Best of the West

It's been an action packed few weeks on the western front and these days, instead of moaning about the lack of western releases, we now have the problem of keeping up with them all. Hence this new monthly feature in which the Archive will point readers to several highly recommended titles, some of them new and some of them old classics, that are now available as eBooks. The Archive is, after all, the Wild West Web's home of the western and we wouldn't champion any title that we believed was sub-standard. Each book featured here will provide a great read and each, in their own way, show the vast possibilities of the western genre.

Author Chap O'Keefe's name is well known to Archive readers, and you won't need me to tell you how good the Misfit Lil series. Misfit Lil Cheats the Hangrope, is the first of the books to make it to eBook, specifically the Kindle. So head on up the Amazon and spend a couple of quid on this modern classic.

This was actually the first eBook I ever bought for my Kindle - I'd seen the film zillions of times but never read the book. And you know what - the book is different to but equally as good as the classic movie. Surely a must have for any western fan.

Ben Bridges AKA David Whitehead (see previous post) like Chap O'Keefe comes from the highly regarded Black Horse Westerns stable. And this is another truly essential purchase.

All of the stories in this collection are in the public domain so it may seem odd that you should pay for this collection. However the book is excellently formatted with a live contents list and priced at only £1.40 UK it does offer great value for money. The author may be better known as the creator of Conan and many of these westerns, which were originally published in the pulp magazines, have not been seen for decades.

Amazon UK have this collection priced at £7.99 which may seem steep by eBook standards, but you've got four Black Horse Western titles in the one volume - each of these books usually retail at around £13 so it's a hefty saving. Black Horse Westerns are the UK's biggest Western publisher and can be relied upon to provide great books - hey, these guys publish my own Jack Martin westerns!


All of the above titles can be found in the Amazon Kindle Store