Bounty Hunter

John Sutherland

  • Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
    Oxford, 265 pp, £4.99, May 1995, ISBN 0 19 282443 0
  • The Man of the Forest: The Authorised Version by Zane Grey
    Nebraska, 383 pp, $15.00, September 1996, ISBN 0 8032 7062 3
  • The Thundering Herd: The Authorised Version by Zane Grey
    Nebraska, 400 pp, $16.00, September 1996, ISBN 0 8032 7065 8

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.

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