The Best Western Stories of Wayne D. Overholser ed. by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg, and: The Best Western Stories of Steve Frazee ed. by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (review)

Reviews 141 arise from the affliction the town and its people suffer but do not comprehend. Though the novel is melodramatic in structure, with a fated quality like Greek tragedy hanging over all the characters, Woolley is a master of the shifting empathic viewpoint that makes Time & Place not just one person’s, but every­ one’sstory. Professor Tom Pilkington of Tarleton State University is editor of this new TCU series, whose aim is “to both publish and preserve significant Texas literature.” With these fine volumes, both illustrated and designed by the Whiteheads of Austin, the series is out of the gate at a gallop. MARSHALL TERRY Southern Methodist University The Best Western Stories of Wayne D. Overholser. Edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Uni­ versity Press, 1984. 199 pages, $14.95.) The Best Western Stories of Steve Frazee. Edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. 296 pages, $14.95.) These two volumes mark the beginning of a new series on western writers to be published by the Southern Illinois University Press which will be a welcome addition to the growing literature by and about popular western storytellers. The collection of sixteen of Wayne D. Overholser’s stories isintro­ duced by his son, Stephen Overholser. While Stephen Overholser’s introduction does lack a detached, scholarly perspective, it offers an evocative and sensitive description of the development of a major writer of popular Westerns who began his professional life as a school teacher and who disciplined himself to work at writing diligently and persistently until he became one of those privileged few who could support himself and his family by writing alone. Stephen’s account of his father’s development as a successful writer is a fine case study for those interested in the marketplace training so many of our talented popular storytellers received in the pulp world of the 1930s and 1940s. Wayne D. Overholser produced over four hundred short stories and a hundred novels during his writing career. Always interested in incorporating “historical realities” into his fiction, he was also interested in encouraging his readers to establish an understanding with their past. One notable lack in the volume is an explanation of the criteria used to select these sixteen stories as the “best” of Overholser. As a testament to Overholser’s abilities as a fine western writer, this volume is long overdue and will, upon careful examination, substantiate the claims the editors and Stephen Overholser make for his literary achievements. 142 Western American Literature The collection of eleven of Steve Frazee’s stories is preceded by an analytical introduction directed at countering a negative assessmentof Frazee’s work contained in the Encyclopedia of Frontier and Western Fiction. Steve Frazee, with fifty-three books and about a hundred short stories to his credit, has not been as prolific as Wayne D. Overholser. Yet Bill Pronzini maintains that Frazee did develop an admirable prose style marked by five strengths: 1. “the ability to tell a convincing, satisfying and unusual story even when employing stock characters,” 2. an “understanding of the nuances of character, of what motivates people, of the good and bad that exist side by side in the human animal, of the conflicts that rage between enemies and friends,” 3. “the ability to vividly and realistically depict a variety of Western settings and to do so in such a way that the settings become primary characters in their own right,” 4. “the ability to build and maintain suspense,” and 5. “his prose style,” which is “always terse, smoothly constructed, evocative, it takes on at times a kind of dark, rough-edged lyricism, . . At least in this volume we are provided with reasons for including these eleven stories which are all from the 1950s, a time when most of Frazee’s fiction was published. To quarrel with the choice of stories in these volumes is probably not worthy of our time and efforts as students of popular western literature. But to study these stories and decide for ourselves what contributions the authors have made to American letters is both proper and pleasurable. We probably ought to...