Next on The Wild Bunch Wednesday Story Challenge

Check out the most recent part HERE - There are also links to all previous instalments.

Dave's took the story off in an unexpected direction and the author who takes over part five, next Wednesday is none other than Jack Martin - Yep, probably biting off more than I can chew, I have stepped forward and taken the virtual pen....

NEXT WEDNESDAY - WILD BUNCH WEDNESDAY STORY CHALLENGE PART FIVE - HERE ON THE TAINTED ARCHIVE.

MISFIT LIL GETS TOUGH

BHE Westerns, a new paperback imprint, looked to be floundering before she properly set sail - the intention was to put these slim paperbacks on the shelves at low prices, the way they used to be.

However the realities of modern publishing meant that the book was priced at a much higher rate than author and publisher, Chap O'keefe would have liked.

Chap O'keefe said, "I would like the book to sell on its merits, like its predecessors in the BHW range. These sell at around £3 more than £10, £1 less for a limited time on release . . . or like the last Lil book, Misfit Lil Cleans Up, not at all once no longer on the Hale website and listed by Amazon UK as: 'Currently unavailable – we don't know when or if this item will be back in stock."




However the book's out there now and offers great value for money - Misfit Lil and Chap O'Keefe are a popular team with previous adventures selling out within weeks of publication.

The book is now listed on Amazon. Com priced at a very reasonable $15.22. It's a lovely looking paperback original - Not only is it a good read but as the first BHE it could prove highly collectable - copies of out of print Chap O'keefe books can go for silly prices. For instance a copy of The Outlaw and the lady is being offered at the time of writing for $120.63.

Check out the listing HERE

And if a great action packed western with a favourite character isn't incentive enough to buy the book there's also a big cash prize which anyone buying the book will be eligible to win.

BHE Books are offering a big cash prize for one lucky reader. The competition will be held in conjunction with the next Wild West Monday and will be announced on The Tainted Archive. To qualify for entry you will need your email receipt for the book from Amazon, Lulu, Book Depository or other on-line retailer.

If this book is a success then it means that BHE will publish other paperback originals and Chap O'keefe has said that he'd like to throw the doors open to other writers. So come on folks...head over to Amazon and put in your order and take a chance of celebrating this Wild West Monday with a fistful of dollars.

Presidential Address - The Tainted Archive in conversation with Johnny D. Boggs

Born in 1962, Johnny D Boggs was destined to write about the West. He spent his formative years on a farm in Timmonsville in South Carolina. At school Johnny found he had a talent for storytelling and he would write down wild stories in longhand and sell them to class mates, detective and super hero stories.

His interest in the western developed when he discovered the true West rather than Hollywood's West - this history fascinated him and then later when he discovered the novels of Jack Schaefer and Dorothy M. Johnson he was hooked.

These days Johnny is an author of many bestselling westerns himself, the recipient of multiple Spur Awards and he is currently sitting in the exhaulted position of being president of the Western Writers of America.

I wondered what his duties were as President?


"As president, I try to put Western literature, and Western Writers of America, in the forefront. We've worked on building up WWA's Star Speakers Bureau, and promoting our Best Western surveys. We voted on the 100 Greatest Western Movies last year, Best TV series/miniseries/movies this year, and will vote on the Greatest Songs of the West next year, and after that, I hope, get into the books. We have a new anthology coming out, titled ROUNDUP!, which will be published by La Frontera Publishing. Duties, of course, include running board meetings, serving as a spokesman for Western Writers of America, putting out fires, maybe starting some fires, and, above all, preserving and promoting Western literature. All while trying to make a living as a writer."






The Western Writers of America do much good work for the genre but many feel that not enough is being done for the western on the Wild West Web. I put this to Johnny. What for instance can be done on the web to aid in the growth of the genre?





"You're doing it right here. Newspapers were once our target, but with the condition of newspapers, at least in the United States, these days, we have to do more promotion online. Look at Anderson Cooper on CNN. Between commercial breaks, he's blogging and answering emails. He's doing that for a reason, and the reason is more and more people are going online. Blogs such as yours, and other web publications, are doing much to push Western literature. I've heard some publishers site the web as one of the reasons they have seen an increase in Western sales. That's something we're well aware of -- not to mention Twitter and Facebook and Linked In -- but WWA is primarily a volunteer organization, so we can move a little slowly at times, and we're still trying to figure out how to make the web work for us."





Where does Johnny see the western going in the future? Do we need to widen the definition of the genre and include contemporary novels set in the West?




"Oh, I'm a big believer in tearing down fences. I think Tony Hillerman was one of the best Western writers we've seen in years. He wrote about men with hats and guns bringing law and order to the West, only his heroes happened to be contemporary Navajo policeman. Many publishers still define a Western as a story set west of the Mississippi River between the years 1865 and 1900, but the Wild West began when the first European settlers landed on the Atlantic coast. Actually, you can argue that the West began with the migration of our Native Peoples. We have writers who tell those stories, and tell them well. Jim Woolard's novels about the Ohio frontier are excellent. Michael and Kathy Gear write about Indians before European contact. Meredith Mason Brown won a Spur Award for her biography of Daniel Boone. The novels by Allan Eckert and James Alexander Thom are great studies of the frontier West -- often east of the Mississippi.

And I can step outside and find a cowboy at my local grocery. The West is very vibrant, and often wild and woolly, today, and there have been some great works set in the contemporary, or at least post-World War II West: Elmer Kelton's THE TIME IT NEVER RAINED and THE MAN WHO RODE MIDNIGHT. Max Evans's THE ROUNDERS and THE HI LO COUNTRY. Brady Udall's THE MIRACLE LIFE OF EDGAR MINT. Aryn Kyle's THE GOD OF ANIMALS. Plus the contemporary mysteries by C.J. Box, Michael McGarrity, and, as I mentioned earlier, Tony Hillerman. And I think Larry McMurtry's best works, aside from LONESOME DOVE, are his contemporary visions of the West in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, LEAVING CHEYENNE and HORSEMAN, PASS BY.

One thing we'd like to see more of are crossover Westerns, that is, Westerns that can find new readers, and new life, in other book sections. Historical romances and mysteries, naturally, but look at Emma Bull's fantasy novel TERRITORY, a retelling of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday -- as sorcerers! It's a tremendous read, and Emma's historical research was dead-on terrific. I can't wait for Emma to finish the sequel."



I asked Johnny how he would describe his books to new readers, mentioning that I had just read and enjoyed his novel, The Big Fifty.



"Thanks. My mother's a big fan of THE BIG FIFTY. I tell people that I'm a Western writer. I just don't always write the kinds of Westerns your grandfather read. By that I mean I'll bend the rules and settings. CAMP FORD's about a baseball game between Confederate guards and Union POWs. EAST OF THE BORDER's about the theatrical career of Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok and Texas Jack Omohundro. NORTHFIELD recounts the James-Younger Gang's blunder of a bank robbery, told by more than 20 different first-person narratives. Next up is HARD WINTER, due out in December, which is about a young cowboy's experiences during the disastrous winter of 1886-87 in Montana. I try to make my next book as far removed, in story, plot, setting and structure, as my previous novel, but I also strive to tell an entertaining, and maybe educational story, as historically accurate as I can. I also don't often write about white hats and black hats. Mine are definitely more gray. I write about people with strong convictions about what's right and what's wrong, and often those convictions are opposite, which leads to trouble."




On his own website Johnny writes that excluding, The Searchers, he much prefers the works of Anthony Mann and Bud Boetticher to John Ford. I asked him what it was that drew him towards these two directors?





"Mann and Boetticher had an edge to them, a depth to their heroes -- those characters played by James Stewart in Mann's films and Randolph Scott in Budd's were carrying a ton of baggage -- and superb villains. That's something screenwriter/director Burt Kennedy -- who wrote a number of the best of the Boetticher movies -- once told me: Make your villain stronger than your hero. That way it'll mean more when the hero wins out in the end. Burt also told me to put your hero in a situation where he can walk out of any time. That way it's more dramatic when he stays.

Budd never had much of a budget, and his movies are spartan, lean, but the best of the bunch -- THE TALL T, RIDE LONESOME, SEVEN MEN FROM NOW and COMANCHE STATION -- grab you by the throat and don't let go. And I admit that BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE is a guilty pleasure.

Mann was more polished, but really savage. WINCHESTER '73, THE NAKED SPUR and THE MAN FROM LARAMIE get a lot of analysis, but I think two of his best Westerns are DEVIL'S DOORWAY -- MGM released it after the success of BROKEN ARROW, but it's a tremendous movie about Indian-white relations, and an amazing political statement in 1950s America -- and BORDER INCIDENT, which is a film noir about illegal aliens and slavery in post-World War II Arizona. They're just dynamite motion pictures.

Ford, of course, gets the glory, and THE SEARCHERS remains my favorite movie, not just Western, but movie. John Wayne's Ethan Edwards has a lot of baggage in that one, and Ford turned Monument Valley into his own canvas. Yet the more I watch Ford's movies, the more his Irish humor wears thin, and the more flaws I find in his Westerns. On the other hand, I think some of his non-Westerns -- THE GRAPES OF WRATH, THE QUIET MAN and HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, in particular -- are among the best movies ever put on film."


As a British writer of westerns I ask Johnny if there is still the attitude in some quarters that you have to hail from the US to write westerns?


"The West isn't so much a physical place. It's more how you feel it. It certainly helps to live here, to know what the wind feels like, or the sound of coyotes yipping, but we're writing fiction. At some point, imagination has to take over, and if your prose can take me to that place, I don't care if you live in Leadville or Liverpoole. It's the words that matter, not your locale. I think most of my contemporaries feel the same way."



Desert Island Western - film and book?

"THE SEARCHERS and A.B. Guthrie Jr.'s THE BIG SKY. !"


And finally for fun - The Duke V Eastwood - Who wins?

"he Duke. He's a much better actor than he's often given credit for. His performances in THE SEARCHERS, TRUE GRIT, SANDS OF IWO JIMA, SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, HONDO and THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE really stand out. Then again, Clint has proved to be a fantastic director with his behind-the-lens work in MILLION DOLLAR BABY, MYSTIC RIVER, UNFORGIVEN and PLAY MISTY FOR ME. And THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES has grown on me over the years. Wayne's turns as a director, THE ALAMO and THE GREEN BERETS, are pretty much train wrecks."


The Tainted Archive thanks Johnny for his time

Johnny's books can be bought anywhere books are sold - there are links to buy any of his available titles on his website HERE

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

This is another of those films that people who say, 'John Wayne couldn't act', should be tied to a chair and forced to view. Under heavy make-up that ages him some twenty years, the Duke gives a wonderful and sensitive performance as a cavalry officer in the last weeks of his service. This film is a masterpiece of mood with director, John Ford painting the canvas with broad assured strokes.

And this time in blazing technicolor.

Set after Custer's defeat at The Little Big Horn the film centers on Captain Nathan Brittles (The Duke) as he deals with a looming Indian uprising and his forthcoming compulsory retirement. There are some tender moments of genuine pathos - Brittle visiting his wife's grave, the burial of a Confederate general who ended up serving out his final days as a common trooper and of course Brittles farewell to his troop. It is in the latter scene that Wayne's performance is so full of subtle nuance that it steps away from mere performance and becomes a kind of reality in itself.

At $1.6 million the film was in its time, one of the most expensive westerns ever made. However it was a huge hit for the studio, RKO and is an acknowledged classic today.

TRIVIA: A plot problem sees it being referenced that Pony Express riders were concerned for their safety after Custer's defeat. And yet in reality the Pony Express shut up shop some 15 years before Custer's death.

THE WILD WEST WEB

The Wild West Web is particularly active today - Over on Lance Howard/Howard Hopkins' blog, Dark Bits the reins are handed over to Andrea Hughes, Welsh writer and huge western fan (it's her Welsh genes, you know) , talks about her involvement in the Black Horse Western Forum and also her story in the Where Legend's Ride anthology. Writing as Kit Churchill, Andrea wrote the marvellous story, Desert Surrender and now Andrea tells us, she is confirmed for the forthcoming second anthology from Express Westerns.

The Wild Bunch Wednesday story challenge - in which a different author takes over the reins each week with the view to eventually completing a novel by many hands for western fans to read online - is over at the Davy Crockett's Almanack. The project, the brainchild of Joanne Walpole, is a fun thing and no one's excluded from taking part - it's chaos but it's organised chaos. So check out the story now.

Later today on The Archive there will be a look at the second film in John Ford's cavalry trilogy - the movie's She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and it's a great western from two masters of the genre - Ford and Wayne. Also on The Archive this evening we will have an interview with author and current president of The Western Writers of America, Johnny D. Boggs - president, no less - think of him as Obama only slightly more important.

And the announcement of the full line up of the second anthology from Express Westerns, that's the so far untitled, follow up to the successful Where Legends Ride, is imminent. So far we know the new volume will contain stories from Jack Giles, Lance Howard, David Cranmer, Jack Martin, Ian Parnham and Kit Churchill. Editor Nik (Ross) Morton promises to announce the full list of contents for this anthology on the 27th August - that's tomorrow, yippee!!!

Wild West Monday the fourth is just around the corner - well, up the street some-ways and then around the corner. If you haven't done so already then please scroll down the right hand sidebar of this blog and sign our petition in support of the western. The more signatures the more ammunition we'll have to arrange full media coverage of the next Wild West Monday.

Most of you will know that western legend, Elmer Kelton passed away earlier this week - much has been written on the wild west web about this great man and his legacy but I wanted to bring everyone's attention to the article HERE.

COMING UP

Tomorrow on the Archive, we are going Wild West Web crazy - as well as our review of the second in John Ford's Calvary trilogy, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon we are pleased to post an interview with sitting president of the Western Writers of America, Johnny D. Boggs. Now that's something worth coming back for.

BRITAIN'S FORBIDDEN COMIC

Action Comic was launched in February 1976 and by October 1976 it was withdrawn from sale over concerns about its violent content. When it did reappear in November of that year it was considerably toned down and would never be the same comic book again. Eventually in November 1977 it was merged into successful war comic, Battle Picture Weekly.

There's a great website devoted to the title HERE


Action was originally launched to combat the success rival publisher D C Thomson were having with Warlord, a boy's war comic with grittier strips than was usual for the period. Pat Mills and John Wagner were brought into IPC Magazines as freelancers and their answer to Warlord, Battle Picture Weekly was a massive success. After the launch of Battle John Wagner was handed Valiant Comic to revive its flagging sales while Pat Mills was set to work on a new kind of comic.

The result was Action.

The original line up of stories were:

Dredger - a DI6 operative who was more than a match for any of the terrorists the storylines threw at him week after week. The character was very heavily based on Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry and there was something of Dredger about Judge Dredd when the character initially launched.

Hellman of Hammer Force - which was a thoughtful anti-war story told from the German perspective which was something new for British comics at the time. Traditionally British war comics had treated the Germans as a mindless evil or buffoons. The Hellman series would survive when the comic merged with Battle Picture Weekly.

Blackjack - a boxing story about heavyweight boxer, Jack Barron who is determined to win the world championship even if continuing to fight could turn him blind. The storylines would feature gangsters, bent promoters

Play Till You Drop, was a football strip centering on Rampton City striker, Alec Shaw. It was a bit more gritty than Roy of the Rovers but otherwise followed the same pattern as the great Roy Race.

The centre pages, full colour, were taken up by Hook Jaw - a shameless rip off of Jaws. The first episode saw the killer great white get a gaff-hook stuck in his jaw when a fisherman foolishly tried to land him. There was a reason the strip was in colour and men being eaten, other sea creatures being torn apart were drawn in graphic detail. One of the early issues gave away an iron on T-Shirt transfer of Hook-Jaw and when I bought a used copy in a bookshop I was delighted to find the transfer was still inside, unused.


Sports not for losers -was another sport based story. This time centred on the most unlikely of athlete who despite himself keeps on winning.



The Coffin Sub - was a world war II set story about a sub commander who is convinced he was responsible for the death of his previous crew.



The Running Man - was a great story about British Runner Mike Carter who when in New York becomes the target of a Mafia plot. He doesn't know why but must keep running dodging hitman after hitman while he discovers what is behind all this.




36 issues were published without a problem but when issue 37 was sent out, it was quickly recalled. Unbearable pressure had been put on the publishers by a campaign to ban the comic because of its overly violent content. And the comic was taken off sale and when it did return, almost a month later it was vastly watered down and one of the most controversial strips, Kids Rule OK, said by our moral guardians to be responsible for street gang crime, was axed completely.

Very few copies of issue 37 survived being pulped and these days issues fetch a startlingly high price. Visit the Action website where many of the pre-ban issue stories have been scanned.

Anyone wanting to learn the entire story behind this comic I can recommend Action: The Story of a Violent Comic by Martin Barker. However the book is long out of print.