SIX-GUN JUSTICE PODCAST EPISODE #209—THE WORLDWIDE WEST TOUR: ENGLAND PART 1

Howdy, cowpokes... It's tea time on the range as the Six-Gun Justice Podcast returns to its Worldwide West Tour with a stop in Ol' Blighty... Join host Paul Bishop and his special guest David Whitehead (aka bestselling Western wordslinger Ben Bridges) as they face down a violent gang of Piccadilly Cowboys and then delve even further into the extensive history of the many indigenous Westerns spawned on British shores...

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Howdy, and welcome to the Six Gun Justice Podcast, where we saddle up and ride hell for leather into the blazing six gun action of the Western genre in books, movies, TV, and any other media at home on the range. I'm your host, Paul Bishop. So far, our Six Gun Justice Podcast Worldwide West tour has taken us to Mexico, Germany, and Australia, where we've explored the indigenous Western novels, films, and comics of those countries, along with their prolific indigenous Western writers, most of whom have never set foot in America, let alone been west of the Mississippi. But even though they are mostly unknown in America, these are true Westerns in every sense, and we are missing out if we don't spend some time acknowledging them. Today's worldwide West tour stop is part one of our gallop across the imaginary prairies of England, where the Western went to survive during a time when the traditional Western in America was struggling to find an audience. Joining me today is my guest co-host, Dave Whitehead, who has become arguably the most influential British writer of the past 20 years. His debut novel, The Silver Trail, marked the first appearance of his popular continuing character, freelance fighting man Carter O'Brien, but also the first book to bear his best known and best selling pseudonym, Ben Bridges. Since the publication of The Silver Trail, Dave has written more than 70 books, writing Westerns not only as Ben Bridges, but also under other pseudonyms, including Glenn Lockwood, Matt Logan, Doug Thorne, Carter West, and occasionally even under his own name. In addition to his work in the Western genre, he has written romantic fiction as Janet Whitehead, and has co-authored nine thrillers with Hollywood's screenwriter Steve Hayes. With his childhood friend and fellow British wordslinger Mike Stoder, Dave has also done Yeoman's service to the Western genre as a co-founder of Piccadilly Publishing, which has resurrected the Western canon of the core group of prolific British Western writers known as the infamous Piccadilly Cowboys, along with many Western novels and series from an Indian territory's worth of other British words. Hey mate, it's great to have you join me on the Six Gun Justice podcast. Welcome.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

It's very nice to be here, Paul. Thank you very much for inviting me.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

As I understand it, currently you are probably way hotter in England than I am here in California with the heat wave you've been having.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

It's absolutely death valley here at the moment, really, miss.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

And the problem is, what, 1% of houses have air conditioning?

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Probably not even 1%. Generally speaking, air conditioning is not something we have really ever needed until now. You know, with the temperatures in the last few days touching about 104 to 106, we're starting to realize that we need to rethink how we build houses. So it's serious stuff.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

With houses built to keep the heat in, this also is a problem.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

That's right. Yeah. This is the thing, isn't it? When you're mopping sweat from your brow, it helps to visualize a scene in the middle of the desert, the man staked out under the sun and crawling over his bare flesh. It's that kind of vibe at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

That's the right mentality to have. You've had that mentality as a Western fan for a lot of years now. What was it that first brought you to the Western genre?

SPEAKER_00 3:38

It was probably my dad. My dad was a big Western fan. I grew up sitting on his knee watching all the Western TV shows. He would take me to see all the Western movies as they came out. He was a security guard, and he often worked night shift. And there he would be in a chemical factory in the middle of the night guarding the place, and he would take a Buffalo Bill annual with him, and he would trace the illustrations out and fetch them home for me to colour in. So from a very early age you might say I was indoctrinated. It would go one of two ways. Either I would love the West or I would hate it. And as luck would have it, I loved it.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Obviously you were a young boy at that time colouring those illustrations. When did you first start to read Western's?

SPEAKER_00 4:25

It's very funny. My sister was very ill round about the time when I was probably about eight years old. And we used to have to go up into London to the hospital where she was recovering from a very serious operation. My mum and dad would go in to see my sister, and I would stay out in the foyer of the hospital, and there was a hospital shop, and I remember one day rummaging through a box of books, and I found a western. Up until that point I didn't even know there were western novels. I can still remember opening that book. It began with a stagecoach coming into town and a plume of yellow dust flying in its wake. And I was energized. I can't tell you how exciting it was for me to discover that in addition to watching Westerns, you could actually read them.

SPEAKER_01 5:13

Your partner in Western fandom, Mike Stoder, when did you guys first hook up?

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Oh, we've known each other for about a hundred years. We met at junior school and we met again at secondary school. We are complete opposites really, but something between us clicked, and we've been together ever since, more or less. I can still remember about ten, eleven years ago, we were talking on the phone. We were just about to say goodbyes, and I can pretty much say verbatim. Mike said to me, Oh, that's something I wanted to ask you. How do you fancy bringing back all the Piccadilly Cowboy Westerns as ebooks? It was almost a throwaway line. I said, How do you mean? And he told me what was vaguely a kind of a business model. I thought, this is a great idea. Let's do it. And we did.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

With that in mind, let's brew up a cup of buffalo tea, stampede the cattle, and get to rounding out our feature on the Piccadilly Cowboys and the other British Western riders. I always have to get my cattle in there somehow.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

Oh, that's good. I can actually smell the manure.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

It's about hip boot high. Many of our listeners know the Piccadilly Cowboys. But for the uninitiated, why don't you run down the whole concept behind the Piccadilly Cowboys, who they were and how they got started? Let me just lay out a groundwork here. As I said earlier, when the Piccadilly Cowboys came to the forefront in the 70s, it was a time in America where the Western was very much in decline. It was off of television, there were no new Western films, and book publishing was maybe Louis Lemour and a couple of others. So it wasn't a very fertile ground in America.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

You've probably answered the question yourself there, because we traditionally had always relied on importing Westerns from America. A lot of UK publishers had a Western line that was essentially Louis B. Patton, Louis Lemour, Oliver Strange, who was a British Western writer, but I think he was very popular over there at one point. And so when the UK publishers were not able to bring the Westerns over as they had before, they decided we would grow our own. What they did in essence is they tried to replicate the spaghetti western as opposed to the traditional Western. They got a guy called Terry Harknett, who was predominantly a crime writer, and also like a writer for hire. He had done a few novelizations, including Red Sun, and I guess most famously A Fistful of Dollars. And they asked him to write a Western series, which he did, and when that took off, that opened the floodgate for other writers to copy his style.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

And that was of course the Edge series.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

Written under the pen name George G. Gilman. After that, Terry did the Adam Steele series, and eventually he did The Undertaker, all under the same name. But in between times, the editor who had commissioned Edge, who was a guy called Lawrence James, he started to write Westerns as well. And he brought with another guy called John Harvey, they brought more of a kind of cinematic edge to it, if you'll pardon the pun. They were very visual writers. They often paid homage to the classic Western movies, but within a kind of spaghetti context. And of course there was humour, there was always a punchline at the end of every chapter. There was always something quirky in the stories, whether it was the plot or the characters, and the whole subgenre really mushroomed from there. The next one was a guy called Angus Wells, who again was an editor until the Piccadilly Cowboys said, Come on in, the water's fine. Of them all, Angus was technically the best writer. He wrote some great stuff.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

The other thing with the Piccadilly Cowboy Westerns was the heightened violence, which as you say came from the Italian spaghetti westerns, but they really took violence to the next level.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

Oh, absolutely. We want more Adam Steele, we want more George G. Gilman. So every series had a kind of sameness to it. The only one I remember the time was Mike Lineker's Bodie the Stalker. It was a violent series, but it didn't have the almost obligatory origin story. Bodhi was just Bodie a bounty hunter. He wasn't a bounty hunter for any particular reason. Nobody killed his wife, nobody shot his baby boy, it was just there doing a job. But all the other series of that time, they all lost fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, pets. It was very similar stuff. And you're quite right, as the books went on, they became more and more outrageous. The classic example is probably Crow by Lawrence James.

SPEAKER_01 11:09

You look at Edge and he is a violent son of a bitch, and then you get to Crow and he's ten times worse.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

I didn't know Lawrence James particularly well, but I knew him well enough to know that he had a wicked sense of humour. He just always wanted to see how far he could go, how much he could get away with. And I'm not sure that was entirely useful for the genre. It was the way Lawrence was. And certainly a lot of people list Crow as their favourite of all the Piccadilly Cowboy series, and I have no idea why.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

It's an interesting twist of humanity there that would be the favourite character of so many people.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

Yeah. Of course, towards the end, what they did, if you look at a series like Hawk or certainly a series like Peacemaker, they started to return slightly to more traditional Western stories and characters. But I'm afraid by that time it was really too late. If you, for whatever reason, decided you didn't like Crow, then it was a pretty safe bet that you also didn't like Caleb Thorne. There was a very unhealthy dose of incest in Caleb Thorne, which was not really conducive to my enjoyment, certainly. And I think this was the thing. When one series fell out of favor, they all fell out of favor. And the last man banding was Edge.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

But they still made a bridge for the Western, because as the popularity of the Piccadilly Cowboy style westerns grew and exploded, American writers took notice. And all of a sudden, American publishers were bringing out what became known as the Adult Western, which added graphic sex into the Western along with the violence. And all of a sudden, you have Longarm, you have Jake Slocum, you have so many other Western series that all of a sudden took off in America. As the Piccadilly Cowboys died out, there was this new injection of life into the Western. Again, traditional Western fans were not happy, but it was keeping the Western alive.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

I agree. In fact, I would say the adult Westerns certainly rejuvenated the Western genre, but also they provided a great marketplace for Western writers. The interesting thing for me is that over here in the UK, we started to get long arm. And I think it lasted maybe off the top of my head, probably about eight or nine books. And then it just was cancelled. And I thought it was very interesting that in the UK, readers still preferred to read about violence more than they cared to read about sex.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

And that's very British, isn't it? I beg your pardon.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

What are you trying to say about me, Paul?

SPEAKER_01 14:02

Not you, me too. I was born and raised there, and that's very British. I'd rather read about violence than about sex.

SPEAKER_00 14:08

Yeah, I just think it's odd. In fact, it was almost a prudish reaction from readers in this country. Yeah, we don't want that here, thank you very much. And yeah, you could kill people, you could see their guts splashing all over the desert sands, and people lapped that up. I never did quite understand that. In fact, talking of long arm, I thought some of the long arm plots were very good, very original.

SPEAKER_01 14:32

They were, and of course, they only ran to eight books in England, but over here in America, I mean, it was 300, 400, I'm not quite sure of the exact number, but it was an exorbitant number before that series was one of the last men standing here and eventually died out, and the traditional Western found its footing again.

SPEAKER_00 14:50

Again, we're talking vaguely about America, specifically about the UK. But I think the same rule applies. It's not that there isn't an interest in the Western anymore. It's just that publishers perceive that it's not as lucrative as it used to be. And I think that's why they don't commission everything has to be, as you said earlier, a brand. It's the William Johnston brand, it's the Ralph Compton brand. For an ordinary Western writer who just wants to write traditional Westerns, it's almost impossible now because it has to be part of a money-making brand. And we don't have anything like that in the UK, so that's why the Western has pretty much died the death in the UK.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

On the other hand, the branding, the William Johnston brand, the Ralph Compton brand, and we talk about the others, even the Piccadilly Westerns themselves were all published under house pseudonyms. They provided work for a tremendous amount of writers and still do.

SPEAKER_00 15:47

Absolutely correct. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

And so many of the writers who wrote for those series, that's where they cut their teeth and they learned how to write. You talk about John Harvey. He went on to bestsellerdom as a mystery writer after his career with the Piccadilly Cowboys. And there's many examples of that in America as well. Martin Cruz Smith is one and others. So it really did provide a fertile training ground.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

Absolutely. I think there's a character called Paul Bishop who did Diamondback Westerns, and he went on to scale giddy heights.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

You had to bring that up, didn't you? You're absolutely right. The first opportunity I had to write a Western was the Diamondback series of Adult Westerns published by Pinnacle in America. And I would not have had that opportunity if it hadn't been for, hey, we need another writer to do a book right now.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

I learned a lot. So that's how that came about. Was it it was literally, we need a book, come in and do it for us.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Ray Obsfeld was the editor of the series, and he was a professor at one of the local universities here, and I had bumped into him at a mystery convention. And we got talking, and he said, I'm doing this series diamondback. I wrote the first two new in the series. There's other writers that are writing the other entries. I need somebody to give me a book. Can you write one for me? That was my first novel under believe it or not, Pike Bishop was the pseudonym that they used. Yeah. From then on, I found my publishing feat and didn't look back.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

No, I'm the same. I don't look back. I don't look back. But I will say I've read the Diamondbacks. I read them when they first came out. And I completely agree. Whatever you say about whether it's the brand or the adult western, they are providing a market. People have to learn their trade somewhere. It's a bit like when you work in the theatre as an actor. Without repertory, there's very few places where you can actually learn your craft. And they've becoming fewer and fewer by the day. So absolutely we are grateful for these brands as a traditionalist. I just wish it could be that you had a selection between the likes of Lewis B. Patton or Clifton Adams, who I know you've mentioned before on this show. But we don't have that anymore. We have a very fairly rigid amount of books to choose from.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

But as you said, these books provided an apprenticeship, which we don't really see anymore in other trades. We used to have an apprentice electrician and an apprentice plumber. Those types of jobs have gone by the wayside now, but for authors, this was our apprenticeship. This was where we learned what to do and quite frankly what not to do.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

Yeah. And also it paid the bills, didn't it? It did. I keep talking about Lewis B. Patton, but I remember somebody said to him once, what is your inspiration for writing a book? And he said, An unpaid bill. Most Western writers, certainly in my experience, have always been very pragmatic, very down to earth, very nice, accommodating, the least pretentious form of writer you could hope to meet. In that regard, that hasn't changed at all. They're exactly the same now as they always were. Very businesslike, friendly, affable, helpful.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

When I go to the Western Writers of America Convention, obviously it's all Western writers, this is the friendliest, most helpful group of writers I've ever come across. There's no jealousy when a new writer's there, they all want to help that person. They don't want to discourage him thinking that he's going to take another slot from them in whatever publishing list there are. They just want to help people. They are so nice, even though they're fighting violent Westerns or whatever. When did you and Mike first start reading the Piccadilly Cowboys?

SPEAKER_00 19:29

Oh, I guess I was probably about 15. The first edge book I ever saw was number three. It was called Apache Death. I liked the cover, and I bought it, and it really was like no Western I had ever read before. I just got hooked on them from there. Nothing beats the series format. You've got another one coming along in a couple of months' time.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

This idea Mike comes to you with this throwaway idea of do you want to bring back the Piccadilly Cowboy writers in ebook form? Of course, the Kindle ebook revolution is just really beginning at that point, and you see this as a new business model. Did you guys know any of the Piccadilly writers at that point?

SPEAKER_00 20:11

We knew all of them. In fact, it's very interesting because around about 1979, I think it was Angus Wells, he said, You guys, you do this fan club. What you should do is take the idea of a Western magazine, take it to a proper publisher, and see if you can get some interest from them. Up until that point, we had literally been producing a photocopied newsletter. That's all we did. We took the idea to, as it was, we didn't know it at the time, but it was Britain's biggest magazine publisher. I think it was later owned by Robert Maxwell. And we pitched this idea to them and they said, yes, we're interested, we want to do it. When it came to payment for the idea, they offered us a very small amount of money. And of course, Mike and I, we were just 19, 20 years of age. We didn't know what was good money, what was bad money. So we didn't know what to do. And we went to, I think it was Lawrence James, and we said, Look, you're gonna have to help us out because these people are interested, they want to buy the idea, but we don't know whether we should just take this small amount of money or hold out for something more. What he did was he contacted the magazine publisher and he said, Unless you give these boys a realistic amount of money, the Piccadilly Cowboys will not write for your magazine. Whoa! Yeah, and the next thing we knew we got paid very handsomely for the idea. But this was the level of friendship we had. They were our friends and they appreciated what we were doing on their behalf, and so they tried to help us however they could.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

And they must have been very gratified when you came back with this idea we want to get you guys back into print.

SPEAKER_00 21:56

The odd thing was we really couldn't find the Piccadilly Cowboys. At that point. The Edge books, I think, were in the process of being published by someone else. So we had to scratch around to find the first few books we actually published. I remember going to Mike Lineker and saying, Can we do the Bodie the Stalker series? And he said yes, which was very good of him because at that point we had no real track record. And then I got a friend of mine from Australia, a guy called Keith Heatherington, who wrote as Kirk Hamilton and Brett Wearing, and he allowed us to do his Madigan series. And so we gradually were able to tread water until we finally got back into touch with either the Piccadilly Cowboys or their estates, because by that time we'd lost a couple of them.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

Did you have trouble getting the rights back from the publishers themselves to republish these books, or did the authors actually own them, which would have been a very different situation from what it was in America?

SPEAKER_00 22:56

Our understanding was when the original contracts were signed, the idea of an e-book was unheard of. It just simply did not exist. And certainly in UK legal parlance, that is called unforeseen technology. So in effect, the e-book rights, the electronic rights, had always remained with the author. So that was how we got around that.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

That was the legal way Piccadilly Publishing could bring these books back as e-books.

SPEAKER_00 23:27

That's correct. Some authors did write to publishers and request a reversion of rights, as was their right to do that. But I think overall, unless a publisher was extremely prescient and knew that one day they would want the e-book rights, nobody allowed for that in contracts back in the day.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

No, it was unthinkable. And publishers caught on very quickly that if they tried to stop the authors with these e-book rights from publishing, they were find themselves legally at risk because they did not own those rights. And there were a couple of lawsuits that proved that, and then publishers backed off.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

Yeah, I think certainly at the beginning, a lot of publishers tried to retain the rights. And in fact, I can remember some publishers actually saying to us, if you make literally the guts of your ebook, you must not use a manuscript which has been subedited by our company. And that was fine because we were sub-editing the manuscripts anyway. So we didn't owe the publishers anything in that regard. But again, these are obstacles they try to throw in your way because they clearly want a piece of that business. And by then we had got the authors in question to sign up with us.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

At what point did you become Ben Bridges?

SPEAKER_00 24:45

I became Ben Bridges when Mike's daughter again phoned me up one day to tell me that his sister, Leslie Bridges, had just given birth to a baby boy whose name was going to be Ben. And I remember saying to him, Ben Bridges, what a great name for a Western writer. And so I had that there and then. So that's when I became Ben Bridges.

SPEAKER_01 25:06

Had you been writing novels at that time, or was that the impetus that started you?

SPEAKER_00 25:12

No, I'd written a lot of books by that time, but none of which got published. I'd written probably about 19 books with no success whatsoever. And I was moaning one day to a guy called Peter Watts, who wrote many westerns under the name Matt Chisholm. I said, I can't get anybody to buy these books. And he said, Send me your best manuscript. I will look at it and I will tell you where you're going wrong. And if you can't take criticism, you will never become a writer. I sent him a manuscript called Shimmering Silver. Eventually it came back through the mail because you were going back a lot of years, it was snail mail. And the manuscript was covered in comments, but those comments taught me everything I needed to know. Where I'd gone wrong, what I should have done, what I shouldn't have done, how I could have done it better. And I still apply those rules even now. So I owe a lot of that to Peter Watts.

SPEAKER_01 26:07

As you became Ben Bridges and you begin to have some success. Now for a writer, 19 books without any success for a lot of people is I'm not doing this anymore. But you had continued to pursue this. Was writing a compulsion for you in some ways?

SPEAKER_00 26:23

Absolutely. I wanted to be a writer since I was a very small boy, and I just couldn't stop even if I wanted to, really. Tried all sorts. I tried to write horror stories, I tried to write westerns, I tried all kinds of different things, and nothing would take on. And the reason for that, I guess you could say was I was not able to find anywhere where I could really learn my craft, which goes back to what we said earlier. But once I saw this manuscript that Peter had edited for me, it was like a Bible for me, and I've used it ever since.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

That's fantastic. So great we have mentors, and that they allow us to look inside their world and learn from them. And it's an amazing thing. I've learned from so many writers myself over the years. I learned to plot from Dick Francis, not personally, but I took two copies of Dick Francis' paperback and stripped out all the pages and laid them out on the floor, and then went through with a yellow marker to find the plot beats he had in almost every book. And I realized I loved his book so much, but they did have a certain sameness to them that was very successful, and I was able to learn that by really examining what another writer had done successfully.

SPEAKER_00 27:36

I did that with the Sundance books by John Benty. I loved the Piccadilly Cowboy books, but I remember reading a Sundance book, thinking, my goodness, this is the way it should be done. He was an enormous influence on me, as I know he has been on you.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

He has, especially his Fargo series, and of course you've brought both of those back into ebook print and made them available for so many new readers. You're to be commended for that because you've done it not just with the Piccadilly Cowboys, but with so many others.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

I often think this is like being a kid and having the biggest toy train set in the world, because you can play with all these wonderful books you read when you were growing up and bring them back to a new audience. If you're lucky, you get to know the authors very well. For example, I know you've touched on Australia, but Marshall Grover, the author of the Larry and Stretch Westerns, he enjoyed a wonderful, a truly wonderful correspondence that lasted for about 10 or 15 years. And it all began with a fan letter from me, just to say, Dear Mr. Grover, I didn't know his name was Leonard Mears at the time. Dear Mr. Grover, I've read your books since I was about ten years old, and I really love them. Len's problem was he got interested in you. He always called it a fault, but it wasn't. He didn't just say, Thank you very much, nice of you to write, goodbye. He got interested in you. So he would write back and say, Tell me, what's life like over there? What do you do? And eventually one letter I received and he just said, I hope you don't mind me asking. And I'm thinking, My God, what's he gonna ask? And he said, Do you mind if I leave my entire collection of author's copies to you in my will? You we're talking 746 books. He said, Because you are the only one who will appreciate them.

SPEAKER_01 29:24

That's breathtaking.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

It was to think there was this ten-year-old kid he used to read, Marshall Grover, who then becomes the recipient of the entire collection of this author's work. It's humbling in its way because there's no way you see that coming when you're a kid. And most of us would probably have grown out of it anyway, but I never did. And he was truly one of the most wonderful men I've ever met. And I must say I've met a lot of them in the Western business.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

That's a beautiful story. That's fantastic. In the podcast look at German Westerns and Australian Westerns and Westerns from other countries, many of their indigenous authors are not known outside of their country. In other words, American readers really don't know these people, even though they've written hundreds of Westerns. But with British Western writers, some of them did make a strong transition over to America. I'm thinking of J.T. Edson, I'm thinking of Oliver Strange, I'm thinking of Matt Chisholm. Why do you think these guys were able to make that transition? And were they successful in England before they became successful in America? You know the history of this better than I do.

SPEAKER_00 30:32

The short answer is yes, they were very successful here in the UK. JT Edson remains the best-selling British Western author of all time. We do the e-books, and I have to tell you, they sell by the thousands. They really do. Wow. The machisms are still very popular. Oliver Strange is almost mythic in its success in, of all places, India. Not so much here in the UK, but in India, the sudden books are still bestsellers. We're talking about books that are 90 odd years old now, but they're still very popular. The other answer to your question is that I think it was being in the place at the right time. It was simply a case of timing.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

And that's the way it is in so much of creative life. It's timing. It has made the Western truly international. We now see, especially with the British writers, we have this crossover into America that we don't see with the other countries. And I think that makes that even more special.

SPEAKER_00 31:35

I always felt, particularly with the Cleveland Westerns from Australia, that there were so many of them, and some of them are actually pretty good, that they would have made more of an impact in America. But Cleveland always saw its market as being Australia and New Zealand. I don't think they necessarily looked further afield.

SPEAKER_01 31:54

The other interesting thing is, especially with the Cleveland Westerns, they weren't quite what Americans would consider novels. They were novelettes. They were produced in a very pulpy way. And this was happening in Germany and elsewhere. These 25,000 words or 30,000-word novelettes were being produced as novels. And they weren't necessarily being sold in the bookstores. They were being sold in the supermarkets and the drugstores and the sundry stores. And found that audience there, I don't think that audience would have been found in America.

SPEAKER_00 32:27

No, it's interesting because I know that Leisure Books did a few double novel editions in paperback. I think they did about four Benedict and Brazos westerns, they did about four Bannerman the Enforcer Westerns, and a couple of standalone westerns. And they presented them as two books for the price of one. And I guess they sold, but I don't think they were necessarily marketed to their real strengths. If they had presented them as this is a series, folks, you can read more than one of these about these characters. But they never did. So you bought the book or you didn't buy the book. Then if you actually read the book, you discovered, oh yeah, they're continuing characters. But where do you go from there? If you don't know that these books came from Australia and there's actually about another forty or fifty books in the series, it all ends there. But Cleveland certainly knew their market and they didn't stray from their traditional market.

SPEAKER_01 33:22

And it makes it a complete nightmare for anal retentive collectors who think they can have every Western on the planet. It just ain't gonna happen. There's just too many of them.

SPEAKER_00 33:33

I'm sorry, sorry, when you said anal retentive western collectors, my ears picked up because I knew you were talking about me.

SPEAKER_01 33:43

It's so hard to keep up with it all.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

It is, Paul, but that's part of the pleasure, the anticipation of waiting for the next adventure. What's the guy gonna get into this time? Is he gonna be in the frozen wastes of Alaska? Is he gonna be in the burning deserts of Arizona? This is what keeps the interest in the reader. We just love to keep reading about the same characters.

SPEAKER_01 34:06

Now careful because I'm in recovery and you're making me feel like I'm gonna fall off the wagon here when it comes to collecting.

SPEAKER_00 34:13

Never, I wouldn't do that to you, Paul. I've heard the rumors.

SPEAKER_01 34:17

What's coming up with Piccadilly Publishing?

SPEAKER_00 34:19

Okay, what's new with Piccadilly Publishing? Well, we have recently had the great good fortune to acquire the rights in several Angus Wells books. What that means is that we're now able to publish the complete run of Jubilee. We're going to do Gunslinger, we're doing Breed, which was always a very popular series, and some various other things. We've also just acquired some stuff from America, the Latigo series by Dean Owen, the Hawk series by the pen name was Brett Sanders, but that was also Dean Owen. We've also acquired two more Sundance books by Dean Owen, writing as Jack Slade. We've got a few other things coming up. We've got a couple of war series coming, Killers by Lawrence James, and we've got the Revenger, which is an executioner knockoff, written by Terry Harknett. And they're really good. I'm really enjoying those at the moment. So the short answer is you ain't seen nothing yet. Keep watching this space.

SPEAKER_01 35:21

And for Ben Bridges?

SPEAKER_00 35:22

Dear old Ben, in between doing all the editing and donkey work at Piccadilly Publishing, he is about two-thirds of the way through a new O'Brien, which is called Justice Is Red.

SPEAKER_01 35:37

Dave, there's the clanging of the Chuck Wagon Triangle telling me it's time to wrap up this episode with some shootouts and shout-outs. I'm really glad you joined me here today. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time and your friendship. And I hope we'll be able to talk again in the future.

SPEAKER_00 35:51

I hope so, Paul. It's been a real privilege and a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 35:54

Take care, my friend. And you thanks to our Six Gun Justice Patreon subscribers for their one-time or monthly support. If you are so inclined, you can help cover the cost of the podcast by using the button at the top of our website, sixgunjustice.com. Prior Six Gun Justice podcast episodes continue to be available on all major podcast streaming platforms. Until we meet again, be kind to each other, be kind to yourself, and may all your trails be happy. Adios for now. I'm out of here. Let's ride.