6
saddlebag dispatches
M
ANY OF THE MOST cherished images of the Old West are of the lone lawman pursuing and ultimately apprehending criminals. The image has been exploited effectively by novelists and filmmakers. In fact, such is the influence of fictional accounts of lawmen in the West that the truth, though no less interesting than the fiction, is not well known. Recently, my passion for Westerns has turned toward collecting and reading vintage TV tiein novels connected to shows from the golden age of TV Westerns—when six-guns and shoot-em’ ups dominated the small screen, making toy gun and holster sets, lunch boxes, Western ranch and town playsets, board games, and other items associated with the most popular Westerns a guaranteed source of income. The earliest Western TV tie-ins appeared in
the ‘50s. Shows such as Wagon Train, The Deputy, and Boots And Saddles were popular enough to justify a publisher taking a chance on an original tie-in novel. However, because this hybrid of western paperback and TV show was a new phenomenon, publishers were unsure how to promote them—did you sell it as a western novel, or did you hype the western TV show? Some publishers were bold enough to use the title of the TV show on the cover. Other times nonspecific titles were chosen with the show mentioned only in tiny print— sometimes even relegated to the back cover. Instead of the photo covers that would become the norm, publishers hedged their bets by using bland illustrations, which were barely recognizable as characters from the show. It was as if
