books

Sunday, February 18, 2001

Author defends oft-sullied genre

By Bill Whitaker
Reporter-News Staff Writer

Out in the rugged West Texas wilderness among armed men and wary quail, Jory Sherman will readily admit to being a western author.

But if the question arises in the more comfortable climes of a high-dollar Disability Resources Inc. Celebrity Quail Hunt banquet, where winged game is served rather than pursued, Sherman will happily take time to explain he’s more than a western author.

So it goes in the realm of westerns, where authors often become pigeonholed. The dilemma can spell both success and frustration.

Of the 200 or so books this prolific writer claims to have authored, Sherman has tackled a number of genres. For example, this month’s moody novel The Ballad of Pinewood Lake (Forge, 224 pages, $22) challenges easy categorization. It’s certainly not a western.

But westerns are what immediately conjure up the Sherman name. Fellow western author Elmer Kelton of San Angelo, whose own novels The Time It Never Rained and The Day the Cowboys Quit are regarded as classics, readily describes his colleague as a “danged good writer.”

Much of Sherman’s fame rests upon his range novel Grass Kingdom and a whole line of spinoffs he’s written about the Manifest Destiny-driven Baron family, including The Baron Brand, The Barons of Texas and The Baron Range, all for Tom Doherty’s busy Forge imprint.

No wonder, in spite of all else, the author is touchy about folks who knock westerns.

“I guess I’ve been one of the genre’s staunchest advocates,” says Sherman, 68, who spent part of his youth in Monahans and nows lives in Pittsburg in East Texas. “Frankly, the western novel is treated by critics and publishers as a bastard stepchild.

“But today’s westerns aren’t the way so many of them envision. They’re not just shoot-’em-ups. They’re something grander, something that really qualifies more as part of the mainstream. And yet, the racks for westerns have shrunk and been shoved to the back of the store.”

Kelton, whose own recent novels, including The Buckskin Line and the newly released Badger Boy, also come from the Forge imprint, concurs with Sherman when it comes to the shabby treatment given contemporary westerns.

“I’d have to say it’s not just publishers who have this attitude but the critical establishment as well,” the celebrated, 74-year-old author says. “There’s almost a stigma attached to westerns. It’s hard to get most critics to even open one up to see what’s in it.

“I think a lot of it goes back to the penny dreadful,” Kelton says, referring to lurid, wildly fantastic, pre-pulp fictions written for mass audiences in the declining days of the American West. “The western just hasn’t gotten the respect that even science-fiction and mysteries get.”

In recent years, westerns have been anything but endangered, thanks to such authors as Larry McMurtry, who revived interest in the genre through his Pulitzer-winning novel Lonesome Dove, a work that demands critical respect.

“They’ve always paid the rent,” Sherman says of westerns. “They’ve rarely made the big dollars, but they’re a staple of the industry — and, best of all, they don’t date. But demographics are disturbing. They show much of our readership is 49 to 80, and some of those readers are dying off.

“But then, so are the authors.”

And if McMurtry has confused critics over the future of the western with his own seemingly self-contradictory declarations, there’s no denying his talent at the genre, despite his many critics.

“I admire his work very much,” Sherman says of McMurtry, “and because he writes so well, others who do not write so well may be envious or jealous.”

Sherman has every right to be proud of his own success in the western genre. By his own admission, he’s come a long way since the mid-1960s, when a friend in the publishing industry showed him the cover for a yet-to-be-written western novel titled Gun for Hire.

Problem: The author originally tapped to write a book based on the cover art pleaded out because of writer’s block.

“Why, I can do that thing with one hand tied behind my back,” Sherman recalls boasting — and so the sometime-poet and magazine editor wrote the novel in a week and a half. Up til then, he “never had any notion of writing westerns, although I read them and I loved Louis L’Amour.

“I just winged it,” he says. “I had a good story and I did some research.”

While proud of his stature as a western writer, he does get rankled when publishers, critics and readers assume he can’t write anything else. One of his proudest accomplishments was a series of novels based on investigative forays into the supernatural.

Another non-western, the newly released The Ballad of Pinewood Lake certainly offers a plot that resonates. It concerns a pulp writer who flees the Los Angeles rat race of the 1990s and tries to find his literary soul in a mountain town bristling with pettiness and alcoholism.

But it’s unlikely Sherman will soon forsake westerns, even if the genre does mean hurdles that other genres seem to lack. He still smarts over the publishing blurb for his novel Grass Kingdom, which described the book as being set on the open expanses of the Texas Panhandle.

“It’s actually in the Rio Grande Valley, for God’s sake!” he marvels. “But they just thought the Texas Panhandle sounded ‘western.’ They didn’t know anything about Texas — and still don’t.

“You know, readers can get nit-picky about those things.”

But at least such nit-pickiness proves western fans are still alive and kicking — and reading.

Contact associate editor Bill Whitaker at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com. Check out our new Web site, www.oldwildwest.com.