Blazing Brushstrokes
As an innocent Texas girl, I was seduced by a dangerous world of sheriffs, six-shooters, and saloons. Today, old and jaded, I'm still addicted to paperback westerns—and it's the killer cover art that ropes me in.
BESIDES THE BIBLE AND A DICTIONARY, the bookshelves in my relatives' houses were sure to contain a few paperback westerns. And unlike the Scriptures and Webster's, they had colorful cover art—hard-eyed heroes, cowering cowgirls, leering desperadoes—that was sure to attract my attention. For a kid, the Old Testament had its lively moments, to be sure, and certain dictionary entries were extremely eye-opening, but for reliable good-guy-bad-guy action, cheapo westerns were the way to go.
I read scores of them, starting with Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey, the most famous western writer ever— which is to say, for the 120 or so years that westerns have been around. I also devoured a lot of adventures by Max Brand, the best-known pen name of Frederick Faust, who wrote more than three hundred westerns (notably Destry Rides Again, which was filmed twice). Sometimes shoot-'em-up illustrations fooled me into finishing some fine work, such as Owen Wister's The Virginian and several J. Frank Dobie books, which were occasionally issued in quickie editions costing a quarter or two. But most pulpy paperbacks, which favored words like "blood," "death," and "hell" in their titles, were dashed off by lesser mortals. Their writing, I realized years later, left much to be desired (eyes narrowed, jaws clenched, bosoms swelled). A typical sentence might read, "His face blue, his tongue protruding grotesquely, the sheriff stared at the man he'd hanged." (Okay, I made that up.) But no matter how awful the author, he got a byline, even if it was only the publisher's house name; one of Texas's finest modern writers, Elmer Kelton, took a turn as the Paperback Library's "Alex Hawk."
