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“You know, you don’t always have to wear the hat,” Elmore Leonard once said to Timothy Olyphant, per an interview that the Justified star did with The A.V. Club. “Maybe the wind picked up one day and blew it away.”

Through multiple interviews it becomes clear that while Leonard didn’t have many objections to the soon-returning series rooted in his short story, “Fire in the Hole,” he seemed not to be a fan of Olyphant’s version of Raylan incessantly wearing the hat. This is interesting to me, to begin with, in part because of the following exchange from the novel Pronto, where Raylan first appears.

[McCormick] said to Raylan, “You wear that hat all the time?”

“When I go out,” Raylan said, “yeah.”

This isn’t just a flippant response by Raylan. The hat is repeatedly commented on throughout the novel, from how it (along with his cowboy boots) seems to enhance Raylan’s height, and how it’s constant presence on Raylan’s head makes him unmistakable, to how it’s a source of mild irritation to people who seem to think he just wears the thing too damn much.

Hey, writers are allowed to change their minds. Years later, Justified comes to small screens and the person who created Marshal Raylan Givens, who went out of his way to point out that the cowboy hat is practically a part of the character, advises the one portraying Raylan that maybe the hat is worn just a little too much.

What a greater part of me finds interesting about Raylan’s hat is what Justified’s storytellers decided to do with it. Which is to say something. Several things, in fact. A couple of them quite significant.

Instead of just saying, “Well the hat looks great on our great-looking actor, and can probably be a quick and easy way to draw certain demographics to the show when they see Olyphant in it in promotional images and commercials,” they decided to actually give the hat some importance, sometimes in truly unexpected and impactful ways.

On the less significant side you have the season 1 episode “Hatless,” where Raylan gets into a fight with two crude loudmouths at a bar after they shoot down his request for them to “just keep it down a little bit.”

“Why would we do that?”

“Because I didn’t order assholes with my whiskey.”

After losing the fight he also gets his hat stolen by the bigger of the two men. At the end of the episode, he’s able to calmly talk the man into giving the hat back without further violence by pointing out that, when worn by the guy who looks like a football lineman, it’s a ten-gallon hat atop a twenty-gallon head.

Even earlier in season 1, Raylan’s partner, Rachel, points out that Raylan being allowed to wear the hat sans any grief from their superiors is a small example of how he can get away with things that she, a black U.S. Marshal working in Kentucky, could never hope to. While driving back to headquarters at the conclusion of a case, Rachel takes his hat while he is asleep beside her, and tries it on. Raylan, actually awake, asks her if it fits. She replies, “Nope,” and hands it back.

While one of these examples is a small, largely inconsequential side-story, and another puts a cap (pun acknowledged) on the relationship dynamic explored between Rachel and Raylan as they’re starting to get to know one another (and gets referenced as Rachel and Raylan part ways in the series finale), the way it’s featured later has legitimate life-and-death stakes.

I’ll jump to the end of the series here, for my first example of the hat playing an important role, and hopefully it’s obvious that I’ll be openly writing about some major plot points, so if you want to remain unspoiled, skip to the next section of this article below. Others, do come along with me.

In the final season of Justified a gunman named Boon is introduced. The latest to want to challenge Raylan one-on-one, whether in an old school shootout, or, as was the case with Fletcher “The Ice Pick” Nix, in some kind of fixed duel to the death that they nonetheless lose because they’re not as smart as they think, not as good as they think, or because Raylan perhaps gets an assist from an unexpected place, like when Limehouse chopped off Quarles’s arm.

Boon is different. While the rest of these villains I’ve described couldn’t match Raylan’s skill, and some only lasted for a single episode, Boon actually is that good. Also, somewhat reminiscent of Doc Holliday in the film Tombstone, he’s in it for the blood. Even after his bosses are dead and he would be far better off laying low for the time being, Boon follows Raylan to “save [him] the trouble of looking for me.” What he really wants—all that he wants—is his quickdraw battle, and to prove he’s the faster, better shot than the legendary marshal.

And Boon might actually have been at least Raylan’s equal. When they draw and fire, both men drop. Raylan, throughout the series, aims for center mass, the heart specifically, and drops his target as expected, while Boon’s shot takes Raylan’s hat clean off his head. The camera shows us a hole has been put through that hat, and I can tell you that on first watching the episode, seeing the hole in his trademark crown, I wondered if Justified might have actually ended the series with the death of its lead (it did not, opting instead for what I would argue is one of the stronger callback exchanges to any work of fiction I’ve read, watched, or listened to).

Raylan gets up slowly. He has been grazed by Boon’s bullet, and is bleeding, but is very much alive. Boon aimed a hair too high.

Remember that part I wrote earlier? About how Leonard wrote of Raylan’s hat in a way that made him seem even taller than he was?

I’ve never seen an official declaration from the show’s creators that this was the reason why Boon, a deadshot, was just a bit off target, and I’d kind of rather not have one. I’m not looking for validation of this theory, which isn’t mine alone, I remember seeing at least a few other fans suggest it in comments after the finale. Even if some might consider it a stretch or entirely bogus, it wouldn’t negate my larger point about the hat being given significance during a vital point in the series—in this case, the show’s very last shootout.

Still, I do legitimately think (and like the idea) that the hat had symbolic and strategic importance in that scene.

While that might be somewhat debatable, the hat’s criticality is indisputable when it is referenced in the heartache-inducing, closing moments of the season three finale, “Slaughterhouse.”

Raylan and his father, Arlo, never got along, in part because Arlo was your classic abusive husband and father, and in perhaps even larger part because Raylan chose to be a lawman while Arlo is a lifelong criminal, and not even a particularly good one at that. In season one, we see the conflict and relationship between them reach an ostensible nadir when Arlo agreed to shoot Raylan in the leg to allow him to be captured by the Miami Cartel, who he surely must have known would execute his son.

Somehow, though, Raylan manages to just barely stand the sight and presence of his father, as well as he can, through season 2 and season 3, despite Arlo effectively disowning his son as though Raylan had been the one to betray him. By the end of season 3, Arlo has all but adopted another career criminal, the charismatic and much craftier Boyd Crowder, Raylan’s foil and the show’s primary antagonist. And in the aforementioned episode “Slaughterhouse,” we find out how far Arlo (who, in whatever fairness he deserves, has been skipping the medication that would curb his dementia) is willing to go to protect Boyd, and how so far beyond caring for his sone he’s gone.

We finish the season not with the previously mentioned moment of Limehouse helping Raylan by “disarming” the season’s main villain (pun stolen from the series itself), but with the revelation that Arlo is responsible for the death of another lawman, Tom Bergen, in order to save Boyd from arrest or worse. Tom was a minor recurring character; a State Trooper who thus wears a hat regularly as part of his uniform.

Speaking later to Winona, his ex-wife, Raylan tells her what he’s learned about his father’s murder of a peace officer. That Arlo, apparently, did not know he was shooting at Tom.

“[H]e just saw a man in a hat pointing a gun at Boyd,” Raylan says, before putting his own hat on and walking off to ponder this information alone.

All of this makes me think of an episode from the beloved, discontinued but never forgotten YouTube channel, “Every Frame a Painting,” created by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos. The episode about chairs, specifically, where it’s pointed out that a chair isn’t always “merely” a prop (not to diminish the importance of props). Chairs can also tell you something about a character (Tony Montana’s absurd throne in Scarface), or enhance an element of the storytelling (Fredo’s unsteady chaise not letting him sit up and assert himself during the critical confrontation with Michael in The Godfather Pt. II).

So, too, can something as simple and seemingly ornamental as a cowboy hat. It’s okay if you want to have your character wear it all the time for no reason other than you just like it. But there also could be a great storytelling opportunity available if you give it a few additional reasons for continuously being there.

P.S. – After the showdown with Boon, Raylan ends up with his adversary’s hat. It came off Boon’s head in the immediate aftermath of their gunfight, even though Boon was hit in the heart, not the head. Just before Boon dies, as Leonard suggested could happen to Raylan’s hat, “the wind picked up[…] and blew it away.” For Raylan to retrieve it.

Sometimes you get great ideas from a legend even when you don’t entirely agree with them.

• Wynn Duffy Threatens Emmitt

  “Show me the cash Emmitt, or I swear to God I’m gonna get a machete and a blow torch and I’m gonna make your body as small as I possibly can!”

• The Legend of Charlie Fish - by Josh Rountree (

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Fitting a Western vibe, Josh Rountree’s novel, The Legend of Charlie Fish is available for pre-order now, and is set to be released on July 25th. Related: I’ll be in person and in conversation with Josh Rountree at Nowhere Bookshop (San Antonio, TX) on July 27th, as part of his tour. As such, I’ve had the chance to read Charlie Fish in advance, and it’s right at home in this current, terrific Weird Western revival (including, but not limited to, Victor Lavalle’s Lone Women, Hailey Piper’s Cruel Angels Past Sundown, and September’s Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian). On top of how good it is on its own, for me personally, it immediately won my heart by incorporating the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 as a pivotal element of the story, a topic that—if you’ve read my previous posts here—you already know I’m forever fascinated by.

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