Posts Tagged Western Noir

Regular readers of MontanaWriter know that the most frequent and faithful commenter here is Ron Scheer. Ron is the creative mind and muscle behind Buddies in the Saddle, my favorite western blog.

Besides writing about westerns, Ron also writes stories himself. His latest story, called “Jingle Bob,” was just recently published at a new westen eZine called Fires on the Plain. Ron knows the western canon as well as anyone and uses that knowledge to take his story in a new direction. Check it out!

I have high hopes for Fires on the Plain which is officially “going live” tomorrow, March 24th. In their submissions guidelines they say: “we love our Westerns hardboiled and very noir.” 

As a reader and writer of noir westerns, I am looking forward to a new source for great fiction to read… and a new “marketplace” for my own writing.

Congratulations again to Ron for a great story… and good luck to Fires on the Plain on their new venture.

(from Fires on the Plain website)
What are we looking for? Westerns with an edge. Hardboiled. Noir. Gritty. Dark. Tough. Stuff that Harry Whittington, Clifton Adams, H.A. DeRosso, or Brian Garfield would have written. Who else do we love here at Fires on the Plain? Elmore Leonard, Ed Gorman, James Reasoner, T.V. Olsen, Frank Castle, Tom Piccirilli, George Gilman, Bill Pronzini, Richard Telfair — the list goes on.

Want to write about the West from a different or unusual point of view? Want to give the genre a new twist? Or just want to let loose with some gut-punching Western action? Or maybe you have something else in mind? Just shoot us an email and let us know what you’re thinking.

At Fires on the Plain, we believe the Western is not dead. The genre is thriving, and there are still new voices to be heard, old voices to be heard from again, and more ways to look at our history and learn from it.

Long live the Western!

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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 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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Montana Noir (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

I found out yesterday that my western noir short story, “Cottonwood Death,” was voted favorite December short story by the readers of Frontier Tales Magazine. To all who voted for my story, thank you.

I have been asked by a few readers, if I have other short stories in the works. I do. A few more western noir short stories I am polishing up and a few… others. I hope to have one or two ready in the next few weeks. I will keep the readers of MontanaWriter posted. And to all who have cared enough to ask, thank you for that as well.

The lot of the writer can be a lonely one. A lot of time alone, working on something that may or may not: ever see the light of day, ever amount to anything in the end, ever work as intended or imagined, ever be finshed, ever be enjoyed by any one at all. So to have some people say they enjoyed something I have written is gratifying.

A few people who have written have also asked me about the dark nature of my stories. I really have not yet figured out how best to respond to that question. One reader, who had taken time to also read some of my poems, said that it seemed to him like I save all the “light” for my poems and all the “darkness” for my short stories. Maybe poetry lends itself better to the language of grace and prose to the language of judgement. I do not know. I only know that I am trying to write the kind of stories I would most like to read.

Either way, thanks to all who take the time to read what I write. You can never know how much I truly appreciate it.

For those who may have missed  ”Cottonwood Death,” or would like to read it again, here is a link to Frontier Tales Magazine.

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My latest short story, a western entitled “Cottonwood Death”, has just been published in the December issue of Frontier Tales Magazine.

I remain convinced that westerns are not merely an anachronistic genre. While they may seem to belong to another time, and may have long ago ceased being big-sellers, the form is far from exhausted and offers a great many possibilities… especially the noir western.

The western is as close to mythology as we have in America. We do not have Olympian gods or faeries or Valhalla, what we have are cowboys and Indians and wilderness and great open spaces.  A pure “western” is mythology in every sense of that word.

Myths tell us about what is best and worst in ourselves and our world. They can inspire and remind us of what is most important… of what we should never forget. A people who forget their myths, who turn their backs on them, are easily lost. It is no coincidence that westerns were put on the shelf in our culture at the very time that America began to lose its way… began to diminish. We lost our mythology and we lost ourselves.

I am making no claims for my stories being mythology… yet. But I will say that mythic is what I aspire for them to one day be. That is the kind of western I would like to write… the kind of western I wish more people were trying to write… the kind of western I like to read.

Thank you to editor Duke Pennell for liking my story enough to publish it.

You can find Frontier Tales Magazine and my story “Cottonwood Death” here.

Enjoy!

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(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”  ~ Flannery O’Connor

I have posted my poems here but not any of my short stories.

Here is a Noir Western I wrote, called “Coffee Cup.” Because of its dark nature, I feel compelled to say a few words about the story and the nature of hardboiled fiction.

It seems to me that one of the things that distinguishes truly hardboiled fiction from merely genre fiction is that hardboiled fiction takes seriously the true cost of violence and death. Violence and death make victims of everyone who come into contact with them.

In your typical Agatha Christie-type novel, the main characters encounter death and violence and yet seem untouched by it all. They solve the crime and move on to the next death and murder, and the next, and the next. Never losing their humanity, seemingly untouched and unstained by the violence.

I have no time for such fiction. Violence, suffering, and death by definition challenge our humanity and change us. That is the kind of fiction I like to read… and the kind I want to write.

I hope you enjoy. If you enjoy it, please share it with others. If you do not like it, I am sorry. Stay tuned… you may like the next one better.

For the a .pdf of the story, click here. “Coffee Cup” by Mark Hinton

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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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