MAVERICK: LEGEND OF THE WEST is a behind-the-scenes look at the iconic Emmy Award-winning Western series that turned the genre inside out, featuring interviews and commentary from series creator and producer Roy Huggins, writers Marion Hargrove and Howard Browne, directors Budd Boetticher and Leslie H. Martinson, producer Coles Trapnell, actors Roger Moore (“Beau Maverick”) and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (“Dandy Jim Buckley”), and other key series personnel.
Bret Maverick (James Garner), and later his brother Bart (Jack Kelly), neither looked nor behaved like a traditional cowboy hero. He dressed in black, played cards for a living, and wasn’t above sneaking out the back door if it meant avoiding trouble. At a time when television was chock full of Westerns, Maverick (ABC, 1957-1962) stood out from the pack, putting series creator Roy Huggins on the map as a producer while making James Garner a star.
Maverick quickly became a bona fide TV legend, burning itself indelibly in the hearts and minds of Baby Boomers around the world. But like most legends, the show’s history on television is a mixture of fact and fiction. MAVERICK: LEGEND OF THE WEST examines the myths and the realities, probing what made Maverick such a huge success in its first two seasons, while also revealing the backstage struggles with Warner Bros. that eventually drove away Huggins and Garner, the show’s two key components.
This revised third edition includes more than a dozen new interviews with such Maverick guest stars as William Reynolds, Ruta Lee, Connie Stevens, William Schallert, Dawn Wells, and Mike Connors; additional photographs that did not appear in previous editions of this book; new behind-the-scenes information about the series, including a freshly discovered revelation about Maverick’s fifth season; new comments from James Garner himself; and more.
Industry Reviews
“This is one of those books that transcends its own parochial interest to shed light on an entire medium: the players emerge as three-dimensional, idiosyncratic characters, and when the decline of the series is delineated, one feels it profoundly as the genuine tragedy and short-sided artistic waste that it was. Mr. Robertson performed the same honors in The Fugitive Recaptured, and, as notable works of television journalism, both deal a straight flush.”
The Nassau Herald
“A thorough documentation of the Emmy Award-winning series.”
Ingram Reviews
“Ed Robertson has studied and described this entertainment phenomenon from its beginning in 1956 to its most recent return, the Warner Bros. movie in 1994. Robertson has made that history suspenseful and absorbing, and I am persuaded, after reading Maverick: Legend of the West, that Maverick is nowhere near the end of its illustrious history.”
Roy Huggins
creator of Maverick and co-creator of The Rockford Files,
from his Foreword for the First Edition of Maverick: Legend of the West
