something of a con artist. The Ballantine cover for that onenfeatures an Indian warrior on a rearing horse, waving a signalnblanket. I get the feeling that my novels were smuggled intonthe line, and smuggled into readers’ hands with a misleadingntraditional cover. These may be fine covers. They probablynsell more books than a cover that truly depicts my story. Butnthey are also an expression of the feverish wish among NewnYork publishers that every novel they publish replay the oldnthemes, for the same old readers. The packaging of mynnontraditional stories says to me that New York publishersndon’t want to develop new markets or alter lines in ways thatnentice new readers to try them. It’s worth noting that nonpublisher of category Westerns shifted the line towardnMcMurtry’s way of telling a Western story, or evennexperimented with it.nA year or so ago, Ballantine decided to discontinue itsnWestern line, and I suddenly found myself without anpaperback publisher for my M. Evans hardcover Westerns.nThe Ballantine line had been profitable, my editor told me,nbut panic had stricken the Random House empire, and a lotnof changing and cutting was going on. Through last winternand spring, my hardcover publisher began soliciting othernpaperback reprint houses about doing my stories. Therenwere three for sale, two of which had been published. It wasnquickly made known to the various paperback housesnlooking at my stories that Fool’s Coach had won the SpurnAward.nMuch to the astonishment of the people at M. Evans, thenWestern editor at Pocket Books rejected all three. Fool’snCoach, he said, fell apart at the end. By falling apart, henmeant that the heroes lost their gold. They should havenblasted their way out with a big gunfight and kept their gold.nThat’s how the mythic Western works. And the other twonbooks, he explained in his letter to M. Evans, weren’tniyrj^m ^#JEI m f .^nM tf»’)ri’^fR mil “”‘nDEFENDINGnPENNY DREADFULSnBut I have another and more importantnquarrel about the sensational novel.nThere seems to be a very general ideanthat the romance of the tomahawk willnbe (or will run the risk of being) morenimmoral than the romance of the teapot.nThis I violently deny. And in this I haventhe support of practically all the oldnmoral traditions of our civilization and ofnevery civilization. . . . For the oldnGreeks a moral play was one full ofnmadness and slaying. For the great medievalsna moral play was one which exhibitednthe dancing of the devil and thenLIBERAL ARTSnopen jaws of hell. For the great Protestantnmoralists of the seventeenth andneighteenth centuries a moral story meantna story in which a parricide was struck bynlightning or a boy was drowned fornfishing on a Sunday. For the morenrationalistic moralists of the eighteenthncentury, such as Hogarth, Richardson,nand the author of Sandford and Merton,nall agreed that shocking calamities couldnpropedy be indicated as the result ofnevil doing; that the more shocking thosencalamities were the more moral theynwere. It is only in our exhausted andnWesterns at all! One of the books. Where the River Runs,ninvolves a captain who takes a treaty-making party out to thennorthwest tribes in the 1840’s — and is never seen again. Hisnfiancee hires a guide and goes looking for him. The othernone, Montana Hitch, is about a rancher in the 1880’s whonhas wife-problems along with problems with rustiing andnneighbors who exploit him. But these weren’t Westerns!nOne is set in the 1840’s, so it’s not a Western. A Western,nremember, is a story that is set somewhere between the CivilnWar and 1890. The other has a hero with a bad marriage —nso that’s not a Western either! I’ve read hundreds ofnWesterns, and I can’t remember even one in which the heronhad a bad marriage. It didn’t matter that both stories were setnin the frontier West—in the estimation of the young PocketnBooks editor, they weren’t Westerns. And in a certain way,nhe’s quite right. Pocket Books, more than any other publisher,nhews rigidly to traditional Western stories. In fact, that isnwhy the Pocket Books Western line is comprised largely ofnghosts. That house specializes in dead Western authors, andnyou can’t get more traditional than that. It is an odd quirk innthe house that published Lonesome Dove.nIn spite of the recent discontinuation or reduction ofnseveral Western lines, the frontier story is not in danger ofnextinction. The present turmoil is really an opportunity tonwrite and publish new forms of the Western story, ones thatnwill reach the broad national audiences that Westernsnenjoyed in the days when the old Saturday Evening Post rannserialized Westerns that were enjoyed by people from allnwalks of life. A bold novelist, willing to research and writenabout the real frontier, use realistic heroes instead of mythicnones, and add literary graces to the genre, can capture a newnmarket for himself and his publishers. The historical frontiernis a virgin field.nn•}^ Mm j^iE M mf^m Iff Of (^wt^nnnagnostic age that the idea has beennstarted that if one is moral one must notnbe melodramatic.nBut I believe that sensational novelsnare the most moral part of modernnfiction. . . . And it is, I think, the abstractntruth that any literature that representsnour life as dangerous and stardingnis truer than any literature thatnrepresents it as dubious and languid. Fornlife is a fight and is not a conversation.n—from “Fiction as Food,”nby G.K. Chestertonn•onAUGUST 1991/23n