On a winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation.

It was an extraordinary news story.

The story of an aristocrat, Lord Lucan, who's said to have killed the family Nanny,

mistaking her for his wife, then somehow just disappeared.

One of the great mysteries in English criminal history. We're still looking for

Lucan. It's honestly one of the most powerful stories of my lifetime. I'm Alex Fontunzelman. This is

the Lucan Obsession. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Howdy. Today on Open Book, it's Guns at Dawn as we look at the Western in literary fiction with Kevin Barre and his new Frontierland novel The Heart in Winter.

As a child, I remember long, boring Sunday afternoons when the only thing to watch on TV was black and white westerns with supposedly heroic cowboys and the dubious treatment of women and indigenous Americans.

But over the last few years there's been something of a literary revival which, as evidenced

by three recent novels, reimagines those dusty well-trodden roads in exciting new ways.

Ananath's outlawed, for instance,

centres women, queer and non-binary characters in an alternative historical timeline.

And in the Borrowed Hills, Scott Preston uses the Western as inspiration for a tale

about Cumbrian farmers at the height of foot and mouth. We'll speak to both later about why

the West has never been wilder.

But we kick off today with Kevin Barry's new novel The Heart in Winter,

a western which foregoes gunfights at noon for a poetic Frontierland Irish romance set in 1890s Montana.

Polly Gillespie is a woman who has just arrived in the frontier town of Butte to enter a

passionless marriage with a devout mine captain.

But when she meets the raffish young poet Tom Rourke, all hell breaks loose.

The two lovers mount their steed and attempt to elope to San Francisco, but first they'll

need to make their way through the treacherous badlands of the

...