Genre hopping by Eric Beetner

 If you write in an alternate non-mystery genre, which one - and why? If you don't, which genre would you most like to write in, and what attracts you to it?

I have written several Westerns, some with my name on them and others under pen names. I love a good western. Granted they get segregated as a separate genre, but really 99% of all westerns are just crime novels on horseback. 

I’ll admit to being under-read in Westerns, but I am very well versed in western films. The golden age of Westerns is the 1950s, with classics of the genre appearing in every decade. At one time they were the most popular genre of film in the U.S., and Western stars were the top box office earners for many years in a row. At the same time Western paperbacks were flying off the shelves.

In novels, Westerns are often tight potboilers with action, gunplay, men standing alone with only their moral code to keep them warm at night. Many are cop stories like any police procedural, just with a tin star sheriff instead of a detective. 

I’ve written period pieces, but also contemporary western. The western that we most recognize is a period-set vision of the wild west, those post-Civil War years of westward expansion and lawlessness on the plains and in the rockies.

But all that is window dressing. Westerns can be noir stories, P.I. stories, romances, epic family sagas. Anything and everything goes, so long as you dress it up with ten gallons hats, snakeskin boots, faithful horses and plenty of trail dust.

I’ve written short form horror, to only mild success. I read a lot of horror in my teens and have watched more than my share of horror films. For whatever reason I can’t seem to crack that market, though. Most of my horror short stories have been rejected. I do think it becomes hard when I over-saturated myself in horror at a young age and now little to nothing scares me. I’ll attribute it to that and not the fact that I’m a terrible writer.

I don’t think I ever have a sci-fi novel in me. I just don’t think that way. Same with romance. But I hope to keep doing westerns now and then. And I’ve been reading more. Many contemporary westerns like John Larison’s Whiskey When We’re Dry or Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers have been some of my favorite books in recent years. And I’ve long been a huge fan of Steve Hockensmith’s Holmes On The Range series which are overtly mystery novels set in a classic western milieu. You could also do a lot worse than the collected Western stories of Elmore Leonard, a massive volume that entertains over and over. 

As for me, I wrote three books in the Lawyer series for Beat to a Pulp. I’ve written under a pen name in the Gunslinger series, the Black Rose series and most recently, the Concho series of contemporary westerns. It’s a welcome break from a straight crime novel for me, and one I know I’ll return to.