The private lives of most BHW authors are closed books to their readers, but maybe it was always so. Only now are the facts emerging about Zane Grey (1875-1939), the archetype of the manly, outdoors adventurer and writer. His escapist novels, mostly westerns, have sometimes been declared flawed by their "pompous moralizing against sin". But in a new biography, Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women (University of Illinois), Thomas H. Pauly tells that Grey was arrested at age 16 in a brothel and that there exists "an enormous, totally unknown cache of photographs taken by Grey of nude women" throughout his life. In many of the pictures, Grey is there, too, naked and engaged in sex. Pauly says the writer's long-suffering wife, Lina Elise "Dolly" Grey, knew of his affairs. "How could she not? Many were with relatives of hers or women she knew. At first hurt by them, she later came to regard them as part of her husband's makeup that would never change" Her summing-up of her husband's personality was: "The man has always lived in a land of make-believe, and has clothed all his own affairs in the shining garment of romance. . . ."

A group of A-list filmmakers — Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, Taylor Hackford, Paul Schrader, Peter Bogdanovich and Robert Towne — commented on the career and influence of a talented B-movie director in a TCM documentary, Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That. USA Today said Eastwood and Boetticher shared at least one important trait: a love of the western. But speculating on what the paper called  the genre's overall decline, Eastwood said, "People just aren't writing that many good western stories. A lot of [the ideas] have been exhausted.When I did Unforgiven in 1992, it was a wonderful script. I thought, 'This would be a perfect last western for me.' " Writers be warned -- be sure to add original elements to your next story of a lone rider's revenge or feuding cattlemen and nesters. Otherwise the Man With No Name isn't going to be interested!

The British Telegraph newspaper sent travel writer Simon Horsford to Monument Valley on the border between Arizona and Utah, the location for many famous western movies and a favourite with director John Ford. Horsford found John Wayne's legacy everywhere. In the restaurant, they served "Wayne's favourite meal" of fried chicken, mash and gravy. In the nearby store, they had John Wayne Toilet Tissue. "Fortunately, eating one does not necessitate the use of the other," Horsford said. "In fact, the chicken supper was quite delicious -- even if it was washed down with a bottle of non-alcoholic beer." Seems you can't walk into the bar and demand a shot of rye either -- there is no bar since the area is "dry".

Bioanthropolgist Jerry Conlogue, of  Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, told Discovery News about analysis of a mummy nicknamed Sylvester who was a 19th century cowboy. Since shotgun pellets blasted Sylvester's right cheek years before his death and he appeared to have survived a bullet to his collarbone, the "wild" in Wild West was confirmed. But his liver was in good condition -- so not all cowboys drank as hard as they lived. The mummy was owned by a California doctor whose uncle was one of two cowboys who found Sylvester’s body in 1895 in the Gila Bend Desert. It was preserved with arsenic and probably went on the sideshow circuit as an "outlaw mummy". Conlogue's magnetic resonance and computerized tomography images showed no arthritis or degenerative disease. Teeth indicated an age between 35 and 40. "In Sylvester's chest, both lungs appear to adhere to the front of the chest wall. This may be an indication of some infective process in his respiratory system." Andy James, of Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, Seattle, where Sylvester is displayed, was surprised. "My great grandfather started this store in 1899. I was led to believe a gunshot wound killed Sylvester. . . a bullet fragment entered his abdomen, bounced off a bone into his lungs and caused him to bleed to death."

Australian BHW writer Keith Hetherington liked the Chap O'Keefe article in BHE about Indians and their harsh treatment, War Paths and Peace Pipes. "Fascinating. As O'Keefe suggests, it's a bad mix really -- good guys and bad guys on both sides. I've only ever met two Red Indians -- and they were nearly black! It was at a place called Redcliffe near Brisbane when I was kid during the [Second World] War. My father got talking to them. They were with a Yankee outfit stationed at Toorbul Point just up the coast and used to hit Redcliffe in the old landing barges for R & R. Met my first Mexican there, too, but all he could do was finger his gold crucifix and say his mother must be worrying about him. . . ." The hardworking author's latest book is Madigan's Mistake, issued under one of his four BHW pen-names, Hank J. Kirby.

Clerkenwell House has been known for decades as the headquarters of BHW publishers Robert Hale Ltd. But it seems London EC1 has had another Clerkenwell House foisted upon it -- a skinny, steel-and-glass erection not so much added to the city skyline as squeezed into a slot between two existing buildings. Why use the same name? We don't know, but the award-winning architect of the newer, just 11-feet-wide Clerkenwell House is Joe Hagan -- believed to be the same who is introduced by David Whitehead elsewhere in this issue of BHE as a misguided critic of the Hale westerns on a TV show called Burning Books. Maybe authors should be doubly careful to include the "45-47 Clerkenwell Green" line when addressing their packages to the proper Clerkenwell House. What happens to misdelivered western manuscripts is a burning question we haven't pursued. . . .

James Mangold, director of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, will remake the classic, 1957 western movie 3:10 to Yuma, which was based on a suspenseful Elmore Leonard story. Mangold has looked over the yarn and found subtleties overlooked fifty years ago. He told showbiz paper Variety: "There are a lot of good-bad themes that were only touched on in the original. A lot of westerns are meditative, but this is a total struggle culminating in a showdown, which has the potential to be one of the great movie gunfights." The old B&W movie, directed by Delmer Daves, has been described by fans as "a distinguished psychological drama", and was largely played out in the claustrophobic setting of a hotel with the key players under mental and physical siege. The poor, family-man rancher (Van Heflin) and the bold, womanizing outlaw (Glenn Ford) each wanted what the other didn't have.

The latest Chap O'Keefe BHW, available from UK online retailers and on request at public libraries, is Ghost Town Belles. O'Keefe tells us, "The scariest content in this tale isn't a conventional spook but the conduct of the belles' father, Mad Dungaree Dan. And the book's most conspicuous feature from a writing point of view is that it gives bigger play to a trademark feature I've  inserted in every O'Keefe BHW from the first, Gunsmoke Night. It's rather like the cameo appearance by himself that director Alfred Hitchcock used to wangle into every movie, but it isn't myself in disguise. Nor, indeed, a character at all. Just an item that will always be there to a greater or lesser extent in each book. In Ghost Town Belles it's prominent and it's woven significantly into the storyline." No prize to the reader who can tell us what it is! No prize, that is, beyond the author's congratulations and his gratitude for keen reader support.

You're based in Bury St. Edmunds, England, it's March, you're writing your BHW -- and you want to know what time the sun goes down in Tucson, Arizona, in June. What do you do without leaving your keyboard? Try www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/aboutastronomy.html .  Tip: use Full List rather than Standard, so you can pick Tucson from a wider range of world cities. When you get to your city, click on the line that says Find sunrise and sunset times for other dates.

Crime scene editor Mike Stotter looks back

For most of us, the compulsion to write fiction is accompanied by a need for it to pay, or at least cover its costs. Otherwise, it has the makings of an expensive hobby, eating up other income and time, and possibly health.

In the bygone days of pulps, fiction weeklies and even newspapers that ran short stories, a correspondence school could advertise writing courses with claims like, "There's gold in Fleet Street, but you have to dig for it . . . These gentlemen say they can't get enough of the kind of stories they need. . . . They'll pay you well and, when half Fleet Street is eating out of your hand, your ego will expand like a sunflower. So will your bank acccount."

The Fleet Street referred to, hub of the British newspaper and magazine scene, is no more. Elsewhere, the pulps are similarly long gone. Writing tuition isn't offered under catch-cries as promising as "Make your ability pay" or "Unlimited opportunities." So what are the potential rewards for the novice writer today?

Let me begin chasing the money rainbow with a digression that has relevance which will become apparent later.

Author Mike Linaker (BHWs' Richard Wyler and Neil Hunter) is, in his own words, a total film nut. One of his recent treats, aside from acquiring the classic movie Stagecoach as a bargain DVD, was receiving among the Christmas presents the Lord of the Rings trilogy, also on DVD.

He emailed me, "Last night I settled down to watch and just couldn't stop. Apart from the fascination of the stories, I was so taken by the natural beauty of the New Zealand settings. I hadn't realized just how beautiful it was. Those fantastic views of green valleys with rising mountains in the backgound. To say the least, I am really envious. I thought American landscapes were great, but those NZ views are just breathtaking. It is fantastic . . . This is where a large, widescreeen TV comes into its own!You are one lucky feller living there."

I decided Mike was largely right.What I see from most of the windows of my hillside home, including those of the room where I write, is what you see here.


It's not LOTR, but it's pleasant enough and a distraction for which I ought to be grateful. One of the attractions of New Zealand for the film industry is the variety of landscapes it offers, from sweeping sub-tropical beaches to lakes and mountains, glaciers and fjords. You can also turn bits of Wellington and Lower Hutt into King Kong's New York! (And the art deco theatre in KK is not a set, but an Auckland cinema, the Civic.)

About ten years ago, a film-maker appoached me with a proposal to do a screen version of my BHW The Outlaw and the Lady. It was to be shot in NZ's South Island with the Southern Alps doubling for the Colorado Rockies. Sadly, like many movie-making propositions, it never got further off the ground than an inch or so -- the thickness of the screenplay.

Today I live in what really has become a city suburb, but I still have intact the impressive, 180-degree view across a creek estuary and the upper harbour to the wooded peninsula of Greenhithe. The big white building behind the moored yachts is a boatbuilder's premises and part of Hobsonville. The world has recently seen Hobsonville, a former aerodrome, as a chunk of Narnia. Also, I understand the low blue structure, which appeared around the time The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was shot, had something to do with that movie. The range of hills in the background is the Waitakeres -- Xena and Hercules land of TV fame.

So -- upshot of digression -- the writer who can live here has it made, right? Well, no, he doesn't . . . and especially not a writer of library fiction of the BHW type.

As most people who visit this site know, BHWs are not a trail to fame and fortune. Because the books are issued as handsome but expensive hardcovers, their buyers are almost entirely libraries. The books are marketed by imprint and are often bought under standing order arrangements with no preferences for particular authors specified, although the range of writing styles and approaches is wide. Softcover reprints are large-print editions, again aimed at the library trade.

Consequently, royalty income, as covered by the contracts for the books, is seldom received by the author beyond the publisher's initial advance, made against royalties in anticipation never realized. The author's money fails to appear not because his or her book isn't read, but because every copy is read by a hundred or more people who don't have to make an individual purchase incorporating a fresh royalty payment.

The world is slowly coming to recognize the unfairness of the situation. Enlightened countries have introduced schemes, usually under the label of "Public Lending Right", or PLR, to compensate authors for their loss.

Britain, where most BHWs circulate, has PLR. I'm informed that a hardworking BHW author with a backlist of fifty titles can earn £5,000 in PLR a year -- that is, £100 of income every January for every book that's in the libraries and being borrowed. This exceeds what the most productive BHW writer can hope to earn from his publishers in one year, although I've seen other writers dismissing PLR payments as "soup kitchen stuff". So over a period of years, a reasonable return can be achieved, perhaps explaining why many UK authors of BHWs have little motivation to spend time and effort on promoting their work to potential retail buyers. The key objective is to write as many books as quickly as possible and hope the distributors and library supply companies will get them on to library shelves.

Though none of the rewards are huge, the principal paymaster for the serious BHW writer living in Britain is not the publisher but the public purse -- a shadowy entity it would be impossible directly to address or sway through promotion.

A writer who produced a handful of BHWs years ago told me privately this year, "Just had my PLR in and happy to see old [hero's name from early '90s] still drawing in the crowds."

A prolific writer who is one of the line's most respected contributors, and who is based in another country which has a PLR scheme, told me a day later, "PLR is a lifesaver for me." Converted to British pounds for the sake of consistency, he was receiving £3,800, which far outstripped what even he could earn in publisher's advances. What he deplored was that the payments would cease when he died, and his heirs and dependants wouldn't be able to continue claiming the earnings from his lifetime of effort.

"Doesn't seem to make sense to me: I mean, someone invents/manufactures a car part, say, or a filter for a washing machine -- he can die the next day after it's on the market and royalties keep rolling in to immediate relatives and anyone else thereafter they wish to leave their rights to."

He also regretted that he couldn't claim the income from his many, many books in the UK libraries. "I don't qualify for the UK PLR either, though I tried."

Here he struck to the heart of the PLR problem: The money is payable to writers only on the basis of their being a resident of the country/political union that has the scheme in place.

The BHW writer who lives in Germany, France or a raft of other European countries is able to claim British PLR because of  the European Union treaty. But not the writer who lives in the United States or Australia . . . or New Zealand.

One non-UK-based BHW stalwart contended that this amounted to discrimination on grounds of residency in an age when discrimination on just about any other grounds -- gender, skin colour, religious belief -- was outlawed internationally.

A British-based colleague responded, "It is an odd view as it'd never occur to me that the Australian or Canadian governments should send me money because my books are in their libraries. But I'll admit that if Scotland ever gets independence from England, I'll be first in line to start complaining when my English PLR dries up! I guess it's my prudent and pedantic accounting training that makes me smile everytime I hear soundbites like 'PLR paid for my holiday.' On one level that's right, but the accountant in me tells me that it ignores the opportunity cost of the time spent to earn that cheque."

Agreed, PLR may never produce proper recompense for the hundreds of hours of effort the best writers put into their work. But the response did not address the point that something is better than nothing in the view of those unfortunates receiving the latter while making an identical expenditure of time and energy.

Nor did the same writer's revelation that only 7% of authors earn more than £1,000 from PLR comfort the overseas authors. It did, after all, merely reflect the well-known fact that a huge percentage of "authors" embark upon their literary career to write only one or two books before abandoning it for other pursuits. This applies both generally and to BHWs.  

"Well, why be greedy?" I hear it asked. "Surely you just claim PLR in the country where you do live."

Alas, this is no answer for American BHW writers because the US has no scheme. So Maine resident Lance Howard, with a couple of dozen popular westerns circulating in Britain, unfairly receives nothing for their reading beyond the modest initial payment. Nor is it a satisfactory answer for any Australian BHW writer, because many more copies of his BHW books will be in British libraries than in Australian.

And for a New Zealand writer of genre fiction, the suggestion is even less help. His government's Authors' Fund scheme is very similar to Australia's PLR, setting a qualifying minimum of fifty copies of a particular title to be held in the libraries before a small payment is made. The difference, however,  is Australia has a population of twenty million -- five times New Zealand's -- and probably more holding of library books in the same proportion.

The NZ scheme allows no compounding of holdings. Thus you could have forty-nine copies of ten separate novels in the libraries (that is, 490 books being read "for free") and receive nothing. Have fifty-one copies of one book and you would collect a small payment.

These rules work against the writer of genre novels. When it comes to light fiction, the NZ libraries are confronted with a wide choice and obviously cannot afford to buy each and every title offered in a particular category, like western, romance or crime. On the other hand, an even remotely popular author has to fill an international publisher's/readers' demand for regular new titles -- perhaps three a year under each pen-name -- thus diluting his/her chances of having a qualifying book under the scheme. The libraries make a selection, and if each of around seventy library buyers chooses a different title from an individual author's list, he/she cannot hope to secure any compensation.

I'm told one very successful, NZ-based Harlequin Mills & Boon romance writer never bothers to register her books with the scheme. (It involves registration of titles, making a statutory declaration before a Justice of the Peace, and annual re-registration.) She relies for income solely on paperback sales to the general public. Books read by library borrowers are regarded as a financial write-off. They might help introduce new readers, who it's hoped will then go to a store and buy the royalty-producing paperbacks -- an argument which doesn't apply in the case of library-only westerns.

Plainly, it's not a sensible financial choice for a BHW writer to live, as I do, in a country like New Zealand which has only a fifteenth of the UK's population or a fifth of Australia's. Too few books in too few libraries paying too little money to the writers who qualify!

My advice to a BHW writer, current or aspiring, is to live in a well-developed, wealthy, heavily populated nation that looks after its authors with a decent PLR scheme. You'll need to be hardworking and patient, but you have the prospect of eventual reward for your efforts.

Meanwhile, the NZ writer must make do with being a "lucky feller" and enjoying the scenery. And enjoying his writing, of course . . . when he can afford it.

-- Keith Chapman, who has written BHWs since 1992 as Chap O'Keefe. His latest book is Ghost Town Belles.

NEW BLACK HORSE WESTERN NOVELS
(Published by Robert Hale Ltd, London)

Ghost Town Belles	Chap O'Keefe	0 7090 7841 2
Steel Tracks - Iron Men	Corba Sunman	0 7090 7892 7
Gambler's Dawn	Dale Graham	0 7090 7896 X
The Drifter's Revenge	Owen G. Irons	0 7090 7904 4
Hell in the Zunis	Clay Burnham	0 7090 7938 9
The Long Search	Alan Irwin	0 7090 7948 6
Guns on the Wahoo	George J. Prescott	0 7090 7959 1
Hellfire	Scott Connor	0 7090 7960 5
Ponderfoot's Dollars	Ben Coady	0 7090 7961 3
Miller's Ride	Caleb Rand	0 7090 7962 1

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