November 21, 2025 • 29 mins
Newt talks with Stephen Hunter, a renowned author and former chief film critic for The Washington Post, about his latest book, "The Gun Man Jackson Swagger." This novel is a prequel set in the 1890s, focusing on Jack Swagger, an ancestor of the famous Bob Lee Swagger character. Hunter, who won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism, shares insights into his career, including his transformative experience at The Baltimore Sun during the 1970s, where he was part of a movement to modernize the newspaper. Their conversation explores Hunter's writing style, which is heavily influenced by his extensive background in film, resulting in novels that often read like movies. "The Gun Man Jackson Swagger" is described as a tribute to the American Western, filled with cinematic references and innovative portrayals of gunfights. Hunter also discusses the cultural significance of the gunfighter myth and his intent to restore this figure's place in American culture.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of News World. I am delighted to
have one of my all time favorite authors back on
the show, somebody who I admired greatly, Steven Hunter. I've
been reading his books about Bob Lee Sweger, starting with
the very first One Point of Impact in nineteen ninety three,
to target It in twenty twenty two. He's joining me
(00:27):
now to discuss his latest book, The Gunman Jackson Swagger,
which I think is best described as a prequel because
it follows Jack Swiger on a ranch in the eighteen nineties,
well before the rise of Bob Sweger. I am really
pleased to welcome back my guest, Stephen Hunter. He is
(00:48):
the creator of the Bob Lee Swager novels, as well
as many others. He is the retired chief film critic
for The Washington Post, where he won the two thousand
three Read Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism. He's also published
two collections of film criticism and a nonfiction work. And
(01:10):
his work is very wide ranging, and I must say
I find all of it fascinating. Steve, Welcome and thank
(01:31):
you for joining me on News World.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Thank you so much for having me, dude. I'm very excited.
I'll try and control my excitement, but I don't know.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Well, hopefully our listeners will pick up a little bit
of the mutual excitement here. He started at the Baltimore
Sun back in nineteen seventy one. I was born in
Harisberg and grew up and was tutored by a local
reporter who ended up running out sort of a weekly newspaper.
It was a great fan of the Baltimore Sun, which
(02:02):
all one time had probably the two best political reporters
in the country. As it was a great, great newspaper.
What was it like to work at the Sun.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I got there in the seventies, but the Sun was
still in the thirties. Well, no, it was in the fifties,
and they didn't understand what was going on in journalism,
which was under the aegis of the Washington Post style section,
the rebirth of feature sections and deep, long narratives, feature
(02:33):
stories that rivaled magazine stories. And I was part of
a radical movement to bring the Sun into the seventies.
And I was a very exciting time. It was a
rough time. There was some labor difficulties. There's a gulf
between the old timers and the hot new kids. We
(02:55):
ultimately prevailed. I made some very good friends, people whose
are still by very good friends. There was a lot
of turmoil, There was a lot of dialectic There was
a lot of energy in the paper for improvement. It
was like a particle version of the Russian Revolution, if
you will. We could feel, you know, we thought history
(03:18):
was on our side. We were very pompous because we
were very young. We were very certain also because we
were very young, and we took the paper in what
I think was the right decision. And I believe that
the suns its next high water was in the eighties,
and particularly in the nineties when John Carroll, who had
(03:40):
been managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and had a
lot of Philadelphia connections with the Inquirer, and he came
and he was also a part of the reform movement.
I was on the Sun for twenty six years. I
believe that in the nineties that was the best Sun
since the thirties, well, no, since the forties. Because the
(04:02):
Sun was very distinguished in its war corresponded and it
had guys on every beach headed in the war. I
don't like to criticize it, you know, it's hard for
me to criticize it, but it's been bought by someone.
It's shrunk enormously. Newspapers all shrunk in the twenty thousands
because the classified ads, which was a great river of
(04:25):
money that poured through all newspapers, had dried up. You know,
all of a sudden, they couldn't afford luxuries like film
critics and art critics and feature writers and all that
sort of to me, what was the fun the heart
of the business. They had to get rid of that,
and now they're thin their dour, They've become insanely partisan,
(04:49):
and frankly, I am a very low point in my
appreciation of American journalism. It's not journalism anymore. It's American
propaganda large and some great papers of the posts, I'm
afraid to say, and particularly the New York Times, have
drifted flow and they've let their Trump psychosis destroy them.
(05:13):
I think that all these people are going to look
when they're as old as I am, They're going to
look at what they did. They're gonna say, Holy, how
what on earth were we thinking? I just think it's
a shame and a crime.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
You've been a book review editor, you've been a feature writer,
and of course really made your name as a film critic.
What was the biggest difference between being a book review
editor and being a movie critic.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Well, I started both knowing not a whole lot about them.
I thought I knew everything about them, and by the
second week and I realized I knew nothing about them.
So I had to sort of self educate myself. Well,
there's the difference between editing and writing. I am not
by nature an editor. In fact, my break in the
(06:00):
novel writing business came when I got a note from
a woman at a publishing house who I'd had lunch with.
You'd come through Baltimore. As she said, you know, I
know many writers, and I know many editors, and I
have to say that you do not have an editor's personality.
(06:20):
You have a writer's personality. Do you have anything to
show me? Well I did, and eventually that was The
Master Sniper, that first book. As I said, that was
forty five years ago. I may have those facts slightly rearranged,
but I'm pretty sure it actually happened. I'm almost certain
that one's for real.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
I think I've read virtually everything you've written, and you
write as though it was a movie.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Thank you very much. It's not something I set out
rationally to do, but because I had seen so many movies,
and the movies are just so into and taken over
my consciousness, and I do movie stuff all the time.
This book, The Gunman is full of references to movies,
(07:13):
and if you want to read it as a sort
of a tribute to the America Western, you could do that,
and you can decode it and you can have fun
with it as a puzzle figuring out what images I've taken,
what scenarios I've taken, how I've rearranged them, how I've
tried to make them fresh again. For me, that was
(07:34):
much of the fun as I bumbled along, you know.
I mean one of my issues was how many gunfights
have we seen? Ten thousand at least? Trying to figure
out some way to make gun fights familiar and yet fresh.
And I invested a great deal of time, and as
you know, the end of the book is just a
(07:55):
cascade of vengeance driven gunfights and just driven gun fights.
And I tried very hard to keep them from being generic.
You know, I didn't want Warner Brothers TV in the
nineteen fifties. I didn't want that. I wanted each of
them to have a different texture and a different feel,
(08:17):
and a different orientation and a different point of view,
and that to me was extraordinary thought.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
One of the characteristics I would say of your books
is that you learn things, and you see specifics, and
in some areas your mastery of weapons or of situations
is remarkable. And this book is a perfect example, because
you know it's entitled The Gunman Jackson Schweger, and you
(08:46):
make the point at the very beginning of the book
which I never thought about, that our version of what
we call say the gunfighter didn't exist in that period.
Just talk from mine about this whole notion that the
America mythos about the Cowboy and the forty five is
a remarkably short period. It is a very intense period,
(09:09):
but it's somehow imprinted in our culture on a scale
that is amazing.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Well, I could say this that one of the missions,
if you will, of this book was to restore that figure.
I mean, he has fallen into banishment and exile and disrespect,
which I think is a crime. When you lose your gods,
you lose everything. It's ruinous to your values and to
(09:35):
your self confidence, to your self belief. So in one
sort of and I don't want it's how pop is here.
I wanted to restore that character. I wanted to restore
that myth. You're very onto something when you talk about
the myth of the gunfighter, the myth of the righteous gunfighter.
(09:56):
He's a key figure in our national culture for or
literally sixty five years, from nineteen hundred till nineteen sixty five.
The Vietnam War sort of eroded a lot of confidence
and authority, and I think that had to do with them,
also the internationalization of the Western They were taken over
(10:19):
by the Italians, I would say brilliantly. Although some people
will disagree with me, old school people will disagree with me,
but they kind of lost their American flavor. And when
they lost that, they sort of diffused and they lost
their impact in the marketplace. And the whole generation wasn't
raised by the standards, the borol standards, the standards of
(10:43):
masculine pride, a need to ensure justice. An entire generation
grew up without that. So in some tiny little fragment
of a way, I was trying to restore that. Maybe
it'll have some impact, maybe it won't, but it was fun.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
I don't want to give away the plot, but you
do have this older man who at the very beginning
of the book is sort of coming out of the
desert with almost nothing, and who's very stoic, very self reliant,
(11:37):
and ultimately when we start seeing him trying to survive
and eventually come to realize that in fact, he knows
exactly what he's doing. I think it's one of the
most compelling people you've written. It's sort of unfolded backwards.
You don't start by saying, look at this compelling person.
You start by saying, look at this kind of non entity,
(12:00):
and then he just kind of like peeling the onion.
He just keeps growing and becoming more complex as the
book goes on.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
I thank you very much for those kind words, and
you're exactly true to me. That's a familiar arc. That's
the bobb Lee Swagger arc. When do we discover him.
He's a bitter, ex drunk living in a trailer by himself,
deep in the forest, and one of the themes of
the Bobbly Swagger books is his restoration and his re emergence,
(12:34):
his reacquisition of his superior skills, the re engagement of
his mind, the re engagement of his values, the re
engagement of his beliefs in his country, and sort of
restoring him to his rightful place in society. Underneath the
(12:55):
I fea myth. This myth doesn't formably exist accepted by
But I see all the Swagger stories as the story
of the usurped Prince. I mean, he is by nature,
by his skills, by his courage, by his values. He
is Nature's nobleman. But cunning operatives have colluded to destroy
(13:21):
him and drive him away. And one of the things
about the Bobbly Swagger books is that he reinvents himself.
He reacquires his old grace and beauty and lethality, and
he goes to work. And at the end he's a
family man living with a wife he loves, with two
(13:43):
successful children, and a part of the community, and is
revered by all who know of him. And I never
thought that would appeal to me, but in the end
it really appealed to me at a very deep level.
And I see some of that in the Jack Swagger character.
(14:04):
In the beginning, as you say, we don't know who
he is, but gradually we understand, as you say, he
knows what he's doing. You know, you watch him go
from a dirty old man in unwashed clothes riding a
nag to the magnificent Western hero. You know, he shaves
his beard, he gets our haircut, he puts on his
(14:27):
good clothes, he gets his handguns, puts them in the
specially made holsters, and he goes to town. And he's
an entirely different figure by the end than he was
at the beginning, not only in and of himself, but
in and of his impact on society. He ends up
(14:47):
inspiring four Harvard boys who are utterly worthless, but who
under his tutelage, they learn immensely from him, and we
hope that they will his spirit onward. And that's what
the book was really about. At some level. I found
that a very provocative myth. If you will to fill in,
(15:11):
to invent, to polish and to offer.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
I don't know if you'll agree with this, but in
a way, the book opens with the world impacting on him,
and the book closes with him impacting on the world.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
That's very true. He goes from passivity to assertiveness to
I guess you would say aggression. That is part of
his transformation. He has to learn what he's doing. You
don't get this until later, but what he's doing is
he's investigating and he has to learn what happened in
(15:49):
certain circumstances. And once he learns that he understands the
morality of that situation, he's free to act. And you know,
in that sense, he's liberated to become his old self
again because he has a confidant in himself that he
has confidence in justice, he had conveident wrighteousness, and that
(16:13):
process was the pleasure of the book for its author.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
You have created in the Swaggers, and in one of
your novels, you actually go all the way back to
the Revolutionary War period as showed the early emergence of
the Swaggers and then their movement west towards Arkansas. And
now you've taken us into the nineteenth century. And then
you've also shared with us the Swaggers who come out
(16:41):
of World War one, World War two, Vietnam, and of
course more recently a young person who's married into the Swaggers.
You've literally created the history of an entire family.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
I mean, that's absolutely true. And this is remarkable to
be a Maybe it does to you in that it
was never my goal, and yet I found that extremely
compelling as I was doing it, and I began to
see the connections between people, and I began to track
the characteristics that were transmitted generation to generations and sort
(17:22):
of the family opus, the family saga, the family myth.
I found that most of it was generated by my
unconscious and I just arrived while I was at the keyboard,
and I found that really interesting. And I never in
my life thought I would do that. It was never
one of my goals. I've never read the foresight saga,
(17:45):
so I don't know where it came from, except that
on my father's side it was an old, wealthy land
owning banking family in rural Missouri, and it had a
lot of pathologies, a lot of drunkenness, it had some
violent deaths. I never went into that deeply, but you're
(18:07):
aware of the weight of it it in some degree.
I was playing with that, not literally, you know, it's
by incident, but just the sense of the weight of family,
the weight of inheritance, the weight of family tradition, and
how that plays out over the generations. Again, great fun,
(18:31):
and I'm glad Newt. I am so glad you're getting
it and I hope at least four or five other
people do too.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
It's pretty clear to me you did not sit down
twenty five years ago and outline the swagger of saga
that in fact is just year by year has grown
around you and you've sort of reported on it to
the rest of us.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
That is exactly true. I think maybe it's a fanciful
exaggeration of the Hunter family in rural Missouri in the
early part of the twentieth century on up through the fifties,
but with the addition of lots of guns and lots
(19:16):
of gun fights, because I like those. I find them fascinating.
But again, I don't want to go too far, and
it's not a one on one correspondence. It's just kind
of the miracle of bosmosis, of feeling things that can't
quite be expressed in words, but only through drama, and
(19:39):
that's how it came out. I never would have accessed
that pool of information had I not written these books.
You know, the books made me invent well, it made
me access and from vague memories create a family that
I hope people believe in.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Sub Wilson Wall, you dedicate the book to the old gods.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
John Wayne john Ford, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Sam Peckinpah,
William Holden, John Wayne again while in Tectragra Sergio Leone,
Clint Eastwood, Richard Boone, James Arness, Jack Mahoney, and John
Wayne again. I have to ask a couple of questions. One,
why Wayne three times?
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Oh, because I wanted to identify him as a central
figure of fifties masculine mythology. I was born in forty six,
so I edited the fifties at four and I left
them at let's see, No, I left them at fourteen.
And that was the high water mark of the American Western.
(21:03):
And every night on television when I should have been
doing my homework, I was watching Westerns on TV. And
every Saturday and Sunday I was going to the movies
and seeing westerns, you know, seventeen feet tall by thirty
five feet wide, and that imagery, those values, those landscapes,
(21:28):
those guns, they just soaked into me because there was
just an endless profusion of them. So Wayne was predominant
in that world, and so I wanted to pay attention
to him. No, At the same time, I have to
say that I probably didn't do it at the time,
(21:49):
but later as a film critic looking back and going
out of my way to see some of his movies
that were that proceeded by consciousness, like the three great
Calvary Westerns he made with John Ford, and a whole
variety of other westerns Hondo and people don't even remember anymore.
(22:11):
And I realized that he was the kingdom of the genre,
and he was the alpha male of the decade. And
I felt that it was a kind of mischievous way
to pay homage to that and all those other chaps
that I mentioned. All of them great in their own way,
(22:32):
but somehow they wouldn't have existed without John Wade as
the central totem. I must say, I must apologize here.
I left Aunie Murphy out because he made a lot
of Westerns, and some of his best movies were westerns.
I've done a lot with him in the past, but
I don't want to see these people forgotten. It's just
(22:53):
too easy to forget. And one of the things I've
always tried to describe by books or my work as
a ceremony of remembering. That's why there's a lot of
World War two with them. I don't want it to
be forgotten. I don't know if do kids today know
who won World War Two. I am no evidence whatsoever.
(23:14):
I'm here and remind them that there was a great war,
and there were great men, and there was a lot
of blood shed in this country as we settled it
for reasons good and bad. I stand squarely facing the past,
and I'm really not that interested in the future, even
the present. But the past is very alive to me.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
I'm three years older than you, so we literally experienced
culturally the same cycle. One of the names you have here,
which I've always felt was underrated and had an amazing
ability to dominate scenes, was Richard Boone.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Yes, he's a very good actor, and he was charismatic.
He was not a handsome man. He had a lumpy
face and he had sort of a brusque personality that
he was in the Palatin series. It lasted I think
six years, and he was just bagnetic, and he went
on and had a great career as a secondary lead
(24:15):
in all sorts of movies. It's just something about that gruff,
grumpy face and its refusal to get excited. It's something
bagnetic about him. I like saluting the people who built
the movies or build the entertainment screen media on TV
as he did. He dominates every scene he's in, even
(24:40):
when he's not supposed to. That's right.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
It reminds me of a very famous story of John
Ford finally making The Quiet Man with John Wayne and
Marin O'Hara, and she had never worked with John Wayne
before and there's a scene where she's supposed to explode
with anger and Ford can't get her to explode. Finally
(25:04):
takes off to one sign and she says, well, I
don't want to take the scene away from Duke, and
Ford rux saim and says, Honey, you're gonna get as
much of that scene as Duke gives you. Don't worry
about it, just explode. But the whole notion that whenever
Wayne wanted to, he could dominate anything.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
That's very true. And he was a comforting presence. What
I liked about him, and I also like about Jimmy Stewart,
was he was willing to show a dark side. His
character in The Searchers is very dark, almost psychotic, and
he was willing to go that far, just as Jimmy
Stewart was willing to go that far. And it's a
wonderful life, and I respect them for that. And you say, well,
(25:45):
they're not great actors. Meeting they could never play Hamlet, Well,
Lord Olivier could not have been the lead in The Searchers.
So you play your strengths.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
I always fell on their own right. They're actually very good.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Actors, Yes, that's true, very professional. They always do their lives,
they always hit their marks. They had impatience with people
who weren't up to their level of professionalism. I mean
that's just to be expected to find that, say, pattern
in any professional organization.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
If you watch them late in their life interacting in
The Shootest as John Wayne literally is filming about him
gunfighter who's dying while John Wayne is dying. The scenes
of Stewart and Wayne are amazingly touching.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
I think, yes, so I agree with you on that
that's a very fine movie. The novel by Glendon Swarthout,
which I quoted in the beginning of my book, there's
two really good, vivid westerns, so good that they were
big best sellers, and they stood out from their genre
and became mainstream hits. One is The Shooters and the
(26:51):
other's True Grit. Charles Porters was a wonderful writer. He
was a wonderful writer, and both books made very good movies,
and we are much the richer for them.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
What are you now working on? What next adventure should
we expect?
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Well, that's problematic, and I'm trying to sell a book
like I've gotten enchanted with Believe it or not, Sherlock Holmes.
I have a book in mind, a very elaborate plot
called Sherlock Holmes Gunfighter. I'm encountering reluctance in some professional worlds,
(27:28):
and I don't understand why. One of the problems here
is I'm not that interested in my career. I don't
do the career things.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
These younger writers know all the tricks. I don't know
any of them. So I don't quite know what's going on,
and I don't know who to call, and I don't
know what to do. So right now I'm sort of floundering.
But I hope to tell the book and publish it
in twenty seven, and then I have one more Bobble
(28:00):
Swagger book. I'll just give you the title of that one.
I would call it the Bobbly Swagger Overture. And maybe
that gives you some inclination as to what it's about.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Well, I can assure you whatever you do, and whenever
you do it, we will be asking you to come
back have another conversation like this.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
You've been so good to me. I really can't begin
to tell you.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Well, think about how many hours I've gotten of joy
reading your stuff, so I can tell you you've been
pretty good to me too.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
We thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
I want to thank you for joining me. It's always
fun to chat with you and range widely. Your new book,
The Gunman Jackson Swagger is available now on Amazon and
in bookstores everywhere, and I really do look forward to
having you come back and join me again.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Thank you so much, dude, it was a great chat
as far as I've concert.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Thank you to my guest, Steven. News World is produced
by Gingrish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is
Guardnzie Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for
the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to
the team at GINGERSH three sixty. If you've been enjoying
News World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and
both rate us with five stars and give us a
(29:21):
review so others can learn what it's all about. Join
me on substack at gingrishtree sixty dot net. I'm Newt Gingrich.
This is news world,
On this episode of News World. I am delighted to
have one of my all time favorite authors back on
the show, somebody who I admired greatly, Steven Hunter. I've
been reading his books about Bob Lee Sweger, starting with
the very first One Point of Impact in nineteen ninety three,
to target It in twenty twenty two. He's joining me
(00:27):
now to discuss his latest book, The Gunman Jackson Swagger,
which I think is best described as a prequel because
it follows Jack Swiger on a ranch in the eighteen nineties,
well before the rise of Bob Sweger. I am really
pleased to welcome back my guest, Stephen Hunter. He is
(00:48):
the creator of the Bob Lee Swager novels, as well
as many others. He is the retired chief film critic
for The Washington Post, where he won the two thousand
three Read Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism. He's also published
two collections of film criticism and a nonfiction work. And
(01:10):
his work is very wide ranging, and I must say
I find all of it fascinating. Steve, Welcome and thank
(01:31):
you for joining me on News World.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Thank you so much for having me, dude. I'm very excited.
I'll try and control my excitement, but I don't know.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Well, hopefully our listeners will pick up a little bit
of the mutual excitement here. He started at the Baltimore
Sun back in nineteen seventy one. I was born in
Harisberg and grew up and was tutored by a local
reporter who ended up running out sort of a weekly newspaper.
It was a great fan of the Baltimore Sun, which
(02:02):
all one time had probably the two best political reporters
in the country. As it was a great, great newspaper.
What was it like to work at the Sun.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I got there in the seventies, but the Sun was
still in the thirties. Well, no, it was in the fifties,
and they didn't understand what was going on in journalism,
which was under the aegis of the Washington Post style section,
the rebirth of feature sections and deep, long narratives, feature
(02:33):
stories that rivaled magazine stories. And I was part of
a radical movement to bring the Sun into the seventies.
And I was a very exciting time. It was a
rough time. There was some labor difficulties. There's a gulf
between the old timers and the hot new kids. We
(02:55):
ultimately prevailed. I made some very good friends, people whose
are still by very good friends. There was a lot
of turmoil, There was a lot of dialectic There was
a lot of energy in the paper for improvement. It
was like a particle version of the Russian Revolution, if
you will. We could feel, you know, we thought history
(03:18):
was on our side. We were very pompous because we
were very young. We were very certain also because we
were very young, and we took the paper in what
I think was the right decision. And I believe that
the suns its next high water was in the eighties,
and particularly in the nineties when John Carroll, who had
(03:40):
been managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and had a
lot of Philadelphia connections with the Inquirer, and he came
and he was also a part of the reform movement.
I was on the Sun for twenty six years. I
believe that in the nineties that was the best Sun
since the thirties, well, no, since the forties. Because the
(04:02):
Sun was very distinguished in its war corresponded and it
had guys on every beach headed in the war. I
don't like to criticize it, you know, it's hard for
me to criticize it, but it's been bought by someone.
It's shrunk enormously. Newspapers all shrunk in the twenty thousands
because the classified ads, which was a great river of
(04:25):
money that poured through all newspapers, had dried up. You know,
all of a sudden, they couldn't afford luxuries like film
critics and art critics and feature writers and all that
sort of to me, what was the fun the heart
of the business. They had to get rid of that,
and now they're thin their dour, They've become insanely partisan,
(04:49):
and frankly, I am a very low point in my
appreciation of American journalism. It's not journalism anymore. It's American
propaganda large and some great papers of the posts, I'm
afraid to say, and particularly the New York Times, have
drifted flow and they've let their Trump psychosis destroy them.
(05:13):
I think that all these people are going to look
when they're as old as I am, They're going to
look at what they did. They're gonna say, Holy, how
what on earth were we thinking? I just think it's
a shame and a crime.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
You've been a book review editor, you've been a feature writer,
and of course really made your name as a film critic.
What was the biggest difference between being a book review
editor and being a movie critic.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Well, I started both knowing not a whole lot about them.
I thought I knew everything about them, and by the
second week and I realized I knew nothing about them.
So I had to sort of self educate myself. Well,
there's the difference between editing and writing. I am not
by nature an editor. In fact, my break in the
(06:00):
novel writing business came when I got a note from
a woman at a publishing house who I'd had lunch with.
You'd come through Baltimore. As she said, you know, I
know many writers, and I know many editors, and I
have to say that you do not have an editor's personality.
(06:20):
You have a writer's personality. Do you have anything to
show me? Well I did, and eventually that was The
Master Sniper, that first book. As I said, that was
forty five years ago. I may have those facts slightly rearranged,
but I'm pretty sure it actually happened. I'm almost certain
that one's for real.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
I think I've read virtually everything you've written, and you
write as though it was a movie.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Thank you very much. It's not something I set out
rationally to do, but because I had seen so many movies,
and the movies are just so into and taken over
my consciousness, and I do movie stuff all the time.
This book, The Gunman is full of references to movies,
(07:13):
and if you want to read it as a sort
of a tribute to the America Western, you could do that,
and you can decode it and you can have fun
with it as a puzzle figuring out what images I've taken,
what scenarios I've taken, how I've rearranged them, how I've
tried to make them fresh again. For me, that was
(07:34):
much of the fun as I bumbled along, you know.
I mean one of my issues was how many gunfights
have we seen? Ten thousand at least? Trying to figure
out some way to make gun fights familiar and yet fresh.
And I invested a great deal of time, and as
you know, the end of the book is just a
(07:55):
cascade of vengeance driven gunfights and just driven gun fights.
And I tried very hard to keep them from being generic.
You know, I didn't want Warner Brothers TV in the
nineteen fifties. I didn't want that. I wanted each of
them to have a different texture and a different feel,
(08:17):
and a different orientation and a different point of view,
and that to me was extraordinary thought.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
One of the characteristics I would say of your books
is that you learn things, and you see specifics, and
in some areas your mastery of weapons or of situations
is remarkable. And this book is a perfect example, because
you know it's entitled The Gunman Jackson Schweger, and you
(08:46):
make the point at the very beginning of the book
which I never thought about, that our version of what
we call say the gunfighter didn't exist in that period.
Just talk from mine about this whole notion that the
America mythos about the Cowboy and the forty five is
a remarkably short period. It is a very intense period,
(09:09):
but it's somehow imprinted in our culture on a scale
that is amazing.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Well, I could say this that one of the missions,
if you will, of this book was to restore that figure.
I mean, he has fallen into banishment and exile and disrespect,
which I think is a crime. When you lose your gods,
you lose everything. It's ruinous to your values and to
(09:35):
your self confidence, to your self belief. So in one
sort of and I don't want it's how pop is here.
I wanted to restore that character. I wanted to restore
that myth. You're very onto something when you talk about
the myth of the gunfighter, the myth of the righteous gunfighter.
(09:56):
He's a key figure in our national culture for or
literally sixty five years, from nineteen hundred till nineteen sixty five.
The Vietnam War sort of eroded a lot of confidence
and authority, and I think that had to do with them,
also the internationalization of the Western They were taken over
(10:19):
by the Italians, I would say brilliantly. Although some people
will disagree with me, old school people will disagree with me,
but they kind of lost their American flavor. And when
they lost that, they sort of diffused and they lost
their impact in the marketplace. And the whole generation wasn't
raised by the standards, the borol standards, the standards of
(10:43):
masculine pride, a need to ensure justice. An entire generation
grew up without that. So in some tiny little fragment
of a way, I was trying to restore that. Maybe
it'll have some impact, maybe it won't, but it was fun.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
I don't want to give away the plot, but you
do have this older man who at the very beginning
of the book is sort of coming out of the
desert with almost nothing, and who's very stoic, very self reliant,
(11:37):
and ultimately when we start seeing him trying to survive
and eventually come to realize that in fact, he knows
exactly what he's doing. I think it's one of the
most compelling people you've written. It's sort of unfolded backwards.
You don't start by saying, look at this compelling person.
You start by saying, look at this kind of non entity,
(12:00):
and then he just kind of like peeling the onion.
He just keeps growing and becoming more complex as the
book goes on.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
I thank you very much for those kind words, and
you're exactly true to me. That's a familiar arc. That's
the bobb Lee Swagger arc. When do we discover him.
He's a bitter, ex drunk living in a trailer by himself,
deep in the forest, and one of the themes of
the Bobbly Swagger books is his restoration and his re emergence,
(12:34):
his reacquisition of his superior skills, the re engagement of
his mind, the re engagement of his values, the re
engagement of his beliefs in his country, and sort of
restoring him to his rightful place in society. Underneath the
(12:55):
I fea myth. This myth doesn't formably exist accepted by
But I see all the Swagger stories as the story
of the usurped Prince. I mean, he is by nature,
by his skills, by his courage, by his values. He
is Nature's nobleman. But cunning operatives have colluded to destroy
(13:21):
him and drive him away. And one of the things
about the Bobbly Swagger books is that he reinvents himself.
He reacquires his old grace and beauty and lethality, and
he goes to work. And at the end he's a
family man living with a wife he loves, with two
(13:43):
successful children, and a part of the community, and is
revered by all who know of him. And I never
thought that would appeal to me, but in the end
it really appealed to me at a very deep level.
And I see some of that in the Jack Swagger character.
(14:04):
In the beginning, as you say, we don't know who
he is, but gradually we understand, as you say, he
knows what he's doing. You know, you watch him go
from a dirty old man in unwashed clothes riding a
nag to the magnificent Western hero. You know, he shaves
his beard, he gets our haircut, he puts on his
(14:27):
good clothes, he gets his handguns, puts them in the
specially made holsters, and he goes to town. And he's
an entirely different figure by the end than he was
at the beginning, not only in and of himself, but
in and of his impact on society. He ends up
(14:47):
inspiring four Harvard boys who are utterly worthless, but who
under his tutelage, they learn immensely from him, and we
hope that they will his spirit onward. And that's what
the book was really about. At some level. I found
that a very provocative myth. If you will to fill in,
(15:11):
to invent, to polish and to offer.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
I don't know if you'll agree with this, but in
a way, the book opens with the world impacting on him,
and the book closes with him impacting on the world.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
That's very true. He goes from passivity to assertiveness to
I guess you would say aggression. That is part of
his transformation. He has to learn what he's doing. You
don't get this until later, but what he's doing is
he's investigating and he has to learn what happened in
(15:49):
certain circumstances. And once he learns that he understands the
morality of that situation, he's free to act. And you know,
in that sense, he's liberated to become his old self
again because he has a confidant in himself that he
has confidence in justice, he had conveident wrighteousness, and that
(16:13):
process was the pleasure of the book for its author.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
You have created in the Swaggers, and in one of
your novels, you actually go all the way back to
the Revolutionary War period as showed the early emergence of
the Swaggers and then their movement west towards Arkansas. And
now you've taken us into the nineteenth century. And then
you've also shared with us the Swaggers who come out
(16:41):
of World War one, World War two, Vietnam, and of
course more recently a young person who's married into the Swaggers.
You've literally created the history of an entire family.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
I mean, that's absolutely true. And this is remarkable to
be a Maybe it does to you in that it
was never my goal, and yet I found that extremely
compelling as I was doing it, and I began to
see the connections between people, and I began to track
the characteristics that were transmitted generation to generations and sort
(17:22):
of the family opus, the family saga, the family myth.
I found that most of it was generated by my
unconscious and I just arrived while I was at the keyboard,
and I found that really interesting. And I never in
my life thought I would do that. It was never
one of my goals. I've never read the foresight saga,
(17:45):
so I don't know where it came from, except that
on my father's side it was an old, wealthy land
owning banking family in rural Missouri, and it had a
lot of pathologies, a lot of drunkenness, it had some
violent deaths. I never went into that deeply, but you're
(18:07):
aware of the weight of it it in some degree.
I was playing with that, not literally, you know, it's
by incident, but just the sense of the weight of family,
the weight of inheritance, the weight of family tradition, and
how that plays out over the generations. Again, great fun,
(18:31):
and I'm glad Newt. I am so glad you're getting
it and I hope at least four or five other
people do too.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
It's pretty clear to me you did not sit down
twenty five years ago and outline the swagger of saga
that in fact is just year by year has grown
around you and you've sort of reported on it to
the rest of us.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
That is exactly true. I think maybe it's a fanciful
exaggeration of the Hunter family in rural Missouri in the
early part of the twentieth century on up through the fifties,
but with the addition of lots of guns and lots
(19:16):
of gun fights, because I like those. I find them fascinating.
But again, I don't want to go too far, and
it's not a one on one correspondence. It's just kind
of the miracle of bosmosis, of feeling things that can't
quite be expressed in words, but only through drama, and
(19:39):
that's how it came out. I never would have accessed
that pool of information had I not written these books.
You know, the books made me invent well, it made
me access and from vague memories create a family that
I hope people believe in.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Sub Wilson Wall, you dedicate the book to the old gods.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
John Wayne john Ford, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Sam Peckinpah,
William Holden, John Wayne again while in Tectragra Sergio Leone,
Clint Eastwood, Richard Boone, James Arness, Jack Mahoney, and John
Wayne again. I have to ask a couple of questions. One,
why Wayne three times?
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Oh, because I wanted to identify him as a central
figure of fifties masculine mythology. I was born in forty six,
so I edited the fifties at four and I left
them at let's see, No, I left them at fourteen.
And that was the high water mark of the American Western.
(21:03):
And every night on television when I should have been
doing my homework, I was watching Westerns on TV. And
every Saturday and Sunday I was going to the movies
and seeing westerns, you know, seventeen feet tall by thirty
five feet wide, and that imagery, those values, those landscapes,
(21:28):
those guns, they just soaked into me because there was
just an endless profusion of them. So Wayne was predominant
in that world, and so I wanted to pay attention
to him. No, At the same time, I have to
say that I probably didn't do it at the time,
(21:49):
but later as a film critic looking back and going
out of my way to see some of his movies
that were that proceeded by consciousness, like the three great
Calvary Westerns he made with John Ford, and a whole
variety of other westerns Hondo and people don't even remember anymore.
(22:11):
And I realized that he was the kingdom of the genre,
and he was the alpha male of the decade. And
I felt that it was a kind of mischievous way
to pay homage to that and all those other chaps
that I mentioned. All of them great in their own way,
(22:32):
but somehow they wouldn't have existed without John Wade as
the central totem. I must say, I must apologize here.
I left Aunie Murphy out because he made a lot
of Westerns, and some of his best movies were westerns.
I've done a lot with him in the past, but
I don't want to see these people forgotten. It's just
(22:53):
too easy to forget. And one of the things I've
always tried to describe by books or my work as
a ceremony of remembering. That's why there's a lot of
World War two with them. I don't want it to
be forgotten. I don't know if do kids today know
who won World War Two. I am no evidence whatsoever.
(23:14):
I'm here and remind them that there was a great war,
and there were great men, and there was a lot
of blood shed in this country as we settled it
for reasons good and bad. I stand squarely facing the past,
and I'm really not that interested in the future, even
the present. But the past is very alive to me.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
I'm three years older than you, so we literally experienced
culturally the same cycle. One of the names you have here,
which I've always felt was underrated and had an amazing
ability to dominate scenes, was Richard Boone.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Yes, he's a very good actor, and he was charismatic.
He was not a handsome man. He had a lumpy
face and he had sort of a brusque personality that
he was in the Palatin series. It lasted I think
six years, and he was just bagnetic, and he went
on and had a great career as a secondary lead
(24:15):
in all sorts of movies. It's just something about that gruff,
grumpy face and its refusal to get excited. It's something
bagnetic about him. I like saluting the people who built
the movies or build the entertainment screen media on TV
as he did. He dominates every scene he's in, even
(24:40):
when he's not supposed to. That's right.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
It reminds me of a very famous story of John
Ford finally making The Quiet Man with John Wayne and
Marin O'Hara, and she had never worked with John Wayne
before and there's a scene where she's supposed to explode
with anger and Ford can't get her to explode. Finally
(25:04):
takes off to one sign and she says, well, I
don't want to take the scene away from Duke, and
Ford rux saim and says, Honey, you're gonna get as
much of that scene as Duke gives you. Don't worry
about it, just explode. But the whole notion that whenever
Wayne wanted to, he could dominate anything.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
That's very true. And he was a comforting presence. What
I liked about him, and I also like about Jimmy Stewart,
was he was willing to show a dark side. His
character in The Searchers is very dark, almost psychotic, and
he was willing to go that far, just as Jimmy
Stewart was willing to go that far. And it's a
wonderful life, and I respect them for that. And you say, well,
(25:45):
they're not great actors. Meeting they could never play Hamlet, Well,
Lord Olivier could not have been the lead in The Searchers.
So you play your strengths.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
I always fell on their own right. They're actually very good.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Actors, Yes, that's true, very professional. They always do their lives,
they always hit their marks. They had impatience with people
who weren't up to their level of professionalism. I mean
that's just to be expected to find that, say, pattern
in any professional organization.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
If you watch them late in their life interacting in
The Shootest as John Wayne literally is filming about him
gunfighter who's dying while John Wayne is dying. The scenes
of Stewart and Wayne are amazingly touching.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
I think, yes, so I agree with you on that
that's a very fine movie. The novel by Glendon Swarthout,
which I quoted in the beginning of my book, there's
two really good, vivid westerns, so good that they were
big best sellers, and they stood out from their genre
and became mainstream hits. One is The Shooters and the
(26:51):
other's True Grit. Charles Porters was a wonderful writer. He
was a wonderful writer, and both books made very good movies,
and we are much the richer for them.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
What are you now working on? What next adventure should
we expect?
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Well, that's problematic, and I'm trying to sell a book
like I've gotten enchanted with Believe it or not, Sherlock Holmes.
I have a book in mind, a very elaborate plot
called Sherlock Holmes Gunfighter. I'm encountering reluctance in some professional worlds,
(27:28):
and I don't understand why. One of the problems here
is I'm not that interested in my career. I don't
do the career things.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
These younger writers know all the tricks. I don't know
any of them. So I don't quite know what's going on,
and I don't know who to call, and I don't
know what to do. So right now I'm sort of floundering.
But I hope to tell the book and publish it
in twenty seven, and then I have one more Bobble
(28:00):
Swagger book. I'll just give you the title of that one.
I would call it the Bobbly Swagger Overture. And maybe
that gives you some inclination as to what it's about.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Well, I can assure you whatever you do, and whenever
you do it, we will be asking you to come
back have another conversation like this.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
You've been so good to me. I really can't begin
to tell you.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Well, think about how many hours I've gotten of joy
reading your stuff, so I can tell you you've been
pretty good to me too.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
We thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
I want to thank you for joining me. It's always
fun to chat with you and range widely. Your new book,
The Gunman Jackson Swagger is available now on Amazon and
in bookstores everywhere, and I really do look forward to
having you come back and join me again.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Thank you so much, dude, it was a great chat
as far as I've concert.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Thank you to my guest, Steven. News World is produced
by Gingrish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is
Guardnzie Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for
the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to
the team at GINGERSH three sixty. If you've been enjoying
News World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and
both rate us with five stars and give us a
(29:21):
review so others can learn what it's all about. Join
me on substack at gingrishtree sixty dot net. I'm Newt Gingrich.
This is news world,
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