Thread: Western fiction

. . . I would second Mr. Chaney's recommendation of Elmore Leonard's westerns - it is informative to read them in the order published as you can really see his development into the style we have come to know and love from his later crime fiction . . . another I would mention is Oakley Hall's classic WARLOCK (the basis for the excellent film by Edward Dmytryk) - this one has an intro by Robert Stone (literary!) and an...

In the Sixties and Seventies -- and a bit into the Eighties -- there were a lot of pulp Westerns that sort of spun off of the Mens Adventure paperback series then popular. Many of them, especially a bunch written by British authors, were heavily influenced by Spaghetti Westerns. This is probably the trashy sort of stuff you're thinking about. Whether they're any good is hard to say -- it's sort of an undiscovered, fallow field...

How about James Fenimore Cooper? He may have created the Western with Natty Bumpo aka Hawkeye. His stories, THE DEERSLYER and THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, show the birth of the West. Like Sam Peckinpah’s work they are also War stories. What I remember is not so much the action but the settling, a dollar per acre.

One series of those trashy 70s/80s Westerns written by a Brit is the Edge books by George G. Gilman. I haven't actually read any yet but picked up a couple. They have quite loyal fans and the descriptions sound fairly interesting. In interviews the author (Gilman is a pen-name) makes a big deal that he hates Westerns and never reads them. The ones in stores are often pretty beat-up and lots on eBay usually go for more than I want to pay,...

Elmore Leonard's eight or so western novels have all been collected in a '...Western Roundup' series of three books, easy to find used at minimal financial investment.

QUOTE (Neil Sarver @ Feb 12 2007, 09:59 PM) The question I have to add to this, as I've read and enjoyed a good many of the books listed here. What are some good trashy western books? I mean, I see plenty of western novels on the shelves and plenty of them look pretty bad, but they look like they err on the side of being kind of "code of honor" type stories or even romancey type stories. Does anyone know some good...

On a related note, can anyone recommend a good book about Ned Kelly? There are seemingly hundreds of different books on amazon. The only one I'm at all familiar with is the Peter Carey one. This looks like the weirdest one, by Schindler's List author, Thomas Keneally. It's a young adult novel described thusly, QUOTE During a bout of appendicitis, ten-year-old Ned Kelly is reduced to the size of a bee and spends the summer in a...

QUOTE (Neil Sarver @ Feb 12 2007, 10:59 PM) Does anyone know some good blood/guts/sex western yarns? I'd imagine anything by William W. Johnstone, based on his Horror entries...

Not a traditional Western, Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West" ( see link below) is set on the Texas-Mexico borders in the late 1840s. Perhaps, the best American novelist since Faulkner, I highly recommend it and would love to see it turned into a film. Some folks have compared the atmosphere of the Australian Western THE PROPOSITION to "Blood Meridan."...

Here's a link to an essay-review of Larry McMurtry's latest novel Telegraph Days . In addition to McMurtry, the author also discusses the influence of James Fenimore Cooper, Buffalo Bill, Theodore Roosevelt, John Ford and even the Bible on the development of the western. QUOTE But by far the most influential work of Western mythology was Owen Wister’s The Virginian . Published in 1902, The Virginian created the conventions and stock...