Monday, January 26, 2009

When is a Western not a Western?

What is a "Western" novel? Definitions vary widely, yet the average person would likely tell you that they define a Western as being a story about cowboys. It could revolve around a gun fight, or a range war for herds and grazing land, and the hero would probably be looking for "justice" in way or another.

Cowboy stories have never really appealed to me. I was always more interested in the Indians, and in the frontiersmen who lived similarly to the Indians. There's actually a long tradition in English language literature of writing about Indians and frontiersmen, going back to the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. As I wrote in this space a few weeks ago, Joseph Altsheler was creating such tales a century ago, and finding an enormous audience. Later, A.B. Guthrie wrote six novels that portrayed east-central Montana from the 1820s through World War 2, with two of them, The Big Sky and Fair Land, Fair Land, dealing with mountain men and Indians (and a third, the Pulitzer Prize winning The Way West, being about one of those mountain men becoming a wagon train guide). At roughly the same time, Frederick Manfred penned his Buckskin Man series, which followed "Siouxland" (parts of Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas) from the 18th Century into the late 1800s. Even the notorious L. Ron Hubbard's first novel, Buckskin Brigades, was about the Canadian fur trade at the time of Louis & Clark's expedition.

There's other examples with which I'm less familiar. The point remains that plenty of fiction set on some American frontier has been published over the past 150+ years. This genre, often referred to as a "Western" even when it was set east of the Mississippi River, reached a new height of popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. By then, it was often referred to simply as "historical fiction," which put it alongside novels about any and every epoch. These "frontier novels" were often found in bookstores mixed in with general fiction, as Bernard Cornwell and Jack Whyte's near-fantasies are today. Jameson Books published a line of Mountain Man novels, Bantam created the "Domain" sub-label, and Tor created the Forge sister-label (which handled all non-science fiction/fantasy, but focused on historical fiction). Terry C. Johnston's mountain man and Indian wars books reached best-seller status, and similar works by Earl Murray, Win(fred) Blevins, Richard S. Wheeler, Norman Zollinger, Don Coldsmith, and Jory Sherman weren't far behind.

These authors found their audience among people who enjoyed the study of history, and who were sympathetic towards Native American causes. Some of the dwindling fanbase for traditional cowboy yarns probably also read these frontier novels, but most of the frontier novel readership were, like I was, relatively uninterested in stories of cowpokes and gunfighters. By 2000, I was overjoyed to have so many interesting options available. But then Zollinger, Johnston, and Murray passed away. I had gotten to know Terry Johnston and Earl Murray, and these friends of mine were only 54 and 52 when they died far too young, with too many stories left untold. Sherman switched to writing ranching stories, and Coldsmith's output slowed as he eased into old age.

This has left just Blevins and Wheeler to carry the torch for this sort of fiction. They continue to release new works on a regular basis, but no newer or younger writer has reached the heights of success of those no longer writing (with Mike Blakely as a possible exception). So frontier novels are in a state of decline in 2009, at least in mass market editions. I haven't looked into the University Presses, but Wheeler (a prolific blogger) has noted that various western American ones are publishing more and more frontier fiction by younger, little known writers. This seems to be the future for the genre, along with print-on-demand outfits which let authors get their works sold via Amazon and similar sites (Wheeler has been a leader in getting his out of print back catalog available again via POD).

The good news for those with an interest in reading frontier novels is that used bookstores have vast stocks of such books available. All of the authors I've mentioned, except Altsheler, should be easy to find in most used bookstores (and Altsheler can be had for free online via Project Gutenberg). Some have separate sections for "historical fiction" and "westerns" and it can be a toin coss that determines in which section a given author is placed, so it is worth looking through both, if a store is set up that way. While browsing, you are likely to find many interesting authors beyond those mentioned above, and countless hours of reading await the novice to the field. In the meantime, this piece has gone on long enough, so I'll post separately about one of my favorite series of frontier novels, one that is still successfully ongoing. Happy reading until then.

Thought of the Day: I've now finished A Fortress in Shadow, which seems a bit rushed in places, but was otherwise quite good. I'm glad Glen Cook now writes longer, more fleshed out stories in a similar fashion, such as his Instrumentalities of the Night series. I'm still hoping for news of the missing last Dread Empire manuscript being recovered or recreated for release in the Wrath of Kings omnibus!

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