When Westerns Aren't

Years ago, when asked to blurb yet another gunman western, I realized something was absent: the West. There was nothing about the vast reaches of the West, its climate, its impact on people, its drought, its history, its tribes. The story I was reading may as well have been set in Peoria or Keokuk.

I realized that was true of nearly all the gunman-type westerns I had read in recent times, many of them written by people who had never explored the West or its distant valleys or its social codes or its impact on emotions. I also realized that I had always included the West in my western novels; it was omnipresent and a part of the story.

I resolved not to review ersatz westerns, in which the American West was missing from the very genre whose name it bore. I've stuck with that ever since.