From a New York Times story by Celia McGee headlined “Novelists Reimagine The Old West”:

Their eyes meet across a crowded street in 1870s Dodge City, Kan., the gunslinging bounty hunter and the impulsive rebel, one a dark-haired loner, the other a striking redhead: two young women destined to work out their mutual sparks on the frontier where Owen Wister enshrined the all-male, all-white Western genre novel with “The Virginian,” in 1902.

In Claudia Cravens’s debut novel, “Lucky Red,” the two main characters are Bridget Shaughnessy, earning her keep as a “sporting woman” at the Buffalo Queen Saloon, and Spartan Lee, a notorious sharpshooter who has touched down in Bridget’s life bearing the warning line, “Whenever I tire of a place, I just light out.”