Six-Gun Justice by Western Pop Culture Columnist Paul Bishop

Six-Gun Justice by Western Pop Culture Columnist Paul Bishop

MANY 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 the publishers thought potential readers might not buy the book if they didn’t like the show.

Among the earliest western TV tie-in novels, were three Wagon Train paperbacks—Wagonmaster, The Scout, and Wagons West—which were published between 1958 and 1959. These were penned by longtime pulp writer Robert Turner.

In the Early ‘60s, Rawhide and Wanted Dead Or Alive got their own single shot tie-in novels, both of which were written by journeyman scribe Frank Robertson. The cover of Rawhide had a reasonable painting of the shows stars on a yellow background. This was a trick copied from the pulps, which often used bright yellow covers to make an issue pop on the newsstands. There was also a paperback edition published with a generic cover. Today, the edition with the tie-in cover will push you upward of $100.

There were also two editions of Wanted Dead Or Alive released at the same time, one with a cover drawing of a character who might or might not be Steve McQueen as Josh Randall—the more collectible edition—and the other with a generic cowboy on the front. Neither edition made any mention of its tie-in to the show.

In 1960, the first of two Have Gun, Will Travel (HGWT) tie-ins hit the spinner racks. It was titled after the show, but had a truly awful illustration of Richard Boone on the cover. The second was published in 1963, with a much better cover featuring a photo of Paladin (Richard Boone). Veteran writer Frank Robertson, (Rawhide, Wanted Dead Or Alive) wrote the second entry, A Man Called Paladin.

Another veteran pulp writer, Noel Loomis, wrote the first HGWT tie-in. He would go on to write the first Bonanza tie-in (1960)—a show that was so popular, the tie-in was also published in hardcover. As benefiting Bonanza’s popularity, Loomis’ tie-in was the first of a dozen or more such tie-ins to be inspired by the series—the two latest being published in 2017.

The long running Gunsmoke was arguably as popular as Bonanza. As a result, Gunsmoke produced a remarkable number of tie-in paperbacks. The first appeared in 1957. Simply titled Gunsmoke, it was a collection of ten novelized scripts. This approach was also used for Tales of Wells Fargo written by another famous pulpster (who also created the show), Frank Gruber. Another Gunsmoke standalone was published in 1970, followed by an authorized four book series in 1974, written under the pseudonym Jackson Flynn. A three book series written by Gary McCarthy—a prolific and entertaining writer—came out in 1999, followed by an excellent six book series by top western wordslinger Joseph West in 2005. All of these are readable and collectible.

As TV tie-in paperbacks proved popular, many other TV westerns generated paperbacks—The Rebel, The Restless Gun, Lancer, Cimarron Strip, The Iron Horse, The Outcasts, How The West Was Won, Bearcats, High Chaparral, and others. Each had its own unique story behind its publication, the minutia of which tie-in collectors such as myself revel in.

No column on western TV tie-ins would be complete without mentioning the wonderful, and highly collectible, Whitman Authorized Editions and Big Little Books from the same company aimed at juvenile readers. While Whitman produced tie-ins for other shows, their westerns were the most popular, including Maverick, Cheyenne, Bat Masterson, Have Gun Will Travel, Big Valley, The Rifleman, and of course Gunsmoke and Bonanza, and others. Surprisingly well written by experienced wordsmiths, the Whitman juveniles should never be written off as kid’s stuff.

—Paul Bishop is a novelist, screenwriter, and western genre enthusiast, as well as the co-host of the Six-Gun Justice Podcast, which is available on all major streaming platforms or on the podcast website: www.sixgunjustice. com/