Buddies in the Saddle: Ron Scheer

I finished my first Cash Laramie short story in over seven years and before I crossed the finish line, I spent some time with an old cowboy friend of mine named Ron Scheer. I met Ron online, here at Blogger, over our mutual appreciation for the Western genre. Before he sadly passed away in 2015, I had the distinct privilege of publishing his three volume series How The West Was Written with BEAT to a PULP. The third volume contains colloquial words he had found in the numerous classics he had read, and it was an indispensable resource while working on my latest hardboiled western. Thank you, Ron, for sharing this gem not only with me but with everyone.

How The West Was Written, Vol. 3 Review

Oscar Case takes a look at Ron Scheer's HOW THE WEST WAS WRITTEN, VOL. 3.

Miles To Lost Dog Creek Cover

Release date: August 2015

Remembering Ron Scheer

Lynda Scheer​ asked me to write a final post for Ron​'s Buddies in the Saddle blog. A very deep honor for a friend I loved very much. I hope you can take a few moments to join me over there in remembering Ron.

My West: The Sandhills of Nebraska by Ron Scheer

My West: The Sandhills of Nebraska by Ron Scheer. (I enjoy hearing Ron talk about the land he loves so much.)

How the West Was Written: Frontier Fiction, Vol. 2, 1907-1915 by Ron Scheer

During the years 1907–1915, frontier fiction boomed with new writers, and the success of Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) began to make itself felt in their work. That novel had made the bestseller lists for two years running. With the continued popularity of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, and the appearance of one-reeler westerns on movie screens, many featuring the adventures of Bronco Billy Anderson, the cowboy hero was becoming an established mythic figure in the public imagination.

For writers of popular fiction, the frontier was also a subject for exploring ideas drawn from current public discourse—ideas about character and villainy, women’s rights, romance and marriage, democracy and government, capitalism, race and social boundaries, and the West itself. With each new publication, they participated as well in an ongoing forum for how to write about the West and how to tell western stories. Taken together, the chapters of this book describe for modern-day readers and writers the origins of frontier fiction and the rich legacy it has left us as a genre. It is also a portal into the past, for it offers a history of ideas as preserved in popular culture of a century ago that continues to claim an audience today.

How the West Was Written: Frontier Fiction, Vol. 2, 1907-1915 by Ron Scheer is now available in print and Kindle formats.

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Praise for How the West Was Written: Vol. 1

“This is a splendid study of early western fiction, most of it written contemporaneously with the settlement of the American West. A surprising number of women authors are included among the sixty-some novels reviewed by the author. The book offers penetrating, rich, and lucid examinations of these early novels, and gives us a good understanding of where western fiction came from and how it has evolved. Highly recommended.”

—Richard S. Wheeler

Spur Award-winning author

“[Ron Scheer’s] scholarship is meticulous and the book is an enlightening contribution to American literature with this study of the Western, its roots and its themes. I’m proud to have it on my bookshelf. It’s unique in the canon, as far as I know.”

—Carol Buchanan

Spur Award-winning author

A Further Nod

What a nice way to end the year! Ron Scheer takes a look at my Further Adventures.

For Ron Scheer

My Dinner with Allen Ginsberg

Ron Scheer had asked if he ever told me the story of the time he had dinner with Beat legend Allen Ginsberg. Of course, that was too intriguing to pass on and thinking that it would be a perfect story for The Fall Creek Review (which I occasionally help find content for), I asked Ron if he wouldn't mind writing it up for TFCR. And, he kindly obliged. Here is "My Dinner With Allen Ginsberg" by Ron Scheer.

How the West Was Written: Frontier Fiction, 1880-1906 by Ron Scheer

This book began as a question about the origins of the cowboy western ... how it grew from Owen Wister’s bestseller, The Virginian (1902), to Zane Grey’s first novels a decade later. A reading of frontier fiction from that period, however, soon reveals that the cowboy western was only one of many different kinds of stories being set in the West.

Besides novels about ranching and the cattle industry, writers wrote stories about railroads, mining, timber, the military, politics, women’s rights, temperance, law enforcement, engineering projects, homesteaders, detectives, preachers and, of course, Indians, all of it an outpouring between the years 1880–1915. That brief 35-year period extends from the Earp-Clanton gunfight in Tombstone, Arizona, to the start of the First World War.

The chapters of How the West Was Written tell a story of how the western frontier fed the imagination of writers, both men and women. It illustrates how the cowboy is only one small figure in a much larger fictional landscape. There are early frontier novels in which he is the central character, while in others he’s only a two-dimensional, tobacco-chewing caricature, or just an incidental part of the scenery.

A reading of this body of work reveals that the best-remembered novel from that period, The Virginian, is only one among many early western stories. And it was not the first. The western terrain was used to explore ideas already present in other popular fiction—ideas about character, women, romance, villainy, race, and so on. A modern reader of early western fiction discovers that Wister’s novel was part of a flood of creative output. He and, later, Zane Grey were just two of many writers using the frontier as a setting for telling the human story.  –Ron Scheer

 

Currently available in ebook format for Kindle and in paperback. A second volume is in the works for the years 1907 - 1915.

Ron Scheer

Patti has an update on our friend Ron Scheer. I hope you click over there and leave a comment. Ron's one of the good guys and I know will appreciate the well wishes.

Ron Scheer's Bookshelves

You’re looking at one wall of the room I use for an office. The books across the bottom shelf on the left (plus three on top and three on the floor) are references for blogging and the book project I’m working on. The book itself in its present form is in the stacks of paper on the floor.

The rest of the books are mostly western fiction and some history. The stack between the cases is the to-read-next pile, and it hardly ever seems to sink below where it is now. About a third of that bunch are original editions of 100-year-old novels. There are more on the middle shelf of the bookcase on the right.

The framed photo on the far right is my attractive wife and copyeditor. The bears and koala are part of a collection that has followed me over the years. Charles Gramlich will recognize the framed cover of his KILLING TRAIL peeking out atop the left bookcase.

A Rip Through Time Update

A RIP THROUGH TIME is now available at Amazon for $0.99.

Dr. Robert Berlin has created The Baryon Core, a powerful device with the ability to predict the future and retrodict the past by tracking the position and vector of every particle in the universe. Berlin swipes his own creation from The Company and disappears into history. The Company's time-cop Simon Rip and the sexy, brilliant Dr. Serena Ludwig join together to track Berlin and return the device. Their pursuit will take them back to the ice age and forward to the end of time.

A Rip through Time follows the time-cop's travels in a series of five short stories written by several of today's top pulp writers. Chris F. Holm opens the collection with the fast-paced "The Dame, the Doctor and the Device." Charles A. Gramlich's "Battles, Broadswords, and Bad Girls" and Garnett Elliott's "Chaos in the Stream" breath new life into the time travel story. Bringing the saga to a gripping conclusion in "Darkling in the Eternal Space" is Chad Eagleton, who then takes it a step further with a mesmerizing coda, "The Final Painting of Hawley Exton." And for all the time-traveling enthusiasts, Ron Scheer provides an insightful essay, "Are We Then Yet," which explores the mechanics of time travel in popular fiction.

Scheer Reviews Miles

Ron Scheer reviews the latest Gideon Miles story.

The Man From Laramie Review

Ron Scheer is one of the finest reviewers around and today he highlights The Man From Laramie.