April 18, 2025: I'm reading this collection in intermittent spurts, when I'm between other books; so will be reviewing it the same way. When I've finiApril 18, 2025: I'm reading this collection in intermittent spurts, when I'm between other books; so will be reviewing it the same way. When I've finished the whole book, I'll rate it and edit this review into a more coherent whole.
Popular American author John Jakes got his start writing short Western fiction, and never lost his interest in and affection for the genre. Looking back over the span of the 20th century at the dawn of the 21st, and at a time when the demise of general circulation magazines and other factors had drastically curtailed the market for Western short stories, he assembled this collection of 30 tales, by as many authors (including himself), as a celebration of the best fiction the tradition has to offer. (He was assisted in the selection by veteran anthologist Martin Greenberg and by fellow author John Helfers, so his assessment of the quality of the material isn't entirely idiosyncratic.) His two introductory pieces, the Introduction or "What Happened to the Western?" which both analyzes the current diminished state of the genre and speculates about the prospects for its enduring survival and future directions (drawing upon, for the latter, the thoughts of a number of current Western writers) and the much-shorter Preface, which briefly sketches the genre's roots in the 19th-century dime novels, are spoiler-free.
This anthology mines territory similar to that of Jon Tuska's Shadow of the Lariat: A Treasury of the Frontier, though Jakes' chronological range is broader than the one covered in that book, all the contents of which were published in the years 1920-1961. Seven authors --Zane Grey, Max Brand, Les Savage Jr., Ernest Haycox, Frank Bonham, Luke Short, and Dan Cushman-- are represented in both collections, but by different stories, so there's no overlap at all in content. Historically, both the writers and readers in this genre have been overwhelmingly male; Tuska's book doesn't include any female authors. Jakes included three; 90% of those represented here are still male, but I appreciated the effort to represent women's contribution to the genre. A defect of this collection compared to Tuska's, though, is that the arrangement of stories is not chronological (indeed, there doesn't really seem to be any principle guiding the arrangement) and publication dates aren't usually given with the selections, though copyright dates for most of them are listed in the front matter. Another is that the author introductions preceding each story are single short paragraphs.
At nearly ninety pages, one selection, Wolf Moon by Ed Gorman, is really a short novel, and was originally published as one. (I intend to treat that one by itself in a separate review.)
The only story here I've previously read is the lead one, Louis L'Amour's outstanding "The Gift of Cochise" (which I've commented on elsewhere). So virtually all of the material here is new to me; and more than half of the authors are ones none of whose work I'd previously read (and in a number of cases ones I'd never heard of before.) In this first installment of reading, I read eight of the stories (only partially in order; I also picked out some of the shorter selections, including all three of the female-written ones), all of them by new-to-me writers except for the one by four-time Spur Award winner Elmer Kelton. There weren't any in this group that I disliked (though I liked one a bit less than the others). So far, I felt the selections demonstrated pretty consistent high literary quality.
Published in 1908, Owen Wister's "Timberline" is the oldest of these eight. (The title is actually the nickname of the character of whom this tale is essentially a character study.) Wister does an excellent job here of evoking a sense of place in the Rocky Mountain high country, makes good use of the electrical phenomena of a high-altitude lightning storm. and shows his mastery of the surprise ending technique, done rightly. (I've never read his landmark Western novel the Virginian, though it's on my to-read shelf; but this story has whetted my interest in doing so.) "The Tin Star" by John M. Cunningham and "Killers' Country!" by Dan Cushman are very different stories, but both represent the violent action-centered tradition of the mid-century pulps (the titular "country" of the latter is both geographical and metaphorical). But both are also serious stories about what matters in life and emotionally evocative in powerful ways. A more modern story by Bill Pronzini, "Fear" (1995) is likewise serious and evocative, and takes its premise in an unexpected direction.
Marcia Muller is married to Pronzini (though Jakes doesn't mention that fact), and like him writes in both the mystery and Western genres. Set in the Arizona desert country in the early 1900s, her "Sweet Cactus Wine" (1982) would have made a great selection for the anthology Just Desserts. (The same could actually be said for the Kelton selection here, "The Burial of Letty Strayhorn.") Like Peggy Simson Curry's 1959 story "Geranium House," it's a deeply thought-provoking story, which tests and challenges our understandings of right and wrong. Neither author is attempting to be morally nihilistic, they're simply presenting a story of human behavior that could realistically happen in an unusual (but far from impossible) situation, and inviting the reader to bring his/her own moral judgment to bear on it. (That sort of experiment in the moral imagination is inherently the stuff of serious literature, and entirely legitimate.)
My ÀÏ»¢»úÎÈÓ®·½·¨ friend Debbie Zapata is a fan of the Western writings of Bertha Muzzy Bower (1871-1940), so I recognized her name here. She's represented by "The Lamb of the Flying U," one of many works she wrote about everyday cowboy life on a fictional Montana ranch. (Having grown up on a real one, she was writing about what she knew.) This tale of attempted hazing of a new hand whom the older ones mistakenly assume to be effeminate and incompetent is humorous in intent, but for me somewhat marred by my basic contempt for the warped attitudes demonstrated by the smug in-group here. (If they'd been working for me, they'd have been looking for a new job.)
May 11, 2025 My latest stretch of reading took me through 10 more stories, again fairly consistent in their high quality, though pretty diverse otherwise (except that a fair number of them happen to feature a Southwestern setting). Again, these were read out of order, with a concentration on shorter selections, but not to the total exclusion of longer ones. Five of the ten were by authors I was already acquainted with --and in the case of Jack London, well acquainted. (I'd also previously read an Evan Hunter novel, but only single short stories by the others.) The selection here by Max Brand (whose real name was Frederick Faust) is "Wine on the Desert." It features a totally despicable protagonist, guilty of murder and on the run ahead of a posse, who's quite confident that he's got a fool-proof plan for a clean get away (but has he?). London's "All Gold Canyon," which has one of the most sensuously beautiful descriptions of unspoiled nature that I've read in any genre, has a miner for its protagonist, and benefits from the author's detailed knowledge of mining and prospecting procedures --but before it's over, more will be going on than just prospecting. Luke Short's title character in "Top Hand" is a "kid" perhaps in his late teens (older than 17, by his own statement), and older folks in the town he's just ridden into are skeptical of his "top hand" claim ...but a chance to prove himself might come sooner than expected.
German writer Karl May (1842-1912) isn't well known to American readers, since few if any of his books have ever been translated into English. But his 40 Western novels featuring his iconic hero Old Shatterhand (also nicknamed Old Surehand and Old Firehand) and the latter's Indian sidekick Winnetou were, and still are, highly popular with readers in German and other European languages. (I'd heard of him and his series character from reading a secondary account of him some years ago, though I don't remember where, but haven't read anything by him.) He's not directly represented in this collection. But Jakes' "Manitow and Ironhand," set in the "Stony Mountains" (as May sometimes designated the Rockies) in 1833, and featuring title characters who are fur trappers, is "Dedicated to the memory of Karl May," and its heroes are inspired by May's own, though it's more of a homage than an actual pastiche. (Jakes' two-page Afterword gives more info on May, and on the similarities and differences of this story and the May corpus.) One of the longer tales in this anthology, this was definitely one of my favorites.
Hunter is best known under his Ed McBain pen name, as an author of police procedurals. I've read none of his work in that vein, but read his novel Last Summer when it was published in 1968. The setting and characters there are very different from those in "The Killing at Triple Tree;" but the two works share an intensely grim vision of human moral darkness, though not from a premise that applauds darkness. Our main character here is a marshal whose young wife was brutally raped and murdered, and now obliged to lead the manhunt for the thug who did it. It's a harrowing practical exploration of the ethics of justice, but no spoilers here. Three more stories, each by new-to-me writers, also have lawmen as protagonists or major characters, who have to make decisions and choices about how far the claims of duty go, and about what is or isn't most important to them in life. All three of these were winners for me, but their plots/premises are distinctively different.
Glendon Swarthout is best known for his Western novel The Shootist (1975), for which he won the Spur Award. His "The Attack on the Mountain" is set in Arizona in the 1880s, against the background of the warfare between the Army and the Apaches, and is another of my favorites here. (Its portrayal of the Apaches is realistic rather than racist, but the author definitely doesn't subscribe to "noble savage" mythology.) Finally, "Hell on the Draw" by Loren D. Estleman is arguably out of place in this anthology, since its supernatural and SF premises place it more in the "Weird West" subgenre (and it's more than a little dubious theologically!); but it holds interest, and makes very good use of the surprise ending device.
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