Posts Tagged Western Fiction

Ghost Town (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

I found out yesterday that The Western Online has just published one more of my western short stories. This one is entitled “Montana is Big”. Regular readers of MontanaWriter may remember that The Western Online published another story of mine, “Box Canyon”, last May.

For those keeping score, right now on-line you can find the following short stories of mine.

• “Box Canyon” at  The Western Online
• “Cottonwood Death” at  Frontier Tales
• “Montana is Big” at  The Western Online

I have also posted a .pdf of another short story, “Coffee Cup”, here at MontanaWriter. For a .pdf of that story, click here. “Coffee Cup” by Mark Hinton

Thank you to the folks at TheWesternOnline.com for liking my story enough to publish it.

You can find TheWesternOnline.com and my short story “Montana is Big” here.

Enjoy!

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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.

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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 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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As I have been polishing up one of my latest western stories, I have been doing a little research on rifles. In the process, I came across this entry at Wikipedia about the Sharps.

Movies which showed the strengths of the Sharps rifle are the 1990 western Quigley Down Under where Tom Selleck‘s title character’s Sharps rifle has a 34″ barrel as opposed to a standard length barrel of 30″ and Burt Lancaster‘s character, Bob Valdez, in the movie Valdez Is Coming.^[6] Also, in the 1976 film “Missouri Breaks“, Marlon Brando‘s character, Robert E. Lee Clayton, uses an 1859 Creedmoor rifle. As a result of Quigley Down Under a Sharps match is held annually every year in Forsyth, Montana known as the “Quigley Match”. A 44-inch target is placed at 1,000 yards for each shooter, remniscent of a scene from the movie.^[7] Theater Crafts Industry went so far as to say, “In Quigley Down Under, which we did in 1990, the Sharps rifle practically co- stars with Tom Selleck.”^[8] This statement was echoed by gunwriters including John Taffin in Guns and Lionel Atwill in Field & Stream.^[6][9] Gun manufacturers such as Davide Pedersoli and Shiloh Rifle Manufacturing Company have credited these movies with an increase in demand for those rifles.^[6]

Guns play an important role in westerns. It is part of the convention. Maybe one of the reasons that people do not read or watch westerns any more is that not as many people hunt or grow-up with guns as they used to. If you grow up believing that guns are something only right-wing extremists, Republicans, and criminals have, you are probably not going to be comfortable reading or watching something where a Sharps rifle or a Colt pistol is “a co-star.”

John Wayne's 44.40

Westerns and guns go hand-in-hand. Guns can play both the hero and the villain in a western. Violence and violent men can also be both. Maybe it is this “morally nuanced” understanding of violence in general, and gun violence in particular, that makes the western seem most anachronistic to the literary and film trend-setters of today.

I love the movie Quigley Down Under. Selleck does a great job. So does his Sharps. It has been a long time since I have seen either Valdez is Coming or Missouri Breaks. I am going to be putting both into my NetFlix queue.

I am thinking now of other westerns and other guns….

Growing up I loved the show The Rifleman and Chuck Connors. His Winchester was certainly the “cool” co-star of the show.

John Wayne, of course, also used Winchesters and Colts in many of his movies. But with the Duke being the Duke, no rifle or pistol… no matter how big… could ever truly be called his “co-star.”

I could, I suppose, do a little research on famous guns and famous westerns. That is the nature of research. It is so fun to move from subject to subject…. And with Wikipedia and “The Google,” it is so easy that sometimes you can lose sight of where you are supposed to be going.

For me I am supposed to be polishing up another western short story that I will soon be sending out…. But hell, wouldn’t it be fun to go to that Quigley Match in Forsyth?

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Bannack, Montana (photo © m.a.h. hinton)

As a literary and film art form, the western’s time has passed. And yet… there remains a small number of dedicated western fans who remain loyal to this most American of all art forms. I count myself as a proud member of this anachronistic remnant.

One of the many peculiarities of the western is that the greatest practitioners of the western as art form came after the form’s apparent demise: Elmer Kelton, Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy. (Elmore Leonard is still alive and writing, but he has not written a western in decades.)

Even though McCarthy and McMurtry have been critically and commercially successful,  any true western fan is painfully aware that good, new westerns are difficult to find. Those that are published for the most part seem to fall into one of four ultimately dissatisfying categories: reprints of old classic westerns that are in the public domain anyway, historical fiction novels that happen to take place in a “western” context, romance fiction that takes place in a “western” context, and male-adventure fiction (soft-core action stories featuring hot, beautiful women and virile, superhuman protagonists) that takes place in a “western” context.

While it is certainly nice to have reprints available of classic works by Max Brand, Zane Grey, Owen Wister and other pioneers in the western form, these writers are not the best example of the art form. Some, like Grey, are unreadable by modern standards. And since all of these writers are available for free from places like Gutenberg, what is the point of re-publishing them anyway. There are a great many writers whose works are out of print but not in the public domain that could be published. But these are not the ones generally reprinted.

What western fans really want… what the publishing and movie industry needs…. what America needs is more new western writers and new western books, and more western movies. The myths and symbols that we embrace, share, and love define and shape us. Fans of the western know that as a country, a people, and individuals, America was at its best when the dominant American myth was the western.

What fans of the western intuitively understand is that by turning our back on that most American of myths, by replacing it with smaller and smaller “post-modern” myths, we have left a large hole in the American soul and psyche. A hole as large as…well, the West itself.

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