Response

Lee K. Abbott’s short story “Love is a Crooked Thing” can be classified as a western for the following reasons:
Language, Setting, Characters, and Plot, along with some particular scenes.
The language used in the story lends it a western air. Language like the narrator’s use of “banditos” and “desperados” brings up mental images of dusty trails and masked men on horseback. Doc calling his followers a “gang of outlaws” and “ne’er-do-well[s]”, he calls the police “lawmen” and affectionately refers to his followers directly as “boys”.
The setting is an obvious throwback to westerns as the location is the Midwest United States and the time is at the turn of the century (1900’s).
As far as the characters go, names like “Doc”, “Chicken Jim”, “Big Bob Cook”, and the “Verdigris Kid” make it easy to slip into the western feel. The fact that they are outlaws, moving from place to place and holding heists, is not enough to invoke the western classification. However, the way Abbott lays out these heist scenes, such as Big Bob bursting in with guns drawn, as well as the hit of the fort to steal the soldiers’ pay does take the story back to the western side of things.
What make’s “Love is a Crooked Thing” such an unusual western are all the little bits and pieces that don’t quite fit into that western mold. The Doc’s cold, calculating, scholarly nature is a far cry from the normal gun slinging, dirty western villain. The same applies to the cohort of unusual characters he surrounds himself with. The “Verdigris Kid” is a transvestite, hardly standard western material. His other lackeys include a poet and a scholar, more outsiders in the normal western posse.
Yet it all comes together in what can be easily classified as a western. That classification, however, and classifications in general for that matter, are all subject to the inconsistencies of their components. Some people would say it is a shaky western because of its characters. Daniel Chandler is particular, would choose not to classify it. According to Chandler’s “The Problem of Definition” section of his piece “An Introduction to Genre Theory”, he believes that all works can be classified into any or all genres, simply based on the point of view of the classifier. That point of view, Chandler says, can be changed by location, time period, personal politics, as well as what the trend of the time is.