Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction 1860-1960 - Christine Bold

From time to time, I get in the mood to read some non-fiction, but it’s usually non-fiction about fiction. Case in point, SELLING THE WILD WEST: POPULAR WESTERN FICTION 1860-1960 by Christine Bold, published in 1980 by Indiana University Press. A friend of mine recommended this book to me, and the author’s name was familiar. I remembered that she contributed some of the essays about various authors in TWENTIETH CENTURY WESTERN WRITERS. So it seemed like something I might enjoy.

The book has an intriguing concept: it’s an examination of the way Westerns became a mass-produced genre with a lot of constraints and rules that developed because of the way it was published, as well as how some authors of Westerns were able to achieve distinct authorial voices despite those constraints and rules. Bold starts with the dime novels and progresses through the early Twentieth Century and the pulp and original paperback eras, doing quick surveys of each of those publishing methods and then analyzing in more detail the careers of several different authors from each time period.

I’m not a big fan of dime novels, but I enjoyed reading about their origins and learned a few things. The authors Bold concentrates on in this section are Ned Buntline, Prentiss Ingraham, Edward S. Ellis, and Edward L. Wheeler. I knew quite a bit about Buntline and Ingraham (I once edited a novel in which Buntline is the main character, THE DIME NOVELIST by Clay More), but Ellis and Wheeler were pretty much new to me. Bold also discusses the different approaches of the two main publishers of dime novels, Beadle & Adams and Street & Smith.

In the section on the early Twentieth Century, Bold focuses on the big sellers—Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Max Brand (Frederick Faust), and Emerson Hough—as well as Frederic Remington, who (I didn’t know this) wrote several novels as well as being a legendary artist of the American West. Brand, of course, is something of a transitional figure, bridging the early days of Wister and Grey with the pulp era that he dominated. I’ve read a lot about Wister (who originated much of what we think of as Western fiction), Grey (the first bestseller in the genre), and Brand (the first King of the Pulps), but I knew much less about Remington and Hough. Neither of whom I’ve ever read, by the way.

Moving on, Bold covers the careers of several writers who “escaped” from the pulps: Alan Le May, Ernest Haycox, Jack Schaefer, and Louis L’Amour. Le May I know mostly from the movies based on his books, although I have read the novel THE SEARCHERS (and didn’t like it as much as the movie). I’ve read and loved both of Schaefer’s novels, SHANE and MONTE WALSH. I’ve come to appreciate Haycox’s work, although I have a preference for his pulp era novellas before he “escaped” those untrimmed pages. And while I haven’t read all of L’Amour’s novels and stories, by any means, I’ve read a bunch of them. L'Amour comes in for the greatest amount of criticism from Bold. She praises his marketing abilities but doesn’t seem to think much of his writing.

The book wraps up with some brief coverage of “Anti-Western Westerns” from the Seventies such as E.L. Doctorow’s WELCOME TO HARD TIMES and Ishmael Reed’s YELLOW BACK RADIO BROKE DOWN. There’s also a mention of what Bold erroneously refers to as “Playboy Westerns”, clearly a reference to the various Adult Western series published under house names. Comparing them to dime novels is fair game, I think. There are certainly similarities in the way they’re produced. But I’ve never heard anybody else refer to them as Playboy Westerns, a misnomer Bold picked up probably from the fact that Playboy Paperbacks published two of the early Adult Western series, Slocum by Jake Logan and Raider and Doc by J.D. Hardin, before those series were sold to Berkley.

SELLING THE WILD WEST is an enjoyable book with plenty of interesting insights. There are stretches where the academic density of the writing made my eyes start to glaze over a little, but for the most part it moves right along and is quite entertaining if you’re interested in the subject. Which I am, considering that a huge part of my own career has been spent writing books within a specific system and following the rules (mostly unwritten) of that system, while at the same time trying to establish my own voice and get across the things that I want to get across. That’s been a lot of fun and I think I’ve been somewhat successful at it.

The Fugitive Trail - Zane Grey

As I’ve mentioned before, the elementary school I attended didn’t have a library, but each room had a shelf of books in it that the students could borrow and read. I have no doubt that the teachers provided those books themselves. When I was in fourth or fifth grade, one of the books in our room was THE MYSTERIOUS RIDER by Zane Grey. I remember reading it, but that’s all I can tell you about it. The plot has faded completely from my mind. But I must have liked it because not long after that I got a copy of Grey’s THE LOST WAGON TRAIN from our little public library. I enjoyed it, too, and over the years I read more of Grey’s novels from the library and the bookmobile or in paperback editions picked up here and there. I don’t recall whom I started reading first—Grey, Max Brand, or Clarence E. Mulford—but those three were my introduction to Westerns for grown-ups. They were also the three big names in the genre during the first two decades of the Twentieth Century. I’m not forgetting Owen Wister, but despite Wister’s huge influence on the genre, he didn’t write nearly as much as those other three and wasn’t as much in the public eye. We tend to forget these days that, sales-wise, Zane Grey was the James Patterson/John Grisham/Stephen King of his time, and his books still sold very well all the way through the Sixties and Seventies.

Over the decades I read quite a few of Grey’s novels but nowhere near all of them, so I still pick one up now and then when I’m in the right mood. And Grey is definitely one of those writers I have to be in the mood for. His flowery, melodramatic, old-fashioned style makes his books difficult going for most modern readers. I’ve always been able to put myself in the mindset of readers from the first half of the Twentieth Century, though, so I still enjoy his books. For example, THE FUGITIVE TRAIL, which I just read.

This is one of the novels published after Grey’s death, but unlike today when popular authors continue producing new books long after they’ve passed on, Grey actually wrote his posthumous novels and left quite an inventory of them when he died of heart failure in 1939. It’s possible that his wife and son polished and fleshed out those manuscripts; I’m not enough of a Zane Grey scholar to say one way or the other. THE FUGITIVE TRAIL was published in 1957 by Harper & Brothers and has been reprinted in paperback editions many, many times.

Set in Texas in the late 1870s, it’s the story of former buffalo hunter and scout Bruce Lockheart, who allows himself to be blamed for a bank robbery that his wastrel twin brother really took part in. Bruce believes that the girl he loves, Trinity Spencer, is actually in love with his brother, so for her sake, he goes on the run and lets the law think he’s the owlhoot, not his twin. Such self-sacrifice in the name of love is common in Grey’s novels. I did mention that his books are a little old-fashioned.

Another well-worn plot element is that Trinity is a foundling, the only survivor of an apparent Indian attack when she was a baby. But is she really the orphan she appears to be, or does she have a family and a surprising fate waiting for her somewhere in the vastness of the Texas frontier?

And what about Quade Belton, the gambler/outlaw who got Bruce’s brother in trouble to start with? Do you think he might show up somewhere later on and cause more trouble for Bruce and Trinity, who are actually in love with each other although they won’t admit it at first?

The first half of THE FUGITIVE TRAIL is an epic chase yarn that covers a span of several years while Bruce is trying to avoid being captured or killed by the Texas Rangers and Trinity is trying to find him, since she’s realized she’s in love with him, not his brother. The second half of the book settles down into a more standard battle-the-rustlers-and-save-the-ranch story driven very much by coincidence. One thing to remember about Grey’s work is that while he didn’t really invent most of these plot elements—credit for that goes more to Wister and Mulford—he was one of the earliest practitioners of them. What seems stereotypical to us was much fresher in those days, and that’s the way you have to approach Grey’s novels.

Although the romance angle is a huge part of the plot, as it usually was in his books, there’s a lot of action, too, including numerous shootouts and chase scenes and a dramatic, large-scale battle at the end. Grey may be known these days more for his descriptive prose and his convoluted romances than anything else, but when he wanted to, he could burn powder pretty darned good, too.

THE FUGITIVE TRAIL isn’t one of Grey’s better-known novels, and it’s not a classic like RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE or DESERT GOLD, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. If you like very traditional Westerns, you might, as well.

Forgotten Books: The Heritage of the Desert - Zane Grey

I found myself in the mood to read a Zane Grey novel, and since Ron Scheer reviewed THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT a while back and it sounded pretty good, I decided to give it a try. I was interested in it as well because it’s Grey’s first real Western novel, first published a hundred years ago in 1910. Ron does a far better job of discussing the novel than I can, so I urge all of you to go and read his comments, if you haven’t already. As for me, I’ll use this as an excuse to wallow a little in nostalgia and ramble on a bit about Zane Grey.


When I was a kid, my mother did not approve of my choice of reading matter, and that’s putting it mildly. She was scandalized that I wanted to read those dirty James Bond books. The Nick Carter novels were just as bad. Of course, anything with a McGinnis cover drew a frown of disapproval. I came to be very fond of Dell Mapbacks, which were still very easy to find in used bookstores in those days, because their covers were almost always less risqué than the editions coming out in the Sixties. Then there was all that crazy science fiction stuff I liked, and those crazy pulp reprints, which weren’t as bad as the mysteries because they didn’t have racy covers, but they were still, well . . . crazy.


Westerns, however, were okay. (This was in the dawn of the Adult Western era, the Jurassic Adult Western era, if you will, when Belmont was publishing the first few books in the Lassiter series by W.T. Ballard, Peter Germano, et al., writing as “Jack Slade”.) Western paperback covers still looked respectable. They might be violent, but there was no sign of anything sexy. Books by Zane Grey were especially okay, because my mother had read Zane Grey and deemed them inoffensive.


Luckily for me, I liked Westerns. I had discovered Max Brand and Clarence E. Mulford on my own, and I was happy to try Zane Grey. The bookmobile that came out every Saturday from the library in Fort Worth had tons of them, and I read most of them: THE LOST WAGON TRAIN (the first Zane Grey I ever read and a candidate for a Forgotten Books post one of these days), the iconic RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE, NEVADA, DESERT GOLD, THE HASH KNIFE OUTFIT, TO THE LAST MAN, THE DRIFT FENCE, UNDER THE TONTO RIM, and plenty of others. I found all of them quite enjoyable, but over time I became less of a fan of Grey’s work because the negative things you’ve heard about the books are true for the most part: the writing style is long-winded and overblown, the characters sometimes have incredibly goofy names, and the plots are full of melodrama, coincidence, and contrivance. Most plots from eighty to a hundred years ago seem that way to us now. While I would still read a Zane Grey novel from time to time and enjoy it, I found that I really had to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate his strengths as a writer.


Because despite the criticism, his work definitely does have its strengths. Yes, the descriptions of the landscape sometimes go on and on, but they paint vivid pictures and they do a good job of drawing a parallel between the setting and the characters. And you can call it melodrama if you want, but Grey puts his characters through hell and can really make the reader feel what they’re suffering. Finally, when he does get around to an extended action scene, they’re great, full of color and adventure and excitement.


But to get back to a few comments about THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT, this is the old “sickly guy from back east comes west and toughens up” plot, with Jack Hare being rescued from death by Mormon patriarch August Naab and then getting involved in Naab’s range war against the rustlers Holderness and Dene. There’s also a romantic triangle involving Hare, Naab’s gunman son Snap (isn’t Snap Naab a great name for a gunman?), and the beautiful half-Navajo, half-Spanish Mescal, August Naab’s ward. The plot is a little thin, especially for the book’s length, and suffers from the way it meanders around. Those pacing problems may be because THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT is one of Grey’s first novels. I seem to recall that the later ones flow a little better. There are some great scenes scattered through this book, though, such as the taming of the wild mustang Silvermane and a dangerous encounter with a bear. I guess I was in the right mood, because I was able to throw myself into the book as a reader and wound up enjoying it quite a bit, enough so that I plan to read something else by Zane Grey fairly soon.


If you’ve never read Grey’s work and you have a Kindle, a bunch of the novels are available free on Amazon. You can try one, and it probably won’t take long for you to tell whether or not you like it. There are also plenty of copies still available in most libraries, and you can still find lots of used paperbacks as well. And the best thing about those paperbacks . . . the covers aren’t smutty, so you can read them without being ashamed.