17 Books Like The Cowboy Way

I have always thought Burke should write a standalone about Clete Purcell, sidekick to Robicheaux and here he has done so. It is an incisive and humane look at the character of a complex hero who has to sort out an internecine plot involving fentanyl and a Nazi group at work.

Can a painter create an image more lifelike than reality? Elmore Leonard proved a novelist can mirror the chaos of reality and still render it an interesting read. There is no recognition of traditional heroes, and the line between right and wrong blurs beyond recognition. He paints reality on a canvas and compels us all to turn the pages. Having marveled at the work, I must point out there is little inspirational or life affirming in this work, and it captures much of the essence of humanity.

Here is another masterpiece.

It purports to be historical fiction set in the Old West, following one of the last great cattle drives. Yet within a few chapters, it begins to feel like a series of episodes from Grimm’s fairy tales.

I remember at UC Irvine, where I earned my Fiction MFA, several fellow writers were reading this novel alongside me. We kept stopping each other in the hall or at cocktail parties to relive this or that chapter, struggling to understand how it could be both so entertaining and so good.

The fact that it is long—a real doorstopper of a book—adds to its “too-big-for-one-genre” feel.

I found this book suspenseful and couldn’t put it down. I was kept on the edge of my seat as to the fate of the characters until the end.

The fact that one of the characters was a Vietnam veteran and it affected his life interested me. I also found the setting of Alaska in the 1970s interesting and informative. 

This riveting novel brings us into the lives of Russian snipers during the WW II siege of Stalingrad.

We live in a basement, learn something of extreme patience, and get a sense of how people barely remain sane in pressure-cooker situations. What struck me most were the women. One was a sniper with extreme convictions. Others were there for the pleasure of the men. But the best part of the novel was the cat-and-mouse game between opposing snipers. 

Not only did I learn something about warfare, but I couldn’t put the book down.

I was delighted to discover this compilation of personal accounts by enlisted men who’d served in the U.S. Army during the settling of the American West. Though the educated class of officers left extensive documentation of their lives on the frontier, the mostly illiterate rank and file were unable to chronicle their experiences. Rickey filled this void in the early sixties by interviewing over three hundred troopers, both black and white, who were still alive at that time.

The wealth of detail they supplied was invaluable to me in creating both Cathy’s voice and the world she passed as a man in.

Published more than a hundred years after the first Black regiments were formed during the Civil War, historian William Leckie’s marvel of a book was a landmark achievement. For the first time, the extraordinary contributions of the Buffalo Soldiers were documented and celebrated in exhaustive detail.

The Buffalo Soldiers was the Rosetta Stone I used for translating the few bald facts we have about Cathy’s life into a language vivid and vibrant enough to match her courageous decision to risk everything in pursuit of a life of freedom and dignity.

First published in 1967, the book is still in print. Attesting to the volume’s enduring popularity, nearly a dozen revisions and updates have been released since then.

Drawing from military records, newspaper articles, personal correspondence, and other source materials, historian Billington shows that despite often extreme prejudice, inferior equipment, and intense bigotry from the citizens they were protecting, the Buffalo Soldiers not just survived but triumphed. I particularly appreciated his focus on New Mexico as Cathy was posted in that state.

Billington has excavated a wealth of detail about the daily life of a Buffalo Soldier. He writes of them storing pickled meats, molasses, pickles, and vegetables, making 25,000 adobe bricks, burning smoky fires to control mosquitoes, and repairing hard to replace shoes.  I found this granular examination of daily life invaluable in bringing Cathy to life.

I based one of the most riveting portions of Daughter on Carlson’s meticulously-researched account of what one newspaper called the “Staked Plains Horror.” And horror it was.  In the middle of a dangerously dry summer, forty Buffalo Soldiers led by white officers set off on a routine scouting expedition. Several days later three Black troopers returned to report that all the men of Troop A were missing and presumed dead.

Eventually, all but four of the party made it back to Fort Concho with tales of having survived by drinking the blood of their dead horses and their own urine. Carlson’s careful examination of the records of the court-martial trials that followed reveal what a large role the officers’ bigotry and ineptitude played in triggering this catastrophe.

If you’d like to understand why Elmer Kelton was voted the greatest Western writer of all time by the Western Writers of America read The Wolf and the Buffalo. Though every word of the dozens of books he authored are saturated in the authenticity of the Texas cattleman that Kelton was, this novel holds a special place in my heart.

Published in 1980 before there was a widespread appreciation for the achievements of the Buffalo Soldiers against great odds, Kelton presents fully-realized portraits of the formerly enslaved men tasked with protecting white settlers. 

All Kelton’s writing is alive with the language of the frontier. I am grateful to the master for helping me feel the rhythm of 19th Century, Western speech. On just one page, Kelton has his characters speak of fires that they “get to goin’,” of someone departing rapidly “skinning out the door,” and of how,… show more.