Pulp Western

Portrait of Louis L’Amour by Fred Pfeiffer

 

(Regarding Louis L’Amour)

 

unclean heroes
find dust and mud
mission in antique
morality tales
standing up against
black hearts the
scorched soulless
gunmen of lawless
frontiers leather
loyalties animate
bile and bloodlust
for rustic cut justice

stark panoramas
give stage to droll
sagas of sage and
saguaro red rocks
tower prominent
primitive sentinels
marking old trails
through meandering
canyons dry gulches
where rustlers and
outlaws hole up
between felonies

crude prairie towns
stick built for vice
homely housed
behind false fronted
dens of iniquity
gamblers bordellos
all manner of rogues
painting intrigues
in violent colors
fierce clashes of black
hats with white hats
horse opera clichés

romanticized virtues
play out in saloons
with brass spittoon
etiquettes aces and
eights stained by
gunsmoke and guile
famous figures who
temper the fiction
familiarize history
rowdy raw characters
give great escape
from a dull afternoon

 

 
(Footnote: L’Amour’s novels of the American west have sold more than 200,000,000 copies worldwide)

 

 

From my books Ephemera and Legacies (vol. 2)

Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler 1888-1959             American Novelist

 

blackjacks and bullets

brick-built duplicitous dames

bourbon for breakfast

 

************************

“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” – Raymond Chandler in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1944)

Bond

Ian Fleming
Photo from pinterest.com

escape from uncertain
commitments of loyalty
black and white
starkly recolors reality
simplifies quandaries
troubling the
unsettled mind

no muddlings of gray
in fictional formulas
rife with exotica
globe-trotting lusty
adventures with
dangerous svelte
femmes fatale
nifty ultra-tech gadgets
galore augment
cracking good
blood pumping action
an ethical feast for
the violent appetite
always and ever
to culminate in the
most highly conceived
innovative demise
of its dastardly dark
unambiguous villains

Fleming and Bond
always comfortably
counted among
guilty pleasures
a pair whose good
company lightens
a dull afternoon

******************

“History is moving pretty quickly these days,
and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.”
― Ian Fleming

Pulp Western

Louis L’Amour
Portrait by Fred Pfeiffer
from fredpfeifferartist.blogspot.com

(Regarding Louis L’Amour)

unclean heroes
find dust and mud
mission in antique
morality tales
standing up against
black hearts the
scorched soulless
gunmen of lawless
frontiers leather
loyalties animate
bile and bloodlust
for rustic cut justice

stark panoramas
give stage to droll
sagas of sage and
saguaro red rocks
tower prominent
primitive sentinels
marking old trails
through meandering
canyons dry gulches
where rustlers and
outlaws hole up
between felonies

crude prairie towns
stick built for vice
homely housed
behind false fronted
dens of iniquity
gamblers bordellos
all manner of rogues
painting intrigues
in violent colors
fierce clashes of black
hats with white hats
horse opera clichés

romanticized virtues
play out in saloons
with brass spittoon
etiquettes aces and
eights stained by
gunsmoke and guile
famous figures who
temper the fiction
familiarize history
rowdy raw characters
give great escape
from a dull afternoon

(Footnote: L’Amour’s novels of the American west have sold more than 200,000,000 copies worldwide)