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The year is 1849. A feisty young whore in New Orleans decides to light out for the goldfields of California and gets the bright idea of buying a slave, a sullen man seething with rage but infinitely resourceful and a crack shot, to help her make the overland journey. Neither of them can imagine the epic adventure that lies before them, the dangers, the magnificence, the heroism and the unlikely bond, stronger that any slaver’s chains, that will come to unite them. This is a Western tale, an American tale — a voyage into the wild and troubled heart of the American dream.

Missouri Green — a short novel, only $1.99.

. . . of my book Fourteen Western Stories by Jan McClintock on her book blog We Need More Shelves:

The description from Amazon.com:

“Fourteen Western tales, by turns boisterous, bawdy, shocking, sentimental. They’re not for kids—there’s a fair amount of adult content here—but a treat for anyone else who likes old-fashioned stories with new twists and turns, written by someone who loves the West, past and present.”

That’s an excellent description of this little treasure of a collection. I found each of the stories well-written and interesting. The author did include some stereotypical characters, but he’s a screenwriter, after all, and fond of pulp fiction (wink). He added a new slant to some stories to keep things hopping. Definitely not for the squeamish or prudes.

Recommended for short-story lovers, those who like westerns, and anyone who falls in between.

E. L. Doctorow’s first novel, Welcome To Hard Times, published in 1960, was a Western. It was, to be sure, a “literary Western”. Doctorow peppered his prose with passages of fancy-pants writin’ and eccentric punctuation, just to make sure readers knew he wasn’t toiling away in the trenches of mere genre. The villain of the piece was often called only “The Bad Man From Bodie”, capitalized in just that way, associated with a band of “Bad Men” — making it clear that he and they were not just men but mythological embodiments of evil.

Still, the tale starts well, setting up the traditional Western themes of shame, honor and redemption in stark and sometimes powerful ways.  As the narrative unfolds, Doctorow loosens up a bit and indulges more and more often in deadpan Western humor and frankly entertaining yarn-spinning.  He doesn’t exaggerate his fancy-pants style to the lunatic extremes of Cormac McCarthy’s convoluted gobbledygook, and frequently employs spare and direct language that’s enlivened by quirky insights and supple turns of phrase.

The genesis of the book explains a lot about it.  Before he devoted himself to fiction-writing, Doctorow worked for a while as a reader for a motion picture company, in the course of which he plowed his way through many Western scripts.  In Welcome To Hard Times, he set out to write a parody Western, but got caught up in his own story and in the tradition and switched to a different strategy — reclaiming the Western as a literary genre.

It was a pompous and patronizing ambition.  Elmore Leonard, a much greater writer than Doctorow, was still writing Westerns when Doctorow was writing Welcome To Hard Times.  The  Western didn’t need to be reclaimed for literature as much as it needed to be recognized as literature.

The book’s parodic roots account for the humor of the work, Doctorow’s familiarity with the genre accounts for its mooring in the traditions of the Western, while the author’s sense of being above the genre accounts for the occasional pretentiousness of the style.

Sadly, Doctorow veers disastrously into “literature” at the book’s conclusion, into an apocalyptic and nihilistic climax that wrenches the tale entirely out of the Western genre, mocking the very idea of redemption.  What might have been a respectable contribution to Western fiction becomes instead a fairly meaningless and churlish comment on the tradition.  It’s the literary equivalent of shooting someone in the back.