'Jurisfiction,' I told him. 'This is Bradshaw, I'm Next. We're looking for the Minotaur.'

The barkeeper stared at me coldly.

'Think you's in the wrong genre, partner,' he said.

All characters or Generics within a book are graded A to D, one through ten. A-grades are the Gatsbys and Jane Eyres, D-grades the grunts who make up street scenes and crowded rooms. The barkeeper had lines so he was probably a C-2. Smart enough to get answers from but not smart enough to have much character latitude.

'He might be using the alias Norman Johnson,' I went on, showing him a photo. 'Tall, body of a man, head of a bull, likes to eat people?'

'Can't help you,' he said, shaking his head slowly as he peered at the photo.

'How about any outbreaks of Slapstick?' asked Bradshaw. 'Boxing glove popping out of a box, sixteen-ton weights dropping on people, that sort of thing?'

The barkeeper laughed. 'Ain’t seen no weights droppin’ on nobody, but I heard tell the sheriff got hit in the face with a frying pan last Toosday.'

Bradshaw and I exchanged glances.

'Where do we find the sheriff?' I asked.

We followed the barkeeper's directions and walked along the wooden decking past a barber shop and two grizzled prospectors who were talking animatedly in authentic frontier gibberish. I stopped Bradshaw when we got to an alleyway. There was a gunfight in progress. Or at least, there would have been a gunfight had not some dispute arisen over the times allocated for their respective showdowns. Both sets of gunmen – two dressed in light-coloured clothes, two in dark, with low-slung gunbelts decorated with rows of shiny cartridges – were arguing over their gunfight time slots as two identical ladyfolk looked on anxiously. The town mayor intervened and told them that if there was any more arguments they would both lose their slot times and would have to come back tomorrow, so they reluctantly agreed to toss a coin. The winners of the toss scampered into the main street as everyone dutifully ran for cover. They squared up to one another, hands hovering over their Colt .455 at twenty paces. There was a flurry of action, two loud detonations and one of the gunmen in black hit the dirt while the victor looked on grimly, his opponent's shot having dramatically only removed his hat. His lady rushed up to hug him as he reholstered his revolver with a flourish.

'What a load of tripe,' muttered Bradshaw. 'The real West wasn't like this!'

Death at Double-X Ranch was set in 1875 and written in 1908. Close enough to be historically accurate, you would have thought, but no. Most Westerns tended to show a glamorised version of the old West that hadn't really existed. In the real West a gunfight was a rarity, hitting someone with a short-barrelled Colt .45 at anything other than close range a virtual impossibility: 1870s gunpowder generated a huge amount of smoke; two shots in a crowded bar and you would be coughing – and almost blind.