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Underground Reading: Shoe-Bar Stratton by Joseph Bushnell Ames

Shoe-Bar Stratton (1922) is about as Western a Western as ever wearily wandered West. "Buck" Stratton is the owner of some grazing land outside of Paloma Springs. He'd bought it immediately before heading off to war, and now, back from Europe, he's looking forward to returning to his cowboy life.

BUT WAIT... unscrupulous double-dealers have rustled Buck's whole ranch! The Shoe-Bar is now the property of Mary Thorne, who runs the ranch with the aid of Tex Lynch. Mighty mystified, Buck signs on as a lowly hand under the nom de cowboy of Bob Green. He's not sure what Mary and Tex are up to, but he's keen to figure it out.

The forces of good and evil align swiftly and predictably. Mary is a petite blonde with a bit o' pluck to her (there is, in fact, a chapter called "Nerve" in which Mary has some). She's a prisoner of both the opposition and her own gullibility - convinced that Tex and his cronies mean nothing but the best for her. On her side are Buck and one of the younger hands, an impressionable youth with a crush on Mary.

Against her, the clever and sinister Tex. The ranch boss is, amongst other things, suspiciously attractive - a lot of supposedly-straight cowboys are going on about Tex's piercing dark eyes and rosy cheeks. There are also some dodgy mobsters (seriously), some grumpy minions and a pair of sneaky Mexican servants - imagine Gollum with a disgracefully transcribed accent, and you're approaching the racist glory of Pedro and Maria.

Friday Five: Gunslingers

Gunslingers. They're the fastest guns in the west, the quickest draws this side of the Mississippi, steady as a rock, can shoot the wings off a fly. And the best part about them is this: they can be anyone. These folks are reeling drunks, old fatasses, hopeless romantics, drifting loners, broken-down losers, haunted by Some Terrible Secret, dying of Some Terrible Disease, with nothing left to prove, or with everything left to prove. They're slow-pokes, stutterers, half-breeds, and women. They're the eternally overlooked and the eternally underestimated, no one's first pick for any team.  And they're always, always your ace in the hole - the person whose clean draw or crack shot is going to change your showdown from certain death to unlikely victory.

It's no wonder our culture is so fascinated by gunslingers. They're all of this, and one thing more: they're us. We, with all our faults and pecadillos, have within us the same shining potential to do one pure thing in a lifetime of anonymous mediocrity. One perfect shot. Well, that's the idea, anyway.

We're delighted to host Kim Lakin-Smith, author of the new dustpunk thriller Cyber Circus (we love it) and the dark fantasy rock opera Tourniquet (we love it too), and a contributor to our own anthology, Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse. Kim is also one of the guests at the Kitschies' Steampunk Evening on 8 December - your chance to talk gunfighters with her in the safety of Blackwell's on Charing Cross Road.

Why don't you set yourselves down and bend our ears with tales of your favorite gunslingers in the comments?

Review Round-up: High school, horror and hooved mammals

Another skim through short stories, featuring Catherynne Valente's "White Lines on a Green Field", Oliver Onions' "The Beckoning Fair One" and O. Henry's "Hearts and Crosses".

Catherynne Valente's "White Lines on a Green Field" (2011) is a creative retelling of the Coyote myth, set in a contemporary American high school. Coyote, that charismatic troublemaker that he is, brings both his blessing and his curse to West Centreville High. This average Everyschool suddenly becomes a hub of excitement and activity. On the field, Coyote leads the football team to victory after victory. Off the field, Coyote leads the entire school into a libertine berserker state. The parties grow wilder, the fights grow bloodier, the drinks go stronger... basically, his very mythic presence turns a real high school into that of "Gossip Girl". I like "Gossip Girl". I also like the Coyote stories, football and a good teen movie. But somehow, this still left me feeling a bit cold.

I've struggled a bit with Ms. Valente's writing in the past (I think referring to Deathless as "like being beaten to death by dried flowers" pretty much encapsulates my relationship with her work). And I found many of the same challenges in "White Lines on a Green Field". The characters are icy, poetic avatars with neither warmth nor humanity to them. The style is beautifully composed, but also quite affected, turning the narrator into a fairly incredulous imitation of a high school student. Bunny (yes) is a mythic archetype of a different tradition - the airy, artsy, savvy, sassy, sensitive poet that we all wanted to be but never were. 

Review Round-up: Quick-Fire Hombre and Blood and Hate

Another pair of paperback Westerns - Nelson Nye's Quick-Fire Hombre and Ward Langley's Blood and Hate.

Despite the appalling cover, Blood and Hate (1959) turned out to be an enjoyable little tale. Our hero, Paul Bascombe is new to the town of Prairie. Prairie is in the cattle business, the town's tiny main street surrounded by thousands of acres of unclaimed land, currently used for grazing. The biggest man in town is Bull Harris – owner of the Bar M Ranch. He's the richest, meanest and greediest - and, as according to the genre tradition, he's got the prettiest daughter.

Bascombe is a soft-spoken man, and not out to make enemies. As the book begins, he's saving the life of a Mexican stranger, just to reinforce to the reader that Paul here is a good egg through and through. But Bascombe rides into Prairie like the Four Horsemen combined - he wants to graze sheep. Bull Harris is livid. Sheep (allegedly) devour all the grass and ruin the land for cattle. Paul's woolly apocalypse also requires some of the (unclaimed) land to be fenced off, so his beloved cows can no longer roam free. Bascombe's got the law on his side as well - with the new Government land act, he can claim, fence and en-sheep some of the Prairie land. Sadly, Harris has no problem with illegal methods of persuasion.

Underground Reading: Another Western Round-Up

Three battered Western paperbacks. Three outsider gunmen. Three beautiful fair-haired ladies. How do they all compare? J.T. Edson's The Big Hunt and Paul Evan Lehman's Stagecoach to Hellfire Pass and The Man from the Badlands.

Even though my collection of Westerns is largely formed at random - scavenging bargain bins and basement shelves, Paul Evan Lehman is a name that's suspiciously over-represented amongst my books. Although it is unfair to generalize after only finishing two of his books, I can already see a pattern. Mr. Lehman writes creative set-ups to familiar situations. The conflict is clever, but the results are predictable. However, one of his strengths is an attention to detail. Even if the heroics are unbelievable, Mr. Lehman paints an unexpectedly meticulous picture of life in the West.

In The Man from the Badlands (1965), the set-up involves water rights. Nominally, that's a bit dull, but Mr. Hale uses a dry issue (sorry) to make for an interesting conundrum. Stan Hale's land adjoins that of the Ward family. The Wards have better land for grazing, but their water comes downhill from Stan's property. So far, so good.

Underground Reading: Iron Men and Silver Stars, edited by Donald Hamilton

“The point I am trying to get across to my writing colleagues is: Let’s not get too enamored of absolute historical accuracy, and for heaven’s sake let’s not start thinking of ourselves self-consciously as great creative artists inheriting a grand literary tradition stemming direct from Owen Wister, whose Virginian was actually a pretty dull book.” – Donald Hamilton

The above passage is from Mr. Hamilton’s passionate introduction to Iron Men and Silver Stars (1967) a collection of Western shorts. Donald Hamilton is best known as the creator of Matt Helm, the “American James Bond” – a series of heavy-breathing adventures that sold in the millions.

Mr. Hamilton’s introduction sets the tone of the book. He damns historical accuracy with faint praise, declaring as long as no one “rides north from Denver to Sante Fe”, the reader won’t (and shouldn’t) care. He further illustrates his point by adding that, as far as proper history goes, cowboys rarely fought with bare hands and the ladies always rode side-saddle – two rather dull truths that fly in the face of the Western literary tradition. “After all,” Mr. Hamilton concludes, “I’m a novelist, not a historian, and if I get too absorbed in the detail of what actually happened back in the nineteenth century, I may lose the pace of the story I’m trying to tell in the twentieth.”

Underground Reading: A Western Round-Up

Four vintage Westerns that kept me company on a trip to Texas. Two by Clifton Adams, two by Frank Castle (sadly, not the Punisher). MBHR3PABVPVJ

The Colonel's Lady (1952) was the first book by Clifton Adams, who went on to have a career of four decades and over three dozen books (under a few different names, as well). Based on this debut effort, that's more than justified. Although the plot is a little contrived at times, The Colonel's Lady is an outstanding look into one of the genre's most frequently scrutinized topics: weakness.

Reardon is an ex-Confederate officer. The war is over, and, at the start of the book, he's on his way out west to join the US Army. Joining the cavalry out west isn't much different to a prison sentence. It is a remote post, surrounded by hostile Indians, with extremely limited food, drink and access to the ladyfolk. It is normally the last respite of desperate men. Reardon's reason is also his weakness - he spotted his ex-love, Caroline, on the arm of an army colonel. Keen to see her again her, he joins the regiment. The book follows his training and his first few missions as a scout.

Underground Reading: Edge - The Loner by George G. Gilman

The Loner is the first book in the long-running Edge series by George G. Gilman (Terry Harknett). From 1972 to 1989, Josiah "Edge" Hedge shot, stabbed, slashed and generally mayhemmed n' mayhacked his way through an astonishing 61 volumes of Western adventure. (63 if you count the two cross-overs with Gilman's other character, the equally destructive Adam Steele).

Edge is billed as a "new kind of Western hero" - a self-consciously revisionist approach to the John Ford / Zane Grey tradition. The traditional Western featured a chivalric, blue-eyed knight errant - forced reluctantly into battle, kind to women and babies, combining "aww shucks" Americana and apple pie heroism. In contrast, Edge, a whiskey-fueled engine of mean, is a studied act of rebellion. 

As far as origin stories go, the plot of The Loner isn't atypical. Captain Josiah Hedge returns from the Civil War to find his brother murdered at the hands of renegade soldiers. Vowing revenge, "Edge" (a malapropism that quickly sticks) travels from Iowa to Arizona in search of the killers. 

The story's set-piece action sequences are equally familiar: a wagon train attacked by Indians, a dynamite-driven jailbreak, an outlaw hideout in a bandit cave. But Mr. Gilman breaks from tradition by populating his West with a legion of shameless villains. There are no innocents in Edge's world, including the man himself.