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 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 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 his work is very wide ranging, and I must say I find all of it fascinating.

Steve, Welcome and thank you for joining me on News World.

Thank you so much for having me, dude.

I'm very excited.

I'll try and control my excitement, but I don't know.

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I think I've read virtually everything you've written, and you write as though it was a movie.

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, 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 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 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, and a different orientation and a different point of view, and that to me was extraordinary thought.

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 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, but it's somehow imprinted in our culture on a scale that is amazing.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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, 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, and then he just kind of like peeling the onion.

He just keeps growing and becoming more complex as the book goes on.

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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, to invent, to polish and to offer.

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.

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 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 process was the pleasure of the book for its author.

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 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.

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 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, 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 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, 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.

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.

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 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 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.

Sub Wilson Wall, you dedicate the book to the old gods.

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?

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.

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, 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, 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.

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, 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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 when he's not supposed to.

That's right.

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 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.

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, 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.

I always fell on their own right.

They're actually very good.

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.

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.

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 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.

What are you now working on?

What next adventure should we expect?

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, 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.

You know.

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 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.

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.

You've been so good to me.

I really can't begin to tell you.

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.

We thank you very much.

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.

Thank you so much, dude, it was a great chat as far as I've concert.

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.

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I'm Newt Gingrich.

This is news world,