Historicals with Horses

  

Since my column here at SleuthSayers about period fiction last week, I've had some interesting conversations with fellow writers about the Western genre. Some of them like it, some hate it, etc. Some don't even consider those stories historical (but they are). As I think I've said before at this blog, Westerns are just historical fiction with horses. To me, one good thing about writing Western stories--whether they're novels, shorts, or screenplays--is that they can usually be considered mysteries as well, and therefore marketable as mystery fiction, because a crime is almost always involved. (Uness maybe it was the movie version of Old Yeller, where the only crime was the older brother's attempt at a Southern accent. But that's another story.)

As I said to one of my writer friends in an email on this subject the other day, part of the Western genre's appeal to me is the definite line those stories draw between right and wrong. It's a black/white structure: there were good people and evil people, with very few gray areas in between--unlike the way our world is today. This is especially true in the older Westerns, the ones I watched in the movie theater and on TV as a kid. 

In that long-ago world--Bonanza, The Rifleman, Gunsmoke, etc.--it was easy to identify the villain or one of his friends, because the good guys always shaved every morning and wore clean clothes, while the bad guys appeared to have been been dragged into town behind the stagecoach. Another thing: the streets of Virginia City or North Fork or Dodge City were always neat as a pin, with nary a sign of mud or ruts or horse droppings. In fact, the downtown thoroughfare in all those different shows often looked suspiciously like the same street. (How could that be? Even as a kid, I knew Nevada and New Mexico and Kansas were a long way apart.)

Other puzzling things happened, as well. As Clint Eastwood once said in an interview, why did the good guy always wait for the bad guy to draw first? He said that made no sense. And when a reporter asked Stagecoach director John Ford why the Indians chasing the coach didn't just shoot one of the horses, Ford replied, "Because that would've been the end of the movie." That, I guess, does make sense. Later, of course, Westerns got smarter in that regard, and way more authentic, although the standoffs in the street and the hero waiting politely for the other guy to draw have persisted to this day. 

Having said all that, these recent discussions of the horse opera and its fans have prompted me to revisit some of the movies I've watched and re-watched over the past years. Here are a few observations, by me and me alone, so feel free to disagree.

My 10 favorite Western movies, in no particular order:

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

The Big Country (1958)

Unforgiven (1992)

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Shane (1953)

Dances with Wolves (1990)

High Noon (1952)

The Magnificent Seven (1960)

Open Range (2003)

The Searchers (1956)

NOTE 1: There actually is sort of an order to these. I consider Once Upon a Time in the West and The Big Country the absolute best of the bunch.

Runners-up:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)

Tombstone (1993)

The Man from Snowy River (1982)

Hondo (1956)

Will Penny (1967)

The Hanging Tree (1959)

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

Rio Bravo (1959)

The Wild Bunch (1969)

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

True Grit (remake, 2010)

Quigley Down Under (1990)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

Hombre (1967)

NOTE 2: I didn't include the wild and crazy Cat Ballou (1965), Blazing Saddles (1974), From Noon till Three (1976), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), or Rustler's Rhapsody (1985), but if you haven't seen those, I recommend them. 

Good Westerns you might not have heard of:

The Homesman (2014)

The Last Sunset (1961)

Bone Tomahawk (2015)

Hostiles (2017)

Duck, You Sucker (1971)

The Proposition (2005)

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)

Lone Star (1996)

7 Men from Now (1956)

Old Henry (2021)

One-Eyed Jacks (1961)

The Salvation (2014)

Appaloosa (2008)

News of the World (2020)

Ride the High Country (1962)

NOTE 3: I also didn't include any TV series or mini-series in my lists, but of those, I think the best, by far, are Deadwood (2004-2006) and Lonesome Dove (1989). Runners-up might be The English (2022) and--if you count it as a modern-day Western--Justified (2010-2015). Once again, my opinion only. Disagreements are welcome.

Questions

What's your view, on Westerns old and new? Like 'em? Hate 'em? Tolerate 'em? Do you agree with any of the above choices? What are some I overlooked? If you do like Westerns, have you tried writing any, either novels or short stories? Have you had any published? In what markets? Were they standalone stories, or installments in a series? Was writing them work, or fun? Please let me know in the comments section.

Final thoughts:

1. I'm looking forward to seeing Kevin Costner's recently-released Horizon. Haven't gotten around to it yet.

2. If you haven't written a Western story but you want to . . .

"Slap some bacon on a biscuit and let's go."--John Wayne, The Cowboys (1972)

BSP: Paperbacks 7 - 8 & 9

I spent this summer bundling some of my short stories into collections. The result is that three more paperbacks are now in print. Most of these stories were previously published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine or various other magazines or anthologies.

Paperback #7

9 Tales from the Golden Triangle consists of nine stories set in the mountain jungles and opium fields of Southeast Asia in the years after Mao's Red Army had pushed the White Nationalist Army under Chang Kai-Shek out of China during their civil war. Part of the White Army went to Taiwan while other divisions found refuge in the mountain jungles of Burma, Laos and Thailand. And, since an army must eat, as the common wisdom went, those latter army divisions soon became involved in the opium trade.

In these stories, two half-brothers contend to inherit their warlord father's opium empire. The elder half-brother was born of a hill tribe mother and raised in the jungle camps. The younger is full-blood Chinese and was raised in the British education system of Hong Kong. Existence means living with treachery and deceit while trying to live up to their father's expectations. Only one brother can win.

Paperback #8

9 Historical Mysteries Vol 2  is a continuation of the Volume 1 collection. The first five stories are set in the 1660s Paris Underworld during the reign of the Sun King, Louis the Fourteenth, on the throne of France. A young, orphan pickpocket, incompetent at his trade, grows up in a criminal enclave outside the gates of Paris. His fellow criminals tend to take advantage of his youthful ignorance and inexperience in order to draw him into their schemes.

The next four stories are in The Armenian series set in 1850s Chechnya ranging from the Cossack cordon along the Terek River and south into the hill tribes of the Wild Country in the shadows of the Caucasus Mountains. In this land, trust is an unmarked grave in the rolling steppes where The Armenian must survive dangerous encounters by his wits.

Paperback #9

9 Tales of a Criminal Mind are stories ranging from power to greed, from excitement to vengeance, where the criminal rationalizes his actions in order to justify the crime. Inside are nine tales of a criminal mind. Some humorous. Some desperate. Some done out of family loyalty. Yet all are against the law.

The last story collection includes the 2022 Macavity Nominated and Edgar Award winner in the Best Short Story category, "The Road to Hana."

All nine books, now on Amazon, are part of my endeavor to keep my stories out there in the market place for readers.

Thank you for your time.

Shelf Life

There was a recent piece in the local paper about a homeless guy who was a crime victim, and the New Mexican referred to him as “unhoused,” which I’m assuming is a new locution.  Mind you, this is a guy my dad would have called a bum, plain and simple. We should take a look at some context.  There was a policy adopted a few years back – a few being relative, it might have been during the Reagan administration – to de-institutionalize the homeless.  Whatever guiding principle was involved, the proximate result was to dump a lot of people on the street who didn’t have survival skills.  What they had were serious drug and alcohol addictions, and unresolved mental health issues.  The problem hasn’t been much alleviated by successive social policies, and it doesn’t matter whether you change the descriptives to somehow humanize these people at the bottom of the food chain.  They’re still in bad shape, just the same.

I realize the anti-woke crowd would suggest that we’re getting overly sensitive to hurting people’s feelings, but it’s not about hurt feelings.  That’s to willfully misunderstand the framing of the argument.  Language is as much about the people applying the labels as it is about the people being labeled, if not more.  Spazz and ree-tard were in vogue back when we were in grade school, and they may still have currency, but if kids use them, they’d probably say they mean no insult to anybody who’s actually spastic or developmentally challenged; it’s exaggeration for effect.  The days are hopefully long past when we threw stones at the witless.  As for words (as opposed to sticks and stones), the same goes for Quentin Tarantino’s favorite noun, or any number of common slang epithets for gay guys or Jews, Italians or Irish or Arabs, and calling somebody a towelhead says more about you than it says about them.

Vocabulary goes in and out of fashion.  We use the term dial tone, but it’s untethered to physical reality, because who dials anymore?  Likewise, a word like Okie, which was specific to homegrown refugees from the Dust Bowl, and these days is as dated as The Grapes of Wrath.  (Except for those pesky refugees, the mojados who just keep coming.)

As a writer, and particularly a writer who’s done his share of period pieces, I’d be the first to admit that colorful language reinforces atmosphere, and authenticity.  Leaving aside the unhappy plethora of prithee, sirrahs in Sir Walter Scott’s medieval fables, he uses picturesque and homely lingo to honest effect in his Border stories, which are closer to his own time.  And for my part, I doubt if the Mickey Counihan stories would have the same gamy flavor if I sanitized the way he talks.  On the other hand, we recognize that even if this is “the way they talk,” common vulgarities perpetuate ugly stereotypes.  It’s not a matter of whether we say these things aloud or in secret.

Language is organic, not prescriptive.  It grows on its own.  The French have an Academy, to hand down the rules, but they can’t keep the weeds out.  I’m no big fan of eviscerating language, of diminishing its muscularity.  Why water your whiskey?  A lot of the time, there’s no real substitute for brute Anglo-Saxon invective.  But there’s a difference between talking dirty, and using language that’s offensive because it singles people out for ridicule, and diminishes them.  It cultivates lazy habits of thought: Jews are grasping, black people are shiftless, Mexicans are illiterate beaners.

We can retire usage, just like clothing.  I might still fit into those paisley bell-bottoms, but hopefully friends and family would stage an intervention.  Sentimental attachment only goes so far.  Enough with the hand-me-downs. 

History and Mystery

Perhaps I've always enjoyed historicals without fully realizing it. To pose a question, are Agatha Christie novels historical? What about the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle?

Generally, we don’t call fiction written in and about the author’s own time as historical novels. Yet modern readers can consider them a slice of history. Who better to fill us in on fine details of the day than someone living then and there?

I don’t find the tales of Edward Marston as smoothly written as, say, Ellis Peters or the wonderful Lindsey Davis. But that lack of ‘smoothinity’ (I’m aware of ‘smoothness’ but this suits my purpose) lends additional verisimilitude. The reader can feel the dirt in roadside food, the pinch of the cobbler’s shoes, the stench of an outhouse.

We live in a politically correct ‘woke’ atmosphere. We foster a supercilious attitude where we think we’re some way superior to those who’ve come before. Novels set in ancient Egypt or Imperial Rome remind us we’re not so different, not different at all.

Many of us, R.T. Lawton and Janice Law, David Edgerley Gates and Eve Fisher, to name a few colleagues, love the research as much as the writing… and reading.

For your pleasure, following are a dozen historical novels, new and old, you might want to nab.


The Alienist first appeared in 1994, the first in a short series. Who can resist New York City Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt?


The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco’s first novel published in 1980, is one of my all time favorites. Monesteries aren’t all peace and quiet.


I loved the virtually vanished Jewish Alps, the Borscht Belt Catskills in upstate New York. Think The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel entertains The Hotel Neversink.


Thanks to Tirzah Price at Book Riot for many of these suggestions and further details.

What are your favorite historical novels or series?

The Macbeth Murder Mystery

UPDATE:  It has been borne in upon me that my copying of The Macbeth Murder Mystery from another site may infringe upon copyright. I have deleted it, but here is the original New  Yorker link:  New Yorker, and New Yorker Folio.

It can also be read in its entirety here.

I have had a cold I can't shake and spent the weekend at the pen, so, for your Thanksgiving entertainment, enjoy a trip down memory lane - and murder - with James Thurber!

https://jimsworldandwelcometoit.com/2012/12/07/thurbers-cartoons/

https://jimsworldandwelcometoit.com/2012/12/07/thurbers-cartoons/#jp-carousel-2168

Thurber, James 1943 The Thurber Carnival Harper and Brothers, NY pp. 60-63

Submitted by Caryl for our enjoyment!!!!
http://userhome.brook...

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/60-minutes-favorite-new-yorker-cartoons/42/