Throughout the entire 20th century, and especially from the 1940s onward, the Western novel was the undisputed queen of the Spanish newsstands. Of the more than 60,000 titles that popular fiction accumulated during this period, more than half revolved around the American West.
In this making of Fernando Eguidazu explains how he wrote Pistoleros de quiosco (Ulises).
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If you were to ask a fan of escapist literature how many Western novels were published in Spain, say, in the last century, there would be no doubt in replying that there were “many,” and perhaps even venturing that there were hundreds or perhaps thousands. And this would be a reflection fueled by the bright-covered kiosk booklets that, as they recall, were read by the generation of their parents and grandparents.
I have been involved with Spanish popular fiction for quite a long time. First as a collector (I managed to amass about 50,000 titles) and later as a modest researcher and author of a number of books on the subject.
A few years ago I wrote a global history of Spanish popular fiction that was published by the Editorial Renacimiento, and in it I tried to explain how and why in 20th-century Spain, and more specifically in the central decades of the century, kiosk fiction came to hold enormous importance as a source of entertainment for a large portion of the Spanish population.
How many titles were published in total I never managed to calculate. I could have done it, thanks to my collection, but the task was large, and so was my laziness. At last, in the book of a fellow researcher, Ramón Charlo, more diligent than I, I found the figure: more than 60,000 original titles. And in breaking down that figure I found that more than 30,000 titles were Western novels.
I had known the importance of this genre within our kiosk fiction for a long time. How could I not know it, if in my adolescence I had been a devoted reader? Yet even knowing this, I confess I had never realized that the figure could be so large. And now my curiosity was awakened. How is it possible that a genre, initially so distant from our cultural environment, attained such significance in our popular fiction? Why did the American West become so popular among readers of the time? Why did it come to outpace other genres such as adventure tales, or pirates, or science fiction, or even detective stories? And why was this fascination not a passing phenomenon, but one as enduring as the kiosk novel itself? That is what I wondered at that moment and what has motivated this book.
In its pages the reader will learn the reasons why, in my view, at the dawn of the 20th century the Western novel became a popular genre in Europe and in Spain. And why from the 1940s and 1950s, up to almost the 1990s, it became, in our country, the readers’ favorite genre.
This West made in Spain was a genuine editorial, cultural, and social phenomenon, because those novels reached the entire population. It was mass literature, read not only by people with little intellectual ambition, but by readers from all social and cultural backgrounds, in short by anyone who sought a moment of simple, uncomplicated distraction.
I felt that a phenomenon of this importance deserved attention not only to its origins and their causes but also to its history: the writers who brought those novels to light, the publishers that released them, the series that appeared, their evolution over time… And even more importantly, their characteristics. How was that West imagined by Spanish kiosk literature. For that was a West somewhat peculiar, not very faithful to historical reality, exaggerating the genre’s tropes, something like the spaghetti Western in relation to Hollywood’s Western cinema.
To tell all of this I had the necessary material. Not only the “raw material” on which to work (my collection), but a respectable amount of reference books, magazine articles, publisher catalogs, and documents of all kinds that I had accumulated over the years to prepare my previous books.
The result is this book, which aims to pay homage to a little-known page of our popular culture.
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Author: Fernando Eguidazu. Title: Pistoleros de quiosco. Publisher: Ulises. Available at: Todostuslibros.