As crime/private eye novelists go, Robert B. Parker of "Spenser" fame was not too bad of a Western writer, too.
Sadly, Parker died in 2010 from a heart attack which he suffered while sitting at his desk working on a novel. His loss is mourned by his family and millions of devoted readers.
If you are completely unfamiliar with the private-eye character Spenser of novel and television fame, you must be living in an alternate universe, or completely uninterested in detective fiction/crime novels. Tell me that isn't true. I'm a major Spenser fan myself, and I've read just about all of Robert B. Parker's novels, including the Sonny Randall crime novels, his first Phillip Marlow novel, and all but three of his "non-genre" novels. So, yes, I am a big fan of crime novels and of Parker.
Late author fares well as accomplished Western writer
What surprised me, however, was Parker's ability as a Western writer and his knack for handling the many historic details of Western fiction. His "Gunman's Rhapsody" is a nearly operatic presentation of the Earps and those events we call "the shootout at the OK Corral" in Tombstone, Arizona. The other three Westerns he's done, one just released last month, focus on fictional gunfighters Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. I highly recommend those books in what he's called the Appaloosa Trilogy: "Appaloosa" (made into a movie released in 2008), "Resolution," and "Brimstone" (released last month). To use something of a cliche, his gunfighters, his cowboys, whores, saloons, cow towns, and all the rest ring with a true sense of "gritty" reality. And, they are well-paced and have flashes of humor.
If I have any criticism of Parker's work as a Western writer, it's one which I have of all his non-Spenser novels: The dialog makes his characters sometime sound like Spenser and his sidekick Hawk placed in different settings or dressed in period clothing. That's not entirely a bad thing, because his terse dialog always snaps and crackles. And, that may simply be my perception because I have read and enjoyed all the Spenser novels for so long.
But as a Western writer goes, you can do much worse than Robert B. Parker's novels in the genre. You won't go wrong giving him a read.
