SSW/FFB: First Installment: WESTERYEAR edited by Edward Gorman (M. Evans 1988); THE NEW FRONTIER edited by Joe R. Lansdale (Doubleday 1989); DREAMERS AND DESPERADOES edited by Craig Lesley and Katheryn Stavrakis (Dell 1993)

Some of the titles of the stories collected in these volumes use, for critical purposes, epithets.

WESTERYEAR edited by Edward Gorman (M. Evans 1988; G. K. Hall 1990)

Introduction * Edward Gorman (in) ** (**noting originally published in this volume) --and each item below with a headnote by Gorman
The Sun Stood Still * "Max Brand" (Frederick Faust) (ss) The American Magazine December 1934
Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses * "Mark Twain" (Samuel Clemens) (ar) North American Review July 1895
The Return of a Private * Hamlin Garland (ss) The Arena, V.3 N.1 (January?) 1891
The Idyl of Red Gulch * Bret Harte (ss) Overland Monthly December 1869 
The Lonesome Road * "O. Henry" (William Porter) (ss) Ainslee’s Magazine September 1903
One Dash—Horses (aka Horses) * Stephen Crane (ss) The New Review #81, February 1896 (and newspaper syndication in the U.S. in January of that year)
The Streets of Laredo * "Will Henry" (Henry Allen) (ss) Western Roundup--a WWA anthology editorially attributed to Nelson Nye (Macmillan 1961)

The Hard Way * Elmore Leonard (ss) Zane Grey’s Western Magazine August 1953

The End of the Time of Leinard * Harlan Ellison (ss) Famous Western April 1958; revised for publication here

Mago's Bride * Loren D. Estleman  ** 
All the Long Years * Bill Pronzini **
The Damned * Greg Tobin **
Wolf Night * Bill Crider **
Liberty * Al Sarrantonio **
Trains Not Taken * Joe R. Lansdale (ss) RE:AL: Regarding Arts & Letters Spring 1987
Whores in the Pulpit * Thomas Sullivan **
Guild and the Indian Woman * Edward Gorman **
A Cowboy for a Madam * Barbara Beman **
One Night at Medicine Tail *  Chad Oliver **
The Time of the Wolves * Marcia Muller **
Hacendado * James M. Reasoner **
The Battle of Reno's Bend * L. J. Washburn **

Vengeance Station * T. V. Olsen (ss) Ranch Romances 2nd October issue/18 October 1957

Index revised and corrected from the WorldCat Index, with links to ISFDB, the FictionMags Index and other databases. Page numbers differ between the two editions.

THE NEW FRONTIER edited by Joe R. Lansdale (Doubleday/Double D 1989)

(Doubleday 0-385-24569-6, May ’89, $12.95, 180pp, hc) Original western anthology of 18 stories and a poem with an introduction by Lansdale and an afterword to a “lost” "Max Brand" (Frederick Faust) story by William F. Nolan. At least four of the stories are also fantasy.

• ix · Introduction · Joe R. Lansdale · in **
• 1 · A First Blooding [from the unfinished novel Wycherley] · "Max Brand" · ex **
• 13 · Afterword to Max Brand’s “A First Blooding” · William F. Nolan · aw **
• 14 · Steam Engine Time · Lewis Shiner · ss **
• 21 · Trooper Story · Lenore Carroll · ss **
• 29 · Uncle Harry’s Flying Saucer Swimming Pool · John Keefauver · ss **
• 34 · Mountain Laurel · Betty Taylor Gyenes · ss **
• 40 · Distant Thunder · Gary L. Raisor · nv **
• 63 · A Cold Way Home · Ardath Mayhar · ss **
• 67 · Hell’s Substation · Roy Lee Fish · ss **
• 79 · The Ballad of Sweeney’s Last Ride · Lee Schultz · pm **
• 82 · Hell on the Draw · Loren D. Estleman · ss **
• 94 · Hansel’s Finger · Leif Enger · ss **
• 101 · First Dawning · Robert Easton · ss **
• 108 · Jimmy and Me and the Nigger Man · Scott A. Cupp · ss **
• 119 · Calamity · Melissa Mia Hall · ss **
• 131 · Chief Wooden Teeth · Lee Sullenger · vi **
• 132 · The Wild One · Max Evans · ss **
• 149 · Mourning Old Spareribs · LoLo Westrich · ss **
• 160 · The Indian Summer of Nancy Redwing · Harry W. Paige · ss **
• 164 · Winter on the Belle Fourche · Neal Barrett, Jr. · ss **

Slightly augmented from the currently offline Locus Index.

DREAMERS AND DESPERADOES edited by Craig Lesley and Katheryn Stavrakis (Dell/Laurel 1993) 

1 * Introduction(s) * Craig Lesley and Katheryn Stavrakis (in)

15 * Sweetheart * Kathleen Alcalá (ex) Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist Calyx Books 1992
Iliana of the Pleasure Dreams / Rudolfo A. Anaya --
Heartwood / Rick Bass --
The Snowies, the Judiths / Mary Clearman Blew --
Bigfoot Stole My Wife; I am Bigfoot / Ron Carlson --
Paraiso: an Elegy / Rick DeMarinis --
Winter of '19 / Ivan Doig --
Science Meets Prophecy / David James Duncan --
Cry About a Nickel / Percival Everett --
Optimists / Richard Ford --
Girls / Tess Gallagher --
Personal Silence / Molly Gloss --
Nebraska / Ron Hansen --
Friends and Fortunes / Linda Hogan --
A Family Resemblance / James D. Houston --
Rock Garden / Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston --
The Flower Girls / Lawson Fusao Inada --
Death by Browsing / Karen Karbo--
I Could Love You (If I Wanted) / John Keeble --
Why I am a Danger to the Public / Barbara Kingsolver --
Do You Hear Your Mother Talking? / William Kittredge --
Nevada Dreams / David Kranes --
Eggs ; Absences : Cicadas ; Growing Tomatoes / Alex Kuo --
Sleepwalkers / Ursula K. Le Guin --
Mint / Craig Lesley --
The Interior of North Dakota / Barry Lopez --
The Woman Who Would Eat Flowers / Colleen McElroy --
Dropping Anchor / Valerie Miner --
Idaho Man / John Rember --
Slaughterhouse / Greg Sarris --
Whitney and Tracie / Carolyn See --
Emerald City: Third & Pike / Charlotte Watson Sherman --
It's Come to This / Annick Smith --
Sea Animals / Tom Spanbauer --
The Room / Katheryn Stavrakis --
Pragmatists / Robert Stubblefield --
Migrants / Elizabeth Tallent --
Double Face / Amy Tan --
Boat People / Joyce Thompson --
Talking to the Dead / Sylvia A. Watanabe --
The Indian Lawyer / James Welch --
Buried Poems / Terry Tempest Williams

Slightly corrected (and soon to be augmented) from the WorldCat index.

***Stupid publisher tricks: 

Westeryear--the first edition jacket from M. Evans (immediately above); even G. K. Hall's generic large-print-line wrap (at top of post) is a step up.

The New Frontier--jacket copy referring to Neal Barrett, Jr. as "a new discovery" in 1989, a quarter-century or so into his career; also, a jacket at least as generic if not quite as clumsy as the Evans cover for the Gorman book or D-day's package for Lansdale's previous western originals anthology, Best of the West.

Dreamers and Desperadoes--managing to leave co-editor Stavrakis's name off nearly every aspect of the packaging, save the title page, though at least the table of contents does include her introduction. Also not quite stupid but perhaps not the best choice: the reasonably handsome cover for this trade-paperback original apparently doesn't photograph too well, at least on most of the photos and scans I've seen. Hence the current slightly blurry image above...and the cover isn't the easiest to read even in the handheld presence of the potential reader (poor color choices for legibility).

And none of these received the publisher push they deserved by any means, even if the Gorman did get a second edition for large-print readers.

Contents:

Westeryear's stories are, to say the least, an interesting mix of classics and contemporaries of classics, and new fiction from some of the best writers in western fiction (among work in other fields) active at time of assembly...a quality it shares with the Lansdale and Stavrakis/Lesley  volumes...even if each book has its own share of work that might fall on either side of the line established some years back by the Western Writers of America, porously between western fiction and fiction of the west (both of which they embraced). 

And then there's the Twain essay, perhaps the most famous KTF review in at least the US canon, and persuasive enough to me at age nine that I never sought out too much of Cooper's fiction, and what little I did seemed to conform to the Clemens assessment. Twain goes to a few lengths to ensure you can read his survey for humor, but nonetheless it tells, and enrages Cooper fans to this day. Editor Gorman himself isn't beyond pointing out the warts in the older reprints he offers here, or in the other work by their contributors, in his headnotes, but the stories do help add a certain perspective and none of them are difficult reading, and clearly are part of the development of the range of western fiction all the relatively contemporary writers included in all three volumes have drawn upon and reacted to. 

"Max Brand" (Frederick Faust)'s "The Sun Stood Still" is a good example of his graceful, tense writing; Gorman notes that its wit and appreciation of life as it was lived by the everyday people of the old West wasn't as widely shared by his peers (nor some of his successors), giving his work more of a contemporary if not quite timeless quality than that of many who wrote for the pulp magazines and higher-budget and yet still prone to tropism "slick" magazines in the first half of the previous century. For those who want even early western fiction to lack subtlety and a certain dramatic verisimilitude, even when the mythos of western fiction was already being employed (not too much in this decidedly unglamorized account of farmhand life), Brand doesn't help their case too much.

Hamlin Garland made a poor showing for himself (with the help of those hoping to Reach Yet Instruct Our Youth) with such widely-distributed work as his poem "Do You Fear the Force of the Wind?", unless one was looking for simpleminded machismo. But a similar devotion to simpleminded machismo on the part of, say Hemingway or Mailer (and far too many others, even if these two more flagrantly than most) didn't stop them from having a certain dalliance, at least, with social justice causes, and Garland particularly in his early career was throwing in with agrarian socialists, Populists, progressives and other troublemakers, and his fiction about, particularly, the travails of Civil War veterans and others trying to make a life in the hardscrabble, highly Gilded Age-distorted farming country of the Midwest (perhaps a bit too much like today's), struck a chord, and that's on offer with "The Return of a Private"; it's not subtle, but, as Gorman notes, Garland had an excellent eye for the small details and challenges of life.

"The Idyl of Red Gulch", being as it is a Bret Harte story, tries to couch itself as a fable perhaps a bit too much more than is good for it, but nonetheless gets across a fine account of how even in the far western U. S., the unfortunate prejudices can shoot through society once it asserts itself as post-pioneering country. Definitely romanticized, but also making its points. 

"The Lonesome Road", being as It is an "O. Henry" story, is also not quite a fable, but doesn't, unlike the Harte, call attention to its attempt at being of Great Import with every line, but rather more casually and mildly humorously gives the account of two old hell-raising friends, one of whom has now settled into a happy marriage and a more quiet life, finding themselves together having to deal with old adversaries. An interesting weighing of what makes for an actually good life, with a  rather straightforward account of what a chaotic, unromantic thing a gunfight tends to be. Gorman is particularly annoyed in his headnote about how readily Porter's work these years is condescended to as glib and mechanical, and this story helps make his case (and, fwiw, the Doubleday/Anchor folks are still branding their best stories of the year annual in his memory).

More to come. (More distractions as other parts of the ever-collapsing  house and life demand attention, not least the cat. Don't buy a century-old house. Just don't. Unless you have the money, skill or both to keep replacing everything.)

For more of today's Short Story Wednesday posts, please see Patti Abbott's blog (today she's highlighting Caitlin Kiernan, in her own entry). From this Peter Straub -edited Library of America anthology (see quick review at bottom of FFB listings).

FFB redux: Ed Gorman guest post: LEARNING TO KILL by Evan Hunter as Ed McBain; Mason on HRF Keating: CRIME & MYSTERY: THE 100 BEST BOOKS; Richard Lupoff & Don Thompson, eds.: ALL IN COLOR FOR A DIME; Peter Nicholls, ed. SCIENCE FICTION AT LARGE

Two posts from 2011 that didn't get quite the number of eyetracks they could...particularly Ed's, posted after mine below....

Friday, April 15, 2011

FFBs: HRF Keating: CRIME & MYSTERY: THE 100 BEST BOOKS; Lupoff & Thompson, eds.: ALL IN COLOR FOR A DIME; Peter Nicholls, ed. SCIENCE FICTION AT LARGE

H.R.F. Keating passed on 27 March [2011], and we lost another gentleman, by all accounts, in the CF field, one who had been a fine fiction-writer (most famously for the Inspector Ghote stories) and critic both, and this book, widely available but barely in print (the current edition is handsome, but still a product of the collapsed Carroll & Graf; one hopes Running Press or someone might reissue it), is a gimmicky (in format, and I think the first of its series for C&G, which series has also included notable volumes on sf and horror fiction) but no less valuable selection of a hundred important and valuable books in the CF field, most of them of the "true" mystery rather than suspense or other related fields, some collections (leading off, unsurprisingly, with a Poe collection) though most novels, all given two-page essays to limn their virtues and what flaws they overcome. The Keating assessments are bookended by Patricia Highsmith's two-page introduction (even Highsmith had nothing but good to say of Keating) and an unsigned "Publisher's Note" adding a 101st entry, for one of Keating's Ghotes. Aside from the insightful and deftly-written vignette entries, Keating also doesn't respect received wisdom: he nominated for Ross Macdonald The Blue Hammer and for John D. MacDonald The Green Ripper, the often-dismissed last novels in the two Macs' famous series (Lew Archer and Travis McGee), and makes the case for these specific novels well (hey, I started reading RM with The Blue Hammer, and I wasn't sorry), while the all but inarguable classics (Stanley Ellin's short fiction, The Maltese Falcon, Murder on the Orient Express, The Friends of Eddie Coyle) are treated similarly. Despite at least one dunderheaded comment I've seen, going on about how "outdated" this book is since it was published in 1988 (remarkable how books spoil, isn't it), the book is joy to go through, argue with, and be informed as well as amused by.

Also "outdated" (I mean, it hardly deals with comics after the '40s! I mean, come on!), All in Color for a Dime, which I've reread in the Krause Publications 1997 reissue, retains the enthusiasm of the new ground being tilled (since most of the essays at least have roots in articles in the Lupoffs' Xero and the Thompsons' Alter-Ego, with Comic Art the pioneering comics fanzines [while Xero, at least, also dealt with other matters] from the earliest '60s, and this book was pioneering when first published in 1970). The contributors run most of the changes one could want on their subject matter (and they range from such passionate professional writers of fiction and pop-culture history as Ron Goulart, Harlan Ellison, and Lupoff himself through folks with feet in multiple camps such as Ted White and Jim Harmon, to folks whose primary work was extraliterary, but nonetheless, such as Chris Steinbrunner, had a long engagement in criticism or other sorts of similar work in literary circles--Steinbrunner was, among other things, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine's a/v columnist for a decade or so: "Bloody Visions"). While, as I mentioned last week, the Blue Beetle is nowhere mentioned (the book is not attempting to be comprehensive), the coverage of the evolution of the Love Romances Publications line of comics, Planet Comics and its stablemates, would be worth the price of the book alone, as would the pioneering Lupoff article on Captain Marvel and his eventual clan, or Ellison on the George Harriman-esque George Carlson (only Carlson was busy where Harriman was lean).



New material was added to the reissue, but here's the ISFDB index to the Ace edition pictured above:

• 7 • Introduction (All in Color for a Dime) • (1970) • essay by Richard A. Lupoff and Don Thompson
• 17 • The Spawn of M. C. Gaines • (1970) • essay by Ted White
• 41 • Me to Your Leader Take • (1970) • essay by Richard Ellington
• 63 • The Big Red Cheese • (1970) • essay by Richard A. Lupoff [as by Dick Lupoff ]
• 93 • The First (Arf, Arf!) Super Hero of Them All • (1970) • essay by Bill Blackbeard
• 121 • OK, Axis, Here We Come! • (1970) • essay by Don Thompson
• 144 • One on All and All on One • (1970) • essay by Tom Fagan
• 165 • A Swell Bunch of Guys • (1970) • essay by Jim Harmon
• 193 • The Four-Panelled, Sock-Bang-Powie Saturday-Afternoon Screen • (1970) • essay by Chris Steinbrunner
• 212 • Captain Billy's Whiz-Gang! • (1970) • essay by Roy Thomas
• 233 • The Second Banana Super Heroes • (1970) • essay by Ron Goulart
• 247 • Comic of the Absurd • (1970) • essay by Harlan Ellison

Science Fiction at Large, the first anthology of critical essays (speech transcriptions rendered into essay form) I read, which had somehow found its way into my first high-school's brand-new library in 1978, and featured impressive essays by Ursula K. Le Guin and Thomas Disch which were to grow into or form important parts of later books (UKL's "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown" was collected in her The Language of the Night; "The Embarrassments of Science Fiction" is integral to Disch's The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of and has been collected in his On SF), as well as by Harry Harrison, Alan Garner, John Brunner, Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, and the editor; Edward De Bono's introduction to his take on "lateral thinking" was very useful to me then, and remains so. I haven't yet reread John Taylor's essay, and Alvin Toffler's remains slight. A book worth seeking out.

ISFDB indes:

• 7 • Introduction (Science Fiction at Large) • essay by Peter Nicholls
• 13 • Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown • essay by Ursula K. Le Guin
• 35 • Lateral Thinking and Science Fiction • essay by Edward de Bono
• 57 • Scientific Thought in Fiction and in Fact • essay by John Taylor
• 73 • Science Fiction and the Larger Lunacy • essay by John Brunner
• 105 • Worlds Beside Worlds • essay by Harry Harrison
• 115 • Science Fiction and Change • essay by Alvin Toffler
• 119 • Inner Time • essay by Alan Garner
• 139 • The Embarrassments of Science Fiction • essay by Thomas M. Disch
• 157 • Science Fiction: The Monsters and the Critics • essay by Peter Nicholls
• 185 • The Search for the Marvellous • essay by Robert Sheckley
• 199 • Man, Android and Machine • essay by Philip K. Dick

For more of this week's "forgotten" books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.