Glenn Boyer

Glenn Boyer is dead. I am torn between the axiom to speak no ill of the dead, and my instinct to write intensively about a man who did so much damage to western historical literature.

You can find the bulk of the case against him in Wikipedia's lengthy discussion of his conduct under the heading, I Married Wyatt Earp (one of Boyer's fraudulent histories).

When I was editing the western fiction line at Walker and Company, he submitted a novel titled Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta. It was much too long for our line, and it made me uneasy. I turned it down, while telling Boyer that it skillfully evoked the period.

Later, Boyer published the same work, but now it was no longer a novel but an eyewitness account of Tombstone in the 1880s, a manuscript that had lain hidden for generations, a primary source that he had tracked down and acquired. All that was bunk, and the fraud was swiftly discovered.

Boyer turned on me, sent me poison-pen notes and cards, trashed some of my novels, and wrote long, scornful letters, which I still have.

He did add to our knowledge of some of the women of that period, but even some of that material is suspect.

I do send along my condolences to his widow, the gifted poet Jane Candia Coleman.