We all know the A-listers of Old West bad men and their pursuers: Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickock — one bloodstain after another. Less familiar but no less fascinating are the reprobates whose stories are told by five-time Spur Award winner Loren D. Estleman in THE BRANCH AND THE SCAFFOLD: THE TRUE STORY OF THE WEST’S LEGENDARY HANGING JUDGE, about Isaac Parker of Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Parker believed that executions should be public — not to provide entertainment, but to teach a moral lesson. Murderers and rapists should receive in a public display the wages of their sins. With hangman George Maledon as the man with the rope, and deputies of the caliber of “The Three Guardsmen” — Bill Tilghman, Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas —the Hanging Judge was ready to get to work.

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After hearing for years and years about how great the comic-book creative team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby was, I finally “get it.” All it took was reading the pair’s THE BEST OF SIMON AND KIRBY, a fabulous hardcover collection from Titan Books.

Sure, I’ve read their stuff plenty times before, but as a kid, I was unaware of things like “writers” and “artists.” And anything in adulthood has primarily been their superhero stuff, which as it turns out, is their least dynamic genre. This book offers several examples from that subject, as well as sci-fi, war, romance, crime, Western, horror and even humor.

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The more you know about H.P. Lovecraft, the more you’re apt to enjoy CTHULHU UNBOUND, a Permuted Press anthology of “genre-bending tales” involving the author’s vast mythology. Edited by Thomas Brannan and John Sunseri, the collection features 15 stories in a variety of genres, but if you don’t know your Shub-Niggurath from Nyarlathotep, I’m afraid you’ll be mostly lost.

The book’s inventiveness is evident from the start, as Linda L. Donahue’s opening story is a noir detective tale, albeit one with a protagonist who has cloven hooves. Things get more English and proper for Kevin Lauderdale’s “James and the Dark Grimoire,” in which one Aunt Agnes of the Ladies Auxiliary seeks a rare book she thinks is called something like “the Nickel Norman Chrome.”

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I don’t know about anyone else, but the first car I drove — a super-cool 1978 Volare green station wagon — only had an AM radio, so the musical choices for this young punk fan were talk radio, dentist-office music and one oldies station where I was thrilled to hear a Them song. So, as a teen, there was nothing cooler than having a choice of “Afternoon Delight,” “Mack the Knife” or Paul Harvey. Ugh!

Yeah, I had to endure a lot of awful music in those formative years, and this column is the end result. Fittingly, I have three books sharing titles of certain big hits of those days, with the third being a bit of forcing the matter, but close enough.

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T.T. Flynn (the first T stood for Thomas and the second for Theodore) was one of the more mature writers of Westerns to move into slick magazine and book publication in the 1950s. I know, it’s hard for you non-Western readers to imagine a story from that genre that was intended for grown-ups, but you should take a look at Flynn, Luke Short and Ernest Haycox as starters.

It’s not that their yarns never contained gunfights and saloon brawls, but those favorite elements were not the high points of their books. Stop a second and remember some of the movies based on their stories: Short’s CORONER CREEK, Haycox’s STAGECOACH and Flynn’s THE MAN FROM LARAMIE.

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Shock and awe best sum up SANCTIFIED AND CHICKEN-FRIED: THE PORTABLE LANSDALE, an anthology of Joe R. Lansdale’s East Texas stories, issued by University of Texas Press. Definitely not for the fainthearted or the easily offended, this book also happens to be the definitive collection of his work, showcasing all the elements of his style.

Bill Crider provides a great foreword to the collection, relating his longtime friendship with Lansdale and talking about the pieces that made the cut, including some of Lansdale’s personal favorites. It features his best-known work — for me, at least — with “Bubba Ho-Tep,” the story of a rest home where one Elvis A. Presley resides.

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Food, glorious food is our theme this time out. But I’m severely bending the rules on this one, since our second book barely fits; I would really need to add an S to the second word of the title. However, there are plenty of scenes of people eating by a campfire, so it’s covered. Meanwhile, the first book is more of a dessert, and the final book deals with a stale old muffin. Still, all three are worth searching out, that’s for sure — especially since the middle one is considered a true American classic.

THE SHARK-INFESTED CUSTARD by Charles Willeford — This 1993 novel is unlike anything else I’ve read by Willeford, since it’s not a straightforward story, but more like four vignettes whose main characters appear in each others’ stories. At the start of the book, all four friends live at the same apartment complex. The opening story is all told from the perspective of Larry “Fuzz-o” Dolman. He and pals Eddie Miller, Don Luchessi and Hank Norton are all shooting the breeze by the pool, discussing the hardest place to pick up women in Florida.

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Here’s my Louis L’Amour story: When his short story collection YONDERING was published in 1980, the author set out on a promotion tour that brought him to Oklahoma City. I caught up with him at a mall bookstore where fans were standing in a very long line to get an autograph. We were told he had time to sign two books max, so I grabbed that new collection and a copy of the 1967 MATAGORDA.

I set my two books on the table in front of him and he signed YONDERING, but hesitated some when he saw the title of the second one. He looked up at me with a question on his face and I said, “I grew up in Matagorda County.” Grinning, he replied, “I knew there had to be a reason.”

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John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS is considered not only the greatest Western, but also one of the greatest American movies ever made. But how many people have actually read Alan LeMay’s THE SEARCHERS, on which that 1956 film was based? Leisure Books has reissued four classic Western books that have all been made into classic movies, in “The Classic Film Collection.”

Of course, the film took a few liberties with the 1954 story — some minor, like the name change of the main character, and some huge, which would lead into major spoilers. The plot is that of a family destroyed by an Indian raid with the lone survivor taken as a prisoner by the Comanches, with her only blood kin — Civil War veteran Amos Edwards — knowing the only left to do in his life is to track down his niece.

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I never tire of reading a good Western, and Robert J. Randisi usually provides those hours of enjoyment. DOUBLE THE BOUNTY and THE LAWMAN are reprints of two of his books featuring bounty hunter Decker, who seems to be an amalgam of some spaghetti Western heroes. He’s slightly different, in that he uses a sawed-off shotgun and carries on his horse a noose, which is fine by me, since I know going in that it will deliver some great Western action.

From 1987, DOUBLE THE BOUNTY deals with a legend of his own time: bank robber Brian Foxx. By all accounts, Foxx has been witnessed robbing two banks in two different states on the same day. How can that be? Well, Foxx has an identical twin named Brent pulling off the other robberies, making sure everyone gets a good look at both of them to expound these stories of his amazing crimes.

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Mike Kearby’s new Western for young adults isn’t filled with the clichés that make the genre what it is. In THE LAST RENEGADE, you’ll find no cattle drives, land barons, rapacious railroads, gunfights on the street in front of the saloon, or dewy-eyed school marms in this one. There is an Indian, however — Young-Man-Who-Listens — and he’s the title character.

He’s shot and captured as an adolescent. and sold to a traveling tent show to be displayed as Chief Raging Buffalo, The Last Real Renegade Indian, a bloodthirsty savage with more scalps to his credit than Pawnee Bill has circus posters. The only education he receives in the ways of the white man is the brutal treatment he is accorded by his captors. He picks up the language to the extent he hears it regularly from the men who care for him. Or don’t care for him, as the case may be.

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Although the title may be JONAH HEX: LUCK RUNS OUT, luck be a lady for you, the reader, in this six-issue collection of DC Comics’ ongoing Western series. Either you like stories about an ex-Confederate bounty hunter with half a face, or you don’t; I freaking love them, and could read them all day long.

In the first tale, “My Name Is Nobody,” Hex busts a gang of Mexican bandits and ends up meeting his long-lost son in the process; neither are very happy about the family reunion. Next is “Four Little Pigs: A Grindhouse Western.” True to its name, it’s a bloody one, so it’s more along Hex’s normal lines, but with an fairly uncharacteristic villain: women.

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