He was an inch over six foot, wiry under his light brown wool shirt, seeming lighter than the hundred and seventy pounds that had been his weight for thirteen years. His face was lean and stubbled, the high cheek bones strong against his tanned skin. Above them, Hart’s eyes were a faded blue.

Romantic, certainly; one could see Gary Cooper in that saddle, perhaps, or Robert Taylor, Joel McCrea. But the majority of our heroes, men like Jedediah Herne in the Herne the Hunter series I wrote with Laurence James, were darker, closer to extreme violence and despair. Carved from the same unforgiving granite rock as John Wayne’s vengeful character in The Searchers and the Eastwood of the spaghetti westerns, this hero was no longer young, a loner with a tragic and troubled past that had left him imbued with a fierce but melancholic anger and a concern for few lives other than his own. He was, perhaps above all, a man not out of place, but out of time. In some respects he was not dissimilar to the Charlie Resnick to come—you see, I have not forgotten my principal theme and subject—yet in others he was cast from quite a different metal.

I got to thinking about much of the above quite recently, sitting one Sunday afternoon in one of the few London cinemas to maintain a repertory programme, watching for the umpteenth time Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid—a movie about men out of time if ever there was one.

There’s a moment early on when Billy turns to Garrett, his former running mate, now the lawman who has told him to move on, and says, “We had some times, didn’t we?” And this made me think of all the pleasure, the sheer fun the bunch of us hacks had during our years spent churning out cowboy yarns, and also how important films like Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and The Wild Bunch were in forming the vision of the west we had.

Sometimes this was present in the detail—in Cherokee Outlet, for instance, Wes Hart recalls his own first meeting with Billy the Kid, at which the Kid shoots the heads off several chickens, which is a direct reference to the opening of the Peckinpah movie—but more often in the tone and the predicament of the protagonists, who time and again find themselves shut out from a society they know and recognize but which increasingly fails to recognize and accept them.

Inside and yet outside.

Belonging and yet not belonging.