Sure you can! Journalist Jeff Guinn's Glorious is a pretty good modern western novel. Set in St. Louis and Arizona in the 1860s, it plays well with some of the historical oddities of the period like the Robber Barons, impromptu mining towns, prospector culture, and the start of the big cattle ranches. As a change of pace the hero is no kind of gunslinger; he fires a gun a handful of times at the end of the novel, and is more likely to talk his way out of trouble.
Guinn's writing is fun, fast, and readable. Glorious is the first of the Cash McLendon trilogy, with the next featuring buffalo hunting and the Battle of Adobe Wells. As soon as I finished Glorious I read 50 pages of Buffalo Trail (#2) and started looking for Silver City (#3). Guinn will probably not hit my list of all time favorites, but the books are worth the time.
