{"id":10049,"date":"2016-01-23T08:16:10","date_gmt":"2016-01-23T15:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=10049"},"modified":"2016-01-24T07:23:37","modified_gmt":"2016-01-24T14:23:37","slug":"in-livingston-a-night-to-honor-acclaimed-prolific-novelist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/01\/in-livingston-a-night-to-honor-acclaimed-prolific-novelist\/","title":{"rendered":"In Livingston, a night to honor an acclaimed, prolific novelist"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Wheeler\"

John Zumpano<\/p>

Richard S. Wheeler reads from his new novel “Anything Goes” at Elk River Books in Livingston on Thursday.<\/p><\/div>\n

Livingston came out for one of its own Thursday night.<\/p>\n

Richard S. Wheeler, for my money our best living Western writer, had a new novel, “Anything Goes,” to offer, and an overflow crowd of friends, colleagues and admirers filled the upstairs reading room at Elk River Books to hear from him.<\/p>\n

Elk River co-owner Marc Beaudin noted that this was Wheeler\u2019s 71st novel, a take-your-breath-away total by any measure but also one surely too small. When you include those written under other names, such as Wheeler\u2019s Axel Brand mystery novels, the total pushes 80, or beyond.<\/p>\n

That the 80-year-old Wheeler\u2019s first title didn\u2019t appear until he was in his 40s, after a career in newspaper journalism and as a book editor \u2026 well, the output becomes almost unfathomable.<\/p>\n

The best part: His work has been consistently top-drawer for all that time, and he has the acclaim to prove it. He\u2019s an Owen Wister Award winner for lifetime achievement. His books, mostly in the genre of Westerns but too broadly drawn and imagined to be jammed into a narrow category, have won six Spur Awards. The man is the real deal.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>So it was that Thursday night seemed like a rare privilege, a chance to see and hear from a master craftsman in his twilight. It became something more than that toward the end of the evening, as Wheeler entertained questions from the gathering. Ever understated, he noted that he wasn\u2019t writing anymore.<\/p>\n

If that\u2019s true, he gave us not only a new book Thursday but also a valedictory. We\u2019ll not see the likes of him again. (Actually, we will. Such is Wheeler\u2019s output that while he may not be actively writing today, he has enough productive yesterdays that we\u2019ll see another new book, a Western called “Easy Pickings,” in May.)<\/p>\n

So, then, let us praise Richard S. Wheeler, who was never the next big thing, whose work has too many genre elements to be celebrated by the literary snobs (read: he writes stories that entertain, if you can imagine the horror), and whose tools were not incomprehensibly airbrushed sentences but rather the hardiest, most precise words and a nose for research that allowed him to faithfully render any era.<\/p>\n

It seems almost a bonus that he is a gentleman of uncommon grace and generosity, and one whose sense of self is rooted in a healthy place. He noted Thursday night that he hasn\u2019t drawn an employment check in about four decades, relying instead on his boundless imagination and his work ethic to turn out new work and land yet another publishing contract.<\/p>\n

\u201cNever very big,\u201d he said, \u201cbut enough to keep me going.\u201d Privately, he has counseled younger writers to keep their debt low, their manner of living modest and their keyboards warm. It\u2019s damned good advice.<\/p>\n

\"Career\"

John Zumpano<\/p>

Just some of the almost 80 novels from Richard S. Wheeler’s career were on sale Thursday night.<\/p><\/div>\n

For the prospective writer, or anyone who wants to live a life of proportion, there\u2019s much more wisdom in Wheeler\u2019s memoir of a literary life, “An Accidental Novelist.” He learned early that he could only write as well as he could, that the other factors that make a book go aren\u2019t easily quantified or replicated.<\/p>\n

Books for which he held great hope sometimes tanked. Those that seemed middling efforts sometimes soared. And the business of publishing, so peculiar and insular, offered him no end of delight and disgust. Could you imagine writing a story set in the American West and then receiving the book, only to see African Cape buffalo stampeding across the cover?<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have to. Wheeler has lived it, survived it, and come to learn that there are more important things.<\/p>\n

In “An Accidental Novelist,” he leaves us this as a final paragraph:<\/p>\n

\u201cMy death is not far away now. I do not know what lies beyond the grave, if anything. So I have invented my own eternity. In my blue heaven, only love is eternal. Love carries us into the life to come, beyond the beyond. When we love someone, we vest that person with eternity. We fashion our heaven out of our earthly life, and populate it with the ones we have loved. The person who has loved only himself will have only a bare room. But I am among the fortunate, for I have loved deeply and well, and all my beloved ones will be with me, family and friends, the women I have loved, the writers I have esteemed, the pets who came to live with me. My heaven will be full and not at all lonely. And maybe, because I have been loved, I\u2019ll be in other heavens too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Could any of us hope for more?<\/p>\n

Craig Lancaster is a novelist who lives in Billings.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/h5>\n
WHEELER\u2019S LATEST:<\/h5>\n

In Richard S. Wheeler\u2019s new novel, “Anything Goes,” he turns his gifted eye for Western characters toward the Beausoleil Brothers Follies, a second- or third-rate vaudeville troupe making its way through the remote mining towns of Montana.<\/p>\n

The first chapter, which Wheeler read Thursday in Livingston, is a humdinger of an introduction to the haggard cast of has-beens and never-wases, including two overstimulated capuchin monkeys. The book is dedicated to “my wife, the one, the only Sue Hart.” Hart, a longtime, beloved English professor at Montana State University Billings, died in 2014.<\/p>\n

Publisher<\/strong>: Forge Book
\nFormat<\/strong>: Hardcover<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Livingston came out for one of its own Thursday night. Richard S. Wheeler, for my money our best living Western writer, had a new novel, “Anything Goes,” to offer, and an overflow crowd of friends, colleagues and admirers filled the upstairs reading room at Elk River Books to hear from him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":10051,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[3681,3682,3680,2212],"class_list":["post-10049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-elk-river-books","tag-marc-beaudin","tag-richard-s-wheeler","tag-sue-hart","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10049\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}