Self-respecting guys don't read Westerns. In fact, unless you look carefully, no one seems to read them. The cowboy novel rates lower even than pornography in the scale of cultural visibility. W.H. Smith (true to their origins: they won a monopoly at railway stations in 1848 in return for an undertaking to purify the nation's reading matter) recently banished their modest selection of top-shelf skin magazines. If, by some perverse fatwa, Westerns were similarly proscribed, no action would be required by our moral guardians. W.H. Smith have sections devoted to Horror, Romance, War, Teen Fiction and Science Fiction - but Westerns, as the cowpoke would put it, are scarcer than hen's teeth.

LRB 17 July 1997 | PDF Download