My Dad has read every old western book in his county library. The paperbacks all have different geezer initials all up and down the inside first page so they can see if they already read it. Clearly he needs new material for Father's Day.

Help me with a good western book or series about steely-eyed cowboys, slim-waisted rancher daughters, blazing Colt 45's and sidekicks named Blue.

Louis Lamour, or has he been through all those?

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry is the best ever imho.

Dave

Try to find some westerns by J T Edson, he created Dusty Fog, the Ysabel Kid among others.

This ^^^

Plus the books by McMurtry.

When I was a kid, I liked the Young Trailer series by Joseph Altsheler. Great writing.

Undaunted Courage (about Louis & Clark)

Empire of the Summer Moon (about the rise and fall of the Comanche Nation)

Blood & Thunder (biography of Kit Carson)

I enjoyed reading the mountain man series from William W. Johnstone.

Modern stuff by C. J. Box. Wyoming game warden keeps getting into other crime fighting...so to speak.

And mountan man books.. I think Johnston is the name. Those guys were tougher than cowboys anyhow bur they had squaws for the winter.

Johnny Quarles, A.B. Guthrie Jr., Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Glendon Swarthout, Patrick deWitt, Edward Abbey, Annie Proulx's collections, Larry McMurty's debut novel, E.L. Doctorow, Pete Dexter.

How about that, Nykki. Beat me by 1 second.

Longarm series.

Longmire is based on books.

Zane grey hasnt been mentioned.

Elmer Keith despised Zane Grey.

A few years back Texas Monthly did an article and talked about the trilogy of Texas novels one had to read...Lonesome Dove, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy and The Wonderful Country by Tom Lea. I would suggest reading the last first, having read all three.

Great recommendations, guys. Thank you.

The Lonesome Dove series is actually four books. Historically speaking, the begin with Dead Man's Walk, then there's Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo. At least that's the only four I'm aware of. I don't read much McMurtry anymore.

Another western author with quite a few books to his credit is Elmer Kelton. Llano River is a good read. Stand Proud is another.

Elmore Leonard, who wrote the books that "Justified" is based on, also has a bunch of good Westerns, many of which became movies. A personal favorite, not quite a Western, is "The Hot Kid', which has a lot of gunplay and seems to me to be a precursor to the Raylan Givens stories.

"Mountain Man", by Vardis Fisher, became "Jeremiah Johnson"

"The Big Sky" series by A.B. Guthrie

"Welcome to Hard Times"

"The Last Hunt"

I never really cared that much for L L
The only ones he wrote that I liked were
sacketts and last of the breed

Much prefer E Kelton/ Tom Early
W Johnstone is good ( just about
any of his books of any genre)
And Terry c Johnston
I Quantrill is the only Max McCoy
book I have, but it's a good one

The Oregon Desert, ER Jackman. Non-fiction. Novels have not worked for me since I was like 12. Sad.

Blood & Thunder (biography of Kit Carson) can't beat this one!

Tag

👍🏻

Ralph Cotton and Ralph Compton are both good authors also. And the Longarm Series is also good reading if you are looking for more adult type westerns.

+1, great books. I would imagine that your father would enjoy some of Steven Hunter's books. Havanna, Hot Springs, Dirty White Boys, Point of Impact and a few others. Very entertaining.

EE:

Don't forget Return to Lonesome Dove. Was that another book or just a movie seguel?

I second this. An excellent book!!! Highly recommend.

Currently I’m about half way thru, "The Life of George Bent". Another excellent book. Made from the letters of George Bent to a historian from 1904 to 1918. Bent was 1/2 Cheyenne 1/2 white son of William Bent (Bent’s Fort) and Owl Woman. He was a very educated man and his writng style is very good! If you are interested in the Indian wars of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska this is an awesome book. Full of primary documentation and first hand accounts. Bent was wounded in the hip during the Chivington raid at Sand Creek.

I'm part way through "Following the Guidon" by Elizabeth B. Custer (LTC Custer's wife), original edition 1890. Lots of good stuff about how the cavalry really was.

As mentioned a couple timed above, the A.B. Guthrie series is a definite recommendation. Outstanding.

I just read In The Rogue Blood, by James Carlos Blake. It's a damn good book, but it's a bit rough.

Lots of folks recommend Blood Meridian, but personally I thought it was one of the worst books I've ever wasted my time reading.

Was in Malta to pick up a new fridge yesterday.

Went to the Museum to kill an hour. Malta/Phillips County has a FINE museum.


Anyway....they had a selection of books to buy as well.


I just spent a bunch on a fridge, so let this book go......but to a certain kind of person, I believe it would be a good one.


Kinda pricey...

https://www.amazon.com/Saddleries-Montana-Montanas-Makers-Territorial/dp/0764352741

For the type of books you are looking for I recommend Elmer Kelton. He is a good writer, his stuff is above average for the genre you mentioned and he wrote a lot of books. If at all possible he should read them from the publishing date because some of his later books sometimes refer to incidents and characters in earlier books, although he is good enough as a writer that it is not necessary to have read the earlier books. Most of his stories are set in Texas in the time period prior to and through the civil war although they are not about the war itself.

He wrote the book Good Old Boys it was made into a great movie with Tommy Lee Jones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_Kelton

drover

Hard to beat right there.

The novels written by Luke Short were pretty good, he was an actual gunfighter of those days, so he knew what he was writing about.

I can't remember who wrote it but Brules was very good!

As mentioned above. CJ Box.

Though not western. Still guns. Outdoors. Horses. Crime fighting.

You can get a stack of them off eBay for not tooo much.

I'm just doing this by memory so...IIRC, Return to Lonesome Dove was the first effort after Lonesome Dove and starred Jon Voight as Call and had Ricky Schroeder reprising his role as Newt. It also added some characters. As far as I know, it had nothing to do with McMurtry or any of his novels. SPOILER~McMurtry killed Newt off unceremoniously by having him thrown off or kicked in the head by a horse or mule. He didn't appear in the sequel to LD, Streets of Laredo. IIRC he was a minor character in Comanche Moon, a prequel. Dead Man's Walk was a prequel as well. There was also a TV series on Fox in the nineties called Lonesome Dove the Series. It didn't do too well evidently and lasted a year as that and then came back re-titled Lonesome Dove the Outlaw Years. Again, McMurtry had nothing to do with it and it took the character of Newt Dobbs, now called "Call" after his possible father Woodrow Call, and centered both series' around him. The second series or however you'd term it, lasted only another year. The second series is especially worth watching although again, McMurtry had already killed the character he created off in his books.

I'm not paying Amazon 10 bucks or more for a slim western novel so I went down to the local used book store. I'd been there before, it's not a well traveled place, musty and crammed full of books everywhere. The owner and I had a brief conversation about wearing a mask and she declared her constitutional rights and the fact that the straps jack up her new hearing aids. Fine by me, I agreed with her. She looks like Edgar Winter , but a very nice and helpful eccentric bookworm.

I went through the stacks and ended up with:

5 Will Johnstone
3 JT Edsen
1 McMurtry
2 Ralph Cotton
2 Luke Short
4 Elmer Kelton

Bonus find: Shane by Jack Shaefer. The book they based the movie on. Got to hurry up and finish it before Father's Day. It's a good book.

Thanks for the help!

Another plug for C.J. Box, especially the Joe Picket series, also his Lizard King series. These are particularly good as audio books, the narrator does a fantastic job. They are sort of modern westerns set in the Northern Rockies.

All the praise for Mcmurtry reminded me

The lone L M book I have is Cadillac Jack
Not a western, but a pretty good book

A great "Eastern" is "The Frontiersmen" by Allan W. Eckert. Great audio book if you prefer. European/Indian conflict in earlier times when the eastern area was the untamed west of the day.

The Time it Never Rained by Elmer Kelton is about as real of a "Western" as I've ever read....

I thank God I came along after the
drought was over with.
Some of that book will bring you close
to tears especially if you had folks that
had to scratch by during that time
No amount of hard work you could do
would make rain fall

I can second Zane Gray.
I loved Nevada Smith, as a youngster.

As far as I know, Nevada smith is
a character in the harold robbins
book about jonas cord and his
family ( jonas was kind of a thinly
disguised Howard Hughes)

Zane Grey wrote a novel, Nevada and a bunch more. I've picked up some first editions in used state to keep in my camp trailer a few miles from where Zane's cabin was before it burned in the Dude fire, the cabin has been rebuilt in Payson. Took the kids to the cabin a couple times when the kids were little, it was a cool place, he built his own furniture with pine and manzanita.

Those books are about 100 years old, my granddaughter can read them sitting in the same country they were written about. His style is rather dated but still worth reading for the historical factor.

Kent

Kit Carson and Fremont historical books have a relative of mine in them Auguste Archambeau, he was a guide for them in the 1840s, having run away from home when he was 12 and coming west with the Reeds to start the first trading post in the Taos area 1820s, he was also an associate of Antoine Robidoux.

Kent

"Jeremiah Johnson" was based on a book entitled "Crow Killer." It was the real story of Liver-eating Johnson.

Very cool Kent!

I read Guthrie’s The Big Sky while in high school. That was the standard for all things Mountain Man! A great book!!! I was a bit disappointed with The Way West.

Clarence Mulford. The original Hop A long Cassidy. Written 100 years ago. Very different than the movies. I recommend them highly.

The Carpetbaggers. It has nothing to do with Zane Grey or the Steve McQueen movie Nevada Smith.

I remember reading in J. Frank Dobie once where he was in Arizona and a bunch of local ranch hands came riding down the road shooting up in the air. He asked em what was going on. They said that Zane Grey was home and hired em to add som local flavor to the area while he was there. 🤣

Elmer Kelton, compared to some of the the other authors mentioned here, sounds to me like the only guy who actually spent much time in a saddle. Sounds to me like one of the few to shake frost off a bedroll in the dawn light. Sounds like one of the few to try to make a fire with piss poor damp sagebrush. Writing books of the western theme, requires more experience than driving through the subject country with the window down occasionally.

Not really westerns, although they are set on what was the western border at the time about which they were written, are James Fennimore Cooper's books. "Last of the Mohicans" is my favorite, but all of them are good reads.

Anything by Elmer Kelton.

Longarm series by Tabor Evans. (The first few years were best)

The Sidewinder series by William Johnstone and JA Johnstone.

Really like Keltons stuff, to my taste he's probably better than Lamour

"A 100 Miles to Water". By Mike Kearby you will enjoy it

https://www.amazon.com/Bob-Sharps-Cattle-Country-Ranching/dp/0816509379

“Boss Cowman” by Ed Lemon

“Hell I was there” by Elmer Kieth

All non fiction

Monte Walsh by Schaefer. I felt I had lost a friend by the end.
The virginian
From Where the Sun Now Stands. Will Henry. story of Chief Joseph

Read them in grade school. 12 or 13 years old I thought I was Hawkeye / Pathfinder killing squirrels behind the house. I have them on kindle now.

If you can find a copy, the story of the Lee Brothers (Arizona Hound Hunters) is fascinating.

I just finished A Splendid Savage. It’s good. Now going to have to buy Burnham’s autobiography

Non-fiction, one of the best western books I’ve read is “Westering Man: The life of Joseph Walker”, one of our pre-eminent fur trappers and explorers.

Been awhile since I read it but I recall Burnham's autobiography being a really good book.