Posts Tagged Westerns

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!

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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!

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The quotable Duke

Today at MontanaWriter we begin a new feature: Western Wednesday. Each Wednesday we will highlight all things western: movies, books, art, blogs, history.

For the inaugural Western Wednesday, what better place to begin than highlighting some of the best quotes from John Wayne… beginning with my all-time favorite Duke quote from his last film, The Shootist.

If I missed any of your personal favorites, please let me know.

Enjoy!

“I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.”  – The Shootist

“Well, there are some things a man just can’t run away from.” – Stagecoach

“Sorry don’t get it done, Dude.” – Rio Bravo

“Don’t apologize—it’s a sign of weakness.” – She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

“Out here a man settles his own problems.” – The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

“Whoa, take ‘er easy there, Pilgrim.”  – The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

“Now you understand. Anything goes wrong, anything at all… your fault, my fault, nobody’s fault… it don’t matter…I’m gonna blow your head off. It’s as simple as that.” – Big Jake

“All battles are fought by scared men who’d rather be some place else.” – In Harm’s Way

“I haven’t lost my temper in 40 years; but, Pilgrim, you caused a lot of trouble this morning; might have got somebody killed; and somebody oughta belt you in the mouth. But I won’t. I won’t. The hell I won’t!” – McLintock

“Well, son, since you haven’t learned to respect your elders, it’s time you learned to respect your betters.” – Big Jake

“We’re burnin’ daylight.” – The Cowboys

“I’m thirty years older than you are. I had my back broke once, and my hip twice. And on my worst day I could beat the hell out of you. “ – The Cowboys

“I’m lookin’ at a tin star with a… drunk pinned on it.” – El Dorado

“ I don’t believe in surrenders. Nope, I’ve still got my saber, Reverend. Didn’t beat it into no plowshare, neither.” – The Searchers

“If anyone tries to cross that river before we’re out of sight- baptize ‘em.” – The Train Robbers

“Life’s hard. It’s even harder when you’re stupid.” – (source unknown)

“Talk low, Talk slow, and Don’t say too much.”  – (advice on acting)

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One of the most remarkable things about blogging remains the number of strangers that email me that they have read something I have posted and like it. I assume that there are many who do not like what they read here, but they do not bother to write.

My blog statistics tell me that the number of people coming to  MontanaWriter continues to grow. In the month of March, there were almost 12,000 unique visitors from all over the world. By blog standards, that is a modest number. But since MontanaWriter began two years ago with zero readers, I remain amazed.

One of the other things my blog statistics tell me is that the search term that brings the most people to MontanaWriter is one for John Wayne. The numbers are not even close. On a blog that is mostly about poetry, that has many more references to W.B. Yeats and lyric poetry than to movies, it is curious that so much traffic comes from The Duke.

It is not surprising, though. More than 30 years after his death, John Wayne remains the definitive movie star: iconic and bigger than life. For many he is also symbolic of something vital that it “feels” like we have lost.

What that thing that we have lost is is difficult to define.  It is also difficult to know if it really ever existed at all, or is merely something we wish once existed: some golden era of shared values and understanding that made us all better. Either way John Wayne the actor, the icon, represents something more than just movies or Hollywood or acting technique.

I have loved John Wayne movies all my life. Growing up when and where I did it was natural to love westerns. And if you love westerns, it is inevitable that you will love John Wayne movies because most of the best westerns ever made starred The Duke. There are a handful that star other actors, but they are just that: a handful.

I have always felt more than a bit sorry for those who say they do not like westerns. It is the same way I feel when someone says they do not like baseball (or basketball or football), or reading, or jazz, or poetry, or bourbon, or country music. It is unfathomable to me that someone can live without those things that seem to me so essential to life.

I hope that those who stumble upon MontanaWriter while looking for articles on The Duke are not greatly disappointed to find poetry reviews here, or articles about baseball, or theological comments. I also hope that those who came here for a review of a poem by William Morris or William Blake are not disappointed to find articles about westerns and John Wayne here. For me, all these things seem inseparable, naturally related: Yeats read dime westerns, John Ford read Yeats, theology of culture is all inclusive.

The blogosphere is about interconnectivity… not just of people but also of ideas. In the end, I think it is this “new community” of ideas that is the web’s greatest promise. Poetry, John Wayne, and jazz can inhabit a place together on the web that they could never have in the old, pre-digital age. In fact, in 2012, poetry, John Wayne and jazz seem inextricably mixed, pilgrim.

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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 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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A restless mind means a thousand interests and a thousand different things to “put into the hopper.”

Here are some articles and links to articles that I have been reading and thinking about this past week and this weekend.

Check a few of them out!

Occupy Wall Street

“Four Weeks on Wall Street” by Michael Greenberg
Michael Greenberg, in the New York Review of Books gives a nice synopsis of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I cannot deny my sympathies with the ideas behind the movement. At some point it seems to me that there needs to be a reawakening in this country… it would require though a merger between the Tea Party folks and this group. The Tea Party folks are right when they say that too many of our resources are being hijacked by the government. They are right to be bitter that people with tax-payer funded jobs get better tax-payer funded salaries, better tax-payer funded benefits, and better tax-payer funded retirement options than ordinary American could ever even hope to have. There is something wrong with this picture. They are wrong however in thinking that somehow cutting capital gains taxes and estate taxes for the wealthy is the solution to anything other than giving even more money to the one-per-centers.  What we know is that in our current two-party system, people with common interests are kept politically divided so that a class system that benefits a very small percentage of people who call themselves Democrats or Republicans can be allowed to flourish.

“Jesus’ View of Poverty: Is the Right Clueless” by Jeneé Desmond-Harris
Justice to the poor is as essential to the Christian message as anything, and yet as this brief article and video reminds us, the “religious right” in this country seems consistently on the wrong side of justice issues. The problem is the combination of textual literalism, of course, and our two-party system. Because of Roe vs. Wade American Catholic and Protestant working-class voters found themselves in the 1970s having to abandon the true party of the working class. With the Republican agenda for life issues… they had to swallow a whole host of economic bullshit that ultimately favors the rich and ignores the poor. And so we arrive at the place where working-class people underwater on their mortgages and losing their jobs have come to believe that estate taxes somehow harm them. Their Calvinistic roots leading them to believe that somehow your economic station in this life reflects your salvation in the next. Even American Catholics who should know better have become duped and lost their way.

“U.S. Marine Embarrasses NYPD” by David Gomez
Here is a great video of a U.S. Marine confronting New York’s finest who have apparently forgotten that this is the United States of America and not some fascist dictatorship. He even manages to shame some cops who apparently have been taking delight in roughing up peaceful protesters.

 Biblical Literalists vs. Scientific Literalists

“Stop With Your Impossible Bible, Already (part 1)”
A new book called The Bible Made impossible by Christian Smith is reviewed on the blog Storied Theology. Touching on the difficulties inherent in textual literalism of the biblical kind, Smith addresses the obvious dilemma Protestants of all stripes encounter with their “Word alone” theology. A quick read of the comments also shows that no amount of light will ever help someone who really just wants to stay where they are benighted in their own ignorance. So let me see if I can help, “Hey, biblical literalism does not and cannot work!”

“Why Evolution is True”
Somehow I ended up on the website Why Evolution is True. While I have been struggling here at MontanaWriter to convey how both biblical literalists and scientific literalists of the atheist/ secular-humanist variety are really just the twin children of a misguided movement that sought to divorce reason from faith, this website makes the case perfectly for me. Once again (quoting myself… always a dangerous thing to do): “Evangelicals suffer from two delusions: first, that they represent Christianity (they do not… and cannot, because in almost every way they have misunderstood the essential elements of the Christian faith); second, that faith does not need reason. Secular humanist suffer beneath the same two delusions: first, they have come to believe that Evangelicals are right in their claim to represent Christianity; second, they have come to believe that reason (science) does not need faith (religion).” The definition of ignorance? Not even having the inkling of a clue of how really uninformed you are.

No More Chocolate

Here are two articles that deal with the connection between child slavery in Africa and cocoa harvesting. Warning to chocoholics, after reading these two articles you will not be wanting to buy, or eat, non-fair-trade chocolate ever again. Sorry.
“Child Slaves Made Your Halloween Candy” by Kristin Howerton
“Tracing the bitter truth of chocolate and child labour” BBC News

Miscellaneous

“The Return of a Man Called, EDGE!”
Good news to western fans. George G. Gilman’s Edge Westerns are now available at Amazon for the Kindle. The more westerns available on the Kindle the better. I already purchased and downloaded my first one. Go and do likewise.

“The Future Fridge”
I am not sure why, but this article caught my eye.

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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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