What a great cover that promises so much and uncannylly delivers.Its a lovely collection of stories and essays from Michael Moorcock, communicating the origins of his love for the Wild West. Thirteen entries, thats including the introduction, offerring a Moorcockian mix of the fictional and the factional. It hints at a lifetime of dreams inspired by a vision of the West in old fashioned technicolour, of the type you find in view finder slides. Gary Cooper was a larger than life figure on and off the screen and proved a rich vein of inspiration. The cowboy Tom Mix is in there, as are Hopalong Cassidy and even Sherlock Holmes. Who finds himself way out west in a situation Conan Doyle would no doubt have found entirely plausible, probably.
There are also stories involving Michael Moorcock's own western creations; The Masked Buckaroo and the wonderfully named Johnny Lonesome. Engaging adventures coming from a good place, the writer's love of The West. The essays on different subjects as good as any of the stories in this collection. The western themed essays aside I found myself drawn to his overview of the Adventures Of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot.With a solid name like Arkwright how could he fail to be anything less than a Northern English Working Class heroic archetyke.
