There are two things wrong with Richard S. Wheeler's memoir "An Accidental Novelist." One is that he repeats himself a lot. He says something, then says it again and then says it once again in case you missed it.

The second problem is the title. I don't know how you could write a novel accidentally. Wheeler was probably born to be a novelist; he just didn't realize it until he was well into middle age. First he was failed journalist, who moved from one job to the next without making his mark. Then he became a failed book editor, who moved from one job to the next. Finally he tried his hand at writing western novels out of desperation and found his place in the world. He wasn't so much an accidental novelist as a novelist by trial and error.

Wheeler was born and raised in Wisconsin, where he regularly read the stories in The New Yorker. His family was not surprised that he eventually settled into a literary career. They were just surprised he ended up writing westerns rather than the kind of stories that might be published in The New Yorker. But in his travels across the country from one job to the next, Wheeler fell in love with the West. And he found interesting stories there, not stories about gunfights and cattle rustlers that one associates with western fiction but stories about miners and trappers and others who had been largely ignored by western writers. His fiction, long a favorite of mine, better reflects the real West than the books of most other western writers. ( )