Writing popular fiction

the war story's simplicity and gives it verisimilitude. Most Westerns begin with a carefully delineated hero and an equally obvious villain. The protagonist seems 100% good, while the antagonist is 100% bad. However, in the course of the story's development, the hero becomes less admirable than he was at the outset, while the villain grows gradually more sympathetic and less starkly evil than he seemed in the beginning. By the climax and conclusion of the novel, the reader's main concern is still centered on the hero, but he has accepted good and evil in both antagonist and protagonist. The overwhelming thematic point of the Western is: The good man cannot remain perfectly good in a world full of evil; some of it will have to rub off on him if he is going to survive. Naturally, if that philosophical point is to be accepted, its reverse must also be true: The bad man cannot remain perfectly bad in a world that contains some good; a little of it will have to rub off on him if he is to survive. This character development resembles the changes wrought on a Gothic heroine as she passes through a story, though here the author's approach and tone must be a good bit more profound than it is in the Gothic-romance.
    Brian Garfield's
Gun Down
uses this Western theme and style of characterization. Sam Burgade, a retired lawman, is shown in the opening sequences of the book as a man of virtue and heroism. The antagonist, Zach Provo, whom Burgade put behind prison bars, is clearly a psychopath set upon obtaining revenge. Provo escapes from prison, kidnaps Burgade's virginal young daughter, Susan, and leads the retired lawman deep into the wild country where he intends to kill him. Susan is eventually raped, by several of Provo's murderous allies, in full sight of her father, but is at least rescued from death. By the end of the novel, we have begun to sympathize somewhat with Zach Prove, because we learn that Sam Burgade accidentally shot and killed the antagonist's wife the first time he arrested him. Provo, who loved her quite a bit, has never really recovered from the loss. Burgade, on the other hand, seems to have suffered little guilt for Provo's wife's death and is too quick to write it off as being Provo's fault for having placed her in the middle of a confrontation with the law. Also, by the end, we see that Sam Burgade is a craftier, more deadly man than any of the outlaws who have taken his daughter: he kills seven of the eight and saves his daughter's life. We still prefer him to Provo and look upon him as an admirable, good man, but we no longer see him as all white and his enemies as all black.
    Perhaps the major reason why this characterization gimmick has become more associated with the Western than any other genre lies in the nature of the background against which a Western is set. Most Western novels take place in the years between 1865 and 1899, when there was little organized law enforcement and when local and territorial law was often as corrupt as the outlaws it pretended to be interested in apprehending. Rich men owned the large ranches; they viciously destroyed competition and killed and financially ruined other ranchers and sheep herders. Rich men owned most of the important mines and paid little heed to prior claims staked by powerless individuals. Whole towns were often run by companies or by one or two men from whom all the money in the area generated. This was rarely a time and a place for individual enterprise unless the individual was willing to take enormous risks and was willing to fight for his own. In such a land, the outlaw could easily be elevated into the role of a folk hero. He thumbed his nose at the handful of men in power, stole from them, and fought his way free of all pursuit. To the average man of that time, the outlaw was not just a villain, a law breaker, and a thief—but something of a symbol of each man's soul set free. Unless his only crime was murder, and unless his victims were helpless women or children, no one could really view him without
some
favor.
    Although the modern reader lives in a more civilized society, he too often feels put upon by forces too large for him to deal with—big business, large institutions, the government itself—and he can't help but sympathize a little with the man who makes his way outside traditional bounds of permissible behavior. That is not to say that he will cheer the antagonist and boo the hero. Instead, he will expect well-rounded portraits