Git Along, O11 Typewriter

Git Along, Ol' Typewriter THE RELUCTANT GUNMAN (246 pp.) --William MacLeod Ralne--Houghton Mifflin ($2.75).

Tom Fallon was as pleasant a young cowpoke as anyone would ever care to meet on or off the range. But he kept finding himself where trouble was. Take the pretty fiesta evening he rode into the town of Copper Fork, Ariz. Before he had got the feel of the place, he found himself in the middle of a holdup, saved a small boy from the crossfire, was almost hanged as a suspect, got a job as a deputy sheriff and ran plumb into the man who had murdered his dad in Nebraska 17 years before.

Cowboys like Tom Fallen are the stuff western fiction heroes are made of, and he rides and shoots through the pages of Reluctant Gunman with the predictable luck and easy heroism of the aw-shucks-fellas-'twarn't-nothin' school that has satisfied readers of westerns for half a century. The best proof that Reluctant Gunman is the real article lies in the fact that it was written by William MacLeod Raine, acknowledged dean of western writers since the death of Zane Grey in 1939. In a writing field where reputation is everything, the Raine product is as surefire as the hero's six-guns. In England, where he has the status of a hardy perennial, his publishers buy his manuscripts sight unseen and, Raine believes, do not even trouble to read them.

Reprints of Reprints. At 83, Bill Raine can look back on 80 novels with a sale of 19 million copies in all editions and a gross of $600,000. He has written, besides, more than 200 short stories and three nonfiction books on western lore that have become indispensable reference works for other writers in the field. So solid is Raine's popularity and earning power that he could live quite comfortably from the sales of reprints of his reprints.

Raine is not the only passenger on the western gold coach. Over the years the western has so gained in popularity that some writers pump them out steadily under half a dozen pseudonyms. Harry Drago uses six (Bliss Lomax, Brant Sinclair, et al.). Caches of manuscripts left behind by Max Brand (real name: Frederick Faust), who died in 1944, and Zane Grey sell as well as if their creators were alive and working. ("I think Zane wrote his best stuff while he was still alive," says Raine.) Since within ten years a western can expect to find a brand-new audience waiting, reprints never die. The result is that a steady worker with a fair backlog of books in print can expect an income of $15,000 to $20,000 a year, figures most "serious" novelists associate with mirages or dismiss with envious sneers. The paperback market has given western writers a crack at some real money. Hard-cover sales merely break the ice (even Raine is seldom good for more than 6,000 copies) and movie sales are relatively rare because most studios have their own stables of range writers. But one of Raine's several reprint publishers has sold 6,000,000 copies of 16 Raine books.

The writers of westerns themselves consider Bill Raine the greatest living practitioner, and have made it official by naming him first honorary president of the year-old Western Writers of America in his home town of Denver. There are some who are more finished writers, e.g., Luke Short, Jack (Shane) Schaeffer, but none who can serve up the mixture as before with the same sure authority. As one awed beginner said, "After all, he was here when the guns went off," and he was quite right.

All Bill Raine has to do is close his eyes and mosey back to his memories. He personally knew many of the real he-men and gunslingers who populate today's Western legend--Bat Masterson, Bill Tilghman, the Oklahoma peacemaker, Jeff Milton, against whom even Texas' infamous John Wesley Hardin feared to draw. Once Raine even had a brush with evil-tempered Wyatt Earp of Tombstone over something he wrote about the gunman in a magazine. "All I did," Raine explains, "was say he was a cold-blooded murderer." Punting Bowlers. Raine's wife and daughter call him "Wild Bill." He was born in London, a geographical handicap that was eliminated when his Scottish father brought him to Arkansas in 1881.

He and his three brothers showed up for the first day of country school in proper little bowler hats and Sunday suits. "The bowlers," Raine recalls solemnly, "lasted no longer than it took a healthy hillbilly to punt them over the schoolhouse roof." Today only a slight burr gives away Raine's origin. He was 14 when he first came upon a victim of gunplay. He and his father gave the murderer a wagon ride to the nearest town so he could turn himself in to the sheriff.

Bill went to college in Ohio and, always frail, became a rural schoolteacher, later a newspaper reporter. When he volunteered for the Spanish-American War in 1898, he was rejected as a tubercular, warned to move to Colorado. Seated in a broken-down rocker on his boardinghouse porch, he began to write fiction out of simple desperation. In his first year as a writer, Raine earned $275 and lived on it. As his health improved, he moved about the West and wrote articles that became increasingly popular with Eastern magazine editors.

For well over a quarter of a century, Raine produced two books a year. A careful investor, he writes today only because he likes to. Still brown-haired and lean at 83, he starts work at 9 a.m. on a daily stint that has been cut from over 1,000 words to 500. When Raine dies, there will be no backlog of his unpublished books.

Loping Along. The western has changed considerably in Raine's span. Raine has changed too but not radically. He has been content to lope along an endless Chisholm trail of escape that carries millions of readers to happy endings. He has always been modest about his success, has never thought of himself as a "literary" man. He rode with the Arizona Rangers, drank in campfire tales, covered many of the cattle and mining wars. He looks back with comfortable nostalgia on the people of the Old West. "Any of them would have ridden 30 miles to fetch you a doctor or they'd share their last bit of grub with you. But they wouldn't go to jail for you, or accept an insult," he says with a leathery grin. "The modern cowboy, good man that he is, is not my sort of fellow, jiggling about in a jeep through a West expertly policed and bustling with fences."

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