Western Writer DOYLE TRENT:
Some Reminiscences.

   Western writer Doyle Trent has been covered before on this blog, the occasion being the announcement of a checklist I was working on for him. The announcement is here. The illustrated checklist is here. As a result of his seeing one or the other, I was contacted by an old friend of Trent, who offered to write up some of his memories of him, and I gladly took him up on it. “No by-line or attribution necessary,” he said. I just wanted to share this anonymously.”


DOYLE TRENT Western Author

   In 1962, Doyle Trent walked into the Tucson Police Department, a newly-hired reporter for the Arizona Daily Star, the town’s morning paper.

   Then in his late 30’s, he was older than the typical “cub” reporter, as some old newspapermen labeled such creatures. He stood about 6-feet, of medium build, with sandy, close-cropped (but thinning) hair. His face was smooth and permanently tanned. From mid-forehead to his hairline was a band of white skin, the permanent trademark of a face long in the sun, partially shielded by a hat.

   In contrast to reporters’ “newsroom-grunge” collection of barely-ironed shirts, rumpled slacks and scuffed shoes, Doyle’s taste ran to tailored Western pants, leather belt with a simple silver buckle, a complementing colored shirt (tie-less) with snap-type pocket flaps and shined cowboy boots. But no cowboy hat. And he ambled, rather than walked.

   Initially working the “day cops beat”, Doyle was a quiet presence in that noisy, smelly environment. He shared the large, wooden “press desk” with the afternoon paper’s cops reporter, consigned to the corner of a large, windowless room which housed police dispatchers. From that vantage point, they observed the endless parade of cops and prisoners.

   Soft-spoken and polite, even with the ever-prickly cops of all ranks, Doyle was a good writer who favored two-fingered typing on one of two battered Underwood typewriters at the press desk. He was thorough, always asking the reporter’s basic “Five-W’s” but always managing to get just a bit more. In one highway accident, an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer had overturned, killing the driver. The truck carried several tons of steel; it was in Doyle’s lead sentence. His rival missed that little detail and had to deal with an unhappy city editor who explained the relevance of a law of physics involving mass and momentum.

   Doyle didn’t talk a lot; personal details were sparse. He never said where he was from, offering only that he had been a cowboy and had served in the Army. Knowing a cowboy’s career was limited, he said he used the G.I. Bill to earn a college journalism degree. He spoke with a slow, soft drawl and, at times, with difficulty. A lifetime of little or no dental care caused him pain, not that he ever really complained. It just added to his taciturn demeanor.

    — These recollections came from another reporter who worked “cops” with Doyle a half-century ago. Decades later, that former reporter stumbled by chance on Doyle’s literary career and he observed that, “Given the list of book titles to his credit, it was obvious that his background as a working cowboy, his journalism experience and a vivid imagination combined to make him a successful Western novelist. In a world of cowboy-writer wannabes, Doyle Trent is the real McCoy.”