For the past two decades, enthusiasts have mourned the demise of westerns while the rest of the world has gone about its business, unaware that anyone could care about a genre relegated to a few dark shelves at the local bookstore. Westerns were very popular for over a hundred years. Not only were they popular in the United States, but the whole world devoured them. The western was a staple of fiction, Hollywood, television, and daydreaming. What happened?

Overexposure, for one thing. In 1959, there were 26 Western series on prime-time television. On the big screen, John Wayne brandished his Winchester at countless bad guys. Pocket Westerns could be found in abundance at any drugstore, most of them with Louis L’Amour’s name on the cover. The big names did wonderful and quality things, but the demand was so great that a lot of garbage was printed and it was printed on celluloid.

The common perception is that the western genre is dying. Yet somehow Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and many others make a good living from westerns. Robert B. Parker temporarily dumped private detective Spencer for a trilogy about two guns for hire. Parker’s Appaloosa grossed a respectable $ 28 million at the box office, while 3:10 at Yuma grossed more than $ 70 million. As recently as 1992, Unforgiven won the Oscar for Best Picture, the first western to receive that honor. Old Western DVD sales are doing well, and Louie L’Amour, Zane Gray, and even Max Brand still sell enough books to make their prodigy happy.

So the Westerner is not dead, but it is certainly not the rage, especially for the next generation. Thrillers, fantasies, science fiction and romance novels take up all the shelf space. Action movie soundtracks are full of revving engines, not thunderous helmets. And television … well, television just broadcasts another permutation of CSI or Law & Order. In fact, the western excesses of the late 1950s are repeated today with police shows. Perhaps tired audiences are ready for a western revival.

Maybe. But what kind of western? Probably a new breed. There have been three different Western eras. I call them the healthy, imperfect hero and the violent times.

The healthy era lasted until the late 1950s. He was personified by Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, and other cowboys in white hats. Instead of killing the bad guys, they shot the guns out of their hands. If someone was killed, they deserved it, damn it, and their death would be bloodless, with a promise like a hand on the chest to cover the unsightly bullet holes. As in all eras, there was overlap, and during the later stages of the healthy phase Wayne and others made more realistic westerns, but these, of course, were quarantined in theaters and only screened at night.

The imperfect hero of the sixties was not the antihero of today. He just had flaws, like Josh Randall, the bounty hunter played by Steve McQueen in Wanted Dead or Alive, or the gambling Maverick brothers who proudly proclaimed themselves cowards. Richard Boone was dressed in black and looked petty like a weapon for hire at Paladin. The Magnificent Seven were the reluctant saviors of a small Mexican town, and they were imperfect for a man. Again, you were overlapping. The spaghetti westerns of the late 1960s took the genre into new territory.

Starting in the 1970s, the antihero ruled a border full of violence in slow motion. The violent era was started by Sergio Leone with his trilogy Man with No Name (1967) and Sam Peckinpaw with The Wild Bunch (1969). From that point on, blood red dominated the color spectrum and the hero was just one step away from the bad guy. This kind of raw realism was deemed inappropriate for television until cable brought Deadwood (2004) into our living rooms.

Whats Next? Fortunately, these eras do overlap, so seeing the current direction of the western genre is not conjecture. Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and Robert B. Parker have departed, to varying degrees, from the age of violence. They point out that the future of westerns is a historically accurate narrative. If the story occurs in the past, we call it a historical novel, with the exception of westerns. They are consigned to a niche genre that still bears the stain of pulp fiction. But a story that takes place on the American frontier in the 19th century has as much legitimacy to be called a historical novel as Ken Follett’s World Without End.

McMurtry, McCarthy and Parker have found the key. Good writing, sound plots that move with confidence and great characterization. They focus on characters who are forced to deal with difficulties and human frailty at a particular moment in history. These are the basic elements of a good storytelling. In fact, a Western historical novel can be action-adventure, but it can also borrow elements from detective, suspense, romance, mystery, and other genres. Lonesome Dove took from all of them. The world has grown tired of cookie-cutter police shows and endless permutations of suspense stories about secret societies that are about to take over the world. Before Daniel Radcliffe can learn to turn in a six-shot revolver, Westerns will once again dominate the page and screen.