Hi Steve

   I’ve come to Mystery*File via Steve Holland’s Bear Alley and his mention of your recent entries about the British writer T. Arthur Plummer.

   You have a fascinating blog, with tons of material that interests me. For instance, I began reading Sexton Blake books when I was eight or nine, and I began my working life at Fleetway House as editor W. Howard (“Bill”) Baker’s junior assistant on the venerable detective series when Michael Moorcock left the company in 1961.

   Like yourself, I haunted my local public library’s grown-up section from a very young age, borrowing Saint books and the like on my dad’s library card. So, since this was in England, I was well aware of Plummer’s Frampton titles.

   These days I live in New Zealand and write for a UK genre fiction line published by Robert Hale Ltd — Black Horse Westerns. I also run a website at www.blackhorsewesterns.com . You might enjoy the article “Detectives in Cowboy Boots” in the March-May edition.   [I’ve read it, and I recommend it highly to everyone reading this.  –Steve]

   You’ve mentioned having a primary collecting interest in writers like Plummer and Andrew Spiller. Another I remember was Richard Goyne. They were regular fixtures on the Stanley Paul/John Long catalogues in the 1950s and later. Others were W. Murdoch Duncan and the now famous Ruth Rendell. A few years ago, I picked up a positively shocking sum of money for a first-edition copy of Rendell’s first book, From Doon With Death (1964) in “fine” condition. When I say the money was more than I can earn in three months of writing, I’m sure you’ll understand why I couldn’t say no to the offer.

   All the Paul crime authors were absorbed eventually into the Long list as part of a Hutchinson group rationalization. Yes, they did make such moves in the publishing industry even back then, though they might not have called it “rationalization”.

   Another writer from the Stanley Paul stable was T.C.H. Jacobs/Jacques Pendower, with whom I later had some dealings when editing westerns and the Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine in the 1960s. You can pick up on some of this in the “Detectives in Cowboy Boots” article.

   To continue with the blog comments made in connection with Plummer, I don’t think any of these writers of the past wrote to achieve immortality. I doubt whether the thought entered their heads. Money was one driver. Another was that writing fiction is for many something like a drug — you just can’t kick the habit.

   No way will I or my writing fellows of today achieve immortality, by the way. The print-runs for hardcover library fiction are even shorter than they were in Plummer’s time. After all, each copy is going to have a hundred or so readers in its lifetime. So don’t expect to find them on Abe or equivalent sites in 50 years’ time! My latest western, Misfit Lil Fights Back, was published on July 31. By August 17, the publisher’s warehouse was out of stock and the title was deleted from his online catalogue after just over two weeks of “life”. Reprints — other than in large-print editions, again for libraries — are unheard of. In some ways, this can be very dispiriting.

   I’ve heard from others besides yourself, Steve, that westerns in your country are nearly an extinct breed. “Except for the steady line of sexy westerns, which I don’t read,” you say. To look on the brighter side, Hollywood is going through one of its sporadic revivals of interest and there’s a lively new blog, the Saddlebums Western Review.  [A site that’s gotten off to a great start. I hope they can keep it up.   –Steve]

   I was interested in what you had to say about the “sexy” western lines, not because I sprinkle my work with gratuitous scenes — as some of the anonymous authors for those lines have done in the past — but because I do like to write a genuine adult story. This does sometimes cause problems. Conservative library-book publishers have their worries about “violence towards the women characters,” for instance.

   I take care to see that the sex/violence in my books is woven into the fabric of characterization and storyline. Also, observations on the morality, the beliefs and social behaviour of the times are based on careful research. Generally, I believe unfudged scenes are what an adult reader of fiction in 2007 expects to find. The old “show don’t tell” imperative is stronger than ever and very evident in successful books, movies and TV programmes.

   I understand that US publishers Five Star have lately put out the original, unexpurgated version of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. One day I hope to obtain a copy and study the differences.

   I also found your blog entry on western writer L. P. Holmes. Your comments on the crime component in westerns are well put, and coincide with my — and many others’ — conclusions.   [This was in a review of Edge of the Desert, which he wrote as by Matt Stuart. Alas, my coverage of western/crime fiction has dwindled greatly since then.  –Steve]

   By all means use my email as a blog post if you think that fitting, though you’d be right in saying it’s off-the-cuff stuff. Short on startlingly new facts, for sure. I enjoy the reminiscing, but pleasant though it can be, it does cut into your more productive writing time. As I recently told another blogger, I try not to look back for “greatest satisfactions” in life. I’m sure that for me the notion the best lies somewhere in the past carries with it the danger of making me a melancholic. I look for satisfactions in the present and I’m content when I finish my latest book convinced that from one aspect or another it’s the best thing I’ve written.

MATT STUART – Edge of the Desert

Lancer 72-117, paperback original, May 1966. 2nd printing, Lancer 73-635, as Lady of Battle Mountain, July 1967; 3rd printing, Lancer 73-833, as Edge of the Desert, April 1969.

   I can find covers of the first and third printings, but not of the second, which itself is very difficult to find. The only two copies which surfaced on a recent Internet search were on Amazon, and nowhere else.

   But please forgive me. Is this a western? You’re asking, and the answer is yes. I’ve never read westerns as often as I have mysteries, but I started reading them in the 1950s – I remember buying a copy of King Colt by Luke Short when I was 14 and thinking it was terrific — and I’ve never quite stopped.

   And whether or not they’re included in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV – Al generally says no unless there’s a leading character who’s actually a detective and involved in solving a case – I have no compunction about reviewing them here. Almost every western has a crime component of some kind, and if they don’t, I probably don’t read them. Rustling, gunfighting, horse thievery, burning out homesteaders, it’s all against the law, and therefore – when written up in book form – crime fiction.

   To tell you the truth, though, and I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, the crime component in this book is rather small. But it’s the book I started while taking a short leave of absence from the rather long mystery novel I was otherwise involved with, finishing it in a couple of evenings’ worth of reading time, and here it is.

   But first, worth a mention, I think, is that the author, Matt Stuart, was also better known (to western readers of the 60s and 70s) as L. P. Holmes (1895-1988), who began by writing for the pulp magazines in 1925. His first book appeared in 1935, but the bulk of his career as a novel writer – about 50 of them in all – came between 1949 and 1975.

   I daren’t try to generalize too much from Edge of the Desert, however, as what kind of writer he was, as I think the book is rather unusual – a western in which a woman plays the leading role, and a woman from the East, at that.

   Sherry Gault never knew her uncle very well, having met him only once when she was very young, but when he died and left her his ranch out West, she thought she owed it too him at least to visit it, even though his lawyer had passed on to her a very generous offer for her new inheritance.

   Not so. The lawyer’s a crook, and so is the powerful cattle baron who made the offer, not to mention the local sheriff, who’s solidly in the pocket of the latter. The foreman of the ranch, who meets her off the train, and the other hands – her newly gained employees – are on her side, however, all but one, and together they eventually prevail.

   A very slim story, with every potentially interesting twist of the plot into other directions never quite followed up on. But in its own way, with a manifest love of the open sky and wide open country apparent at every turn of the page, as Sherry finds herself more and more at home on Clear Creek ranch, it’s difficult to speak more badly of the tale than that. The ending is as homespun and corny as you can very well imagine, or at least that’s what I’d thought too if it hadn’t come straight from the heart.

   I’m guessing, therefore, if I dare, but I’m going to say that the rest of L. P. Holmes’s western fiction is going to be very much in this same traditional vein, if not as solidly romantic as this one.