inescapable. Not just at Bantam, either. If you are in the western writing business retail sales points, looking for a copy of your novel, and you have one little single copy in the last part of the rack, farthest from the front, where, if you don’t have your flashlight or a cigarette lighter with you, you can’t even see it. Now, that’s being affected. (cf. “Will Henry Interview by Jean Henry-Mead)

A quick look at Amazon show that there are some kindle editions available of his work but most of what is available is from the used marketplace. Little has changed apparently for Allen (Will Henry). Louis L’Amour is everywhere… but Will Henry westerns remain difficult to find. But certainly worth the search.

Will Henry Partial Bibliography

• No Survivors, 1952
• Death of a Legend, 1954
• The Tall Men, 1954
• To Follow a Flag, 1955
• Who Rides with Wyatt, 1955
• The Fourth Horseman, 1956
• The North Star, 1956
• The Texas Rangers, 1957
• Yellowstone Kelly, 1958
• Journey to Shiloh, 1960
• The Seven Men at Mimbres Springs, 1960
• From Where the Sun Now Stands, 1962
• MacKenna’s Gold, 1963
• The Gates of the Mountains, 1966 (Spur Award)
• Custer’s Last Stand: The Story of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, 1968
• One More River to Cross, 1968
• Alias Butch Cassidy, 1969
• Outlaws and Legends, 1969
• Chiricahua, 1973 (Spur Award winner)
• I, Tom Horn, 1976
• Summer of the Gun, 1978
• The Squaw Killer, 1983
• The Ballad of Billy Bonney, 1984
• Reckoning at Yankee Flat, 1989
• Jesse James: Death of a Legend, 1996
• The Hunting of Tom Horn, 1999

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