All the Long Years: Western Stories

by Bill Pronzini

Presents a collection of short stories featuring such familiar figures as lawmen and cowboys, and seldom featured characters as dentists, saddle makers, and bartenders.

Genres: Westerns, Fiction

210 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Mystery Writers of America Awards "Grand Master" 2008
Shamus Awards Best Novel winner (1999) for Boobytrap
Edgar Awards Best Novel nominee (1998) for A Wasteland of Strangers
Shamus Awards Best Novel nominee (1997) for Sentinels
Shamus Awards "The Eye" (Lifetime achievment award) 1987
Shamus Awards Best Novel winner (1982) for Hoodwink

Married to author Marcia Muller.

Pseudonyms:
Robert Hart Davis (collaboration with Jeffrey M. Wallmann)
Jack Foxx
William Jeffrey (collaboration with Jeffrey M. Wallmann)
Alex Saxon

Reviews

[Tom Donaghey · Rating 5 out of 5]

ALL THE LONG YEARS (2001) by Bill Pronzini. I’ve been reading Mr. Pronzini’s “Nameless Detective” series for a long time. I have enjoyed every one of them and they caused me to read a couple of anthologies that he had edited. But I never read any of his western material.
As a rule, I don’t want to read western stories. Perhaps it was too many cowboy shows on T.V., or too many matinee movies where the bad guy always wore a black hat. Yes, I have liked some of the revisionist westerns of the past two decades, but they never led me into the “Western” section of my library.
But the librarians who inhabit my local library are slick geniuses. There is the “Summer Reading Program” that I have loved since the first I heard about it. This year there is something of a different type of contest about it. Read twelve books and get a library mug. Sixteen gets you enrolled in the local reading club with all it’s perks.
I couldn’t resist, of course.
The trick is you have to read one book from each of sixteen different catagories. Science fiction, biography, ugly book cover, Newberry Award winner, young adult and the like.
Including western as one of the catagories.
So as I wondered the stacks looking for something I could stomach long enough to read the entire way through, I saw this book. ‘What the Hell” I said and checked it out.
It is a great collection of fourteen different short stories, each seemingly better than the rest. Of course there is a private detective story built around a murder mystery, and there are marshals and mavericks, old galoots and gambles, a one-eyed card sharp, cowboys all over the place, a school warm tossed in along the way I think and all the old tropes, except Mr. Pronzini has managed to give them all a delightful spin.
If you are an avid reader of this genre and have managed to overlook Mr. Pronzini’s books, or like me looking for a good read, this is a fine place to start.
I suppose now I’ll have to spend more time in the Western stacks.

[Elisabeth]

The stories in this collection are much better written and better plotted than most other recent Western fiction I've read. On the other hand, there's a fair amount of coarse language sprinkled through them, and a few of them have moments much more gruesome than I like to read.

"'Give-A-Damn' Jones" was my favorite story of the collection.

[D. E. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Compilation of Western Short Stories

BP has collected a wide variety of western short stories they're as newsroom fresh as opposed to a long distance coordinated effort by various authors. This I's an excellent read for the genre.....ER