Lost Canyon is my thirty-sixth western/frontier novel. I wrote it in the spring of 2024, and it was published in January 2025 as an e-book and paperback by Wolfpack Publishing. It is the first novel in a three-book series featuring Jess Delaine.

In Lost Canyon, Jess Delaine comes to the town of Overton, Wyoming, looking for work. He grew up in Wyoming and spent several years in New Mexico and then Colorado, and now he has come back. In his years of work as a ranch hand, he has found himself at marginal work such as mavericking (branding unbranded calves) for an employer from time to time, and part of his motivation in coming back to Wyoming is to get a clean start. In the course of the novel, he meets others who also are trying to remake their lives, with varying results.

Also in the course of this story, Delaine takes interest in the disappearance of a working girl named Nora Peele, who worked at the laundry and did sex work for additional income. When a couple of Delaine’s new acquaintances turn up dead, along with an ineffectual detective who is looking for a missing girl from Colorado, Delaine pursues knowledge in darker places and learns of a place called Lost Canyon, where one or more girls may have ended up. First by himself and then collaborating with a deputy, Delaine works his way up through a hierarchy of traffickers.

This novel is a crossover western/mystery. I have something of a reputation for not writing shoot-’em-ups or straight, fast-action westerns. But because of the imperative western content, or what I think of as expectations of the genre, works such as this one are not straight mysteries, either. Still, they tend to have a limiting factor in that everything in the novel needs to bear upon the central mystery, and we cannot have gratuitous scenes of amour, bronc-busting, cattle rustling, fistfights, and the like. Writing in a series also has some limitations, as everything in the current story has to be compatible with stories that come before or after.

I have done some work with series characters in the past, such as the Jimmy Clevis novels and short stories, the Dunbar novels and shorter works, the two novels and one story with Wilf Kasmire, and shorter fiction with protagonists such as Henry Tresh and Willis Thorne. However, this is the first time that I have written the works in direct sequence, one right after the other. With all of my other series characters, I would do one work with that character, go on to write other things, and come back to the series character when it seemed like time for another story with him. I developed this practice to begin with because I found it productive to go from one kind of story to another, from ironic to straightforward or from contemporary to retro to Old West and back. I also had an editor who said it was a good idea not to be identified with a series. This time, however, the publisher wanted three novels together, so I wrote them. At the time of this writing, with Lost Canyon being released, the other two novels are written and in line for production.

In order to build myself up to write this novel and think about the series, I did quite a bit of background or preparatory reading, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Trollope, and mainstream British and American poetry. I also read some well-known works in Western American fiction, plus a novel by Graham Greene. In addition, I watched several movies, from Tom Mix to John Wayne, James Stewart, and Glenn Ford, plus Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight.

As I often do when I am working on a story, I went on a couple of field trips to observe the kind of terrain in which the story would take place. As many fiction writers do, I changed the names of the places so that I could manage locations for my story purposes. The landscape is real, just re-arranged in some ways.

Wolfpack Publishing has been very good to work with on this series as well as on a sequence of nine reprints and one original (Boy from the Country) before this. The production process is well organized, and everything happens on time. My works have good, original covers that contribute to a coherent image or brand of my work, and Wolfpack does good promotion. I hope this novel and its successors meet with success.

Lost Canyon is available at Amazon.

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