Riders of the Skull is my thirty-fifth western/frontier novel. I wrote it in the spring of 2023, and it was published in December 2024 as a large print original (first edition) by Thorndike Press.

This novel is unlike most of my others in that it does not follow the point of view of one main character but includes a couple of other sub-plots that converge with the main character’s story in the town of Guest. The main character is Jord Blaine, a rider for the Skull ranch who falls out of favor when he does not want to participate in the persecution of Creole (non-white) homesteaders. In one of the sub-plots, a detective named Motte is assigned, along with his amiable colleague Lorna, to try to find a girl who was abducted from an Indian boarding school. In the other sub-plot, Tyler McBroom, a traveling salesman of farm and ranch equipment, runs off with the mistress of a shady businessman in Billings, Montana.

With a wider range of narration, I also brought in a little more physical conflict and action than I sometimes do, as the riders of the Skull wreak havoc with homesteaders and with the hunting guide that Jord Blaine goes to work for.

I came about writing this novel in an unusual way. An editor with a paperback publisher in New York asked me if I would be interested in writing a couple of Zane Grey westerns in collaboration with a production company he was contracting with. There were television and movie prospects. Another writer at about my rank was invited to write two ZG’s, and I was to write the other two. Before long, the other writer withdrew his interest, and I was offered the opportunity to write all four. So I drew up four synopses, or story plans, with a tentative schedule for completion.

The editor wanted these works to be 80,000 words or so, a little longer than my usual work, so I went to work to cook up the first one. As it happens, I have done a bit of work with Zane Grey in my academic life. I read a few of his novels and included a substantial commentary on them in my doctoral dissertation on the western novel. I read a few more of his novels in preparation for an encyclopedia entry on Zane Grey, and I published an article about eroticism in Zane Grey (“Uncertain Sex in the Sagebrush”) when an editor wrote to me about the possibility (with marvelous serendipity) as I had been pondering doing an article on just such a subject. I had also read Riders of the Purple Sage a couple of more times when I gave courses in Western American Literature. So I felt qualified in that sense. I knew what a Zane Grey novel was like.

In preparation, I read Riders of the Purple Sage yet one more time. I also read Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, a classic work of earlier Western American fiction; Stepsons of Light, a shorter novel by Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a contemporary of Zane Grey whose work I have also studied; and Man in the Saddle, a traditional western by Ernest Haycox, a prominent western writer in the next generation after Grey, whose work I have also studied and have read from time to time as I prepare to write a new work. I also saw half a dozen standard western movies.

I have to admit that I have always sensed a little of the improbable and the absurd in much of Grey’s fiction, and in a way, that was liberating, as I did not feel that I had to abide by my own usual constraints of what I think is realistic.

Meanwhile, I had told the editor that I would do this work if I could have my name on the cover. I was not interested in doing ghost writing or pseudonymous work. So I was given that assurance. However, this editor is of the kind who likes to change the title of one’s work. I have interpreted this tendency as a way that the editor takes ownership of a writer’s work (and to some extent of the writer), not unlike the legendary frontier cooks who peed in the soup to give it their flavor.  My sense of the improbable and the absurd was fulfilled when the editor changed my first title to “So Young the Savage Land” and changed another title to “The Whispers of Dawn.” 

As I worked on the manuscript, my agent and I received occasional updates on when we might expect a contract, as the editor’s publishing company was negotiating with the people who had the Zane Grey rights in Los Angeles (and were going to take us all to the movies). On one hand, with work of this nature, it is not advisable, by some people’s standards, to write anything until there is a contract. On the other hand, I had a schedule laid out, and I wanted to be able to hold up my part of it. So I continued to write.

As I wrote, I also had an awareness that I could end up with this work in my own hands, so I wrote it as I wished, with my original title in mind. And that is what happened. At about the time I finished the manuscript, the editor informed us that the people in Los Angeles did not follow through.

So the work was mine. It was not a work for hire, and it was not subjected to someone else’s title. The agent was able to find a very good home for it at Thorndike Press, and it came out as scheduled.

I do not wish to make light of ghost writing or writing for hire, as I have known quite a few writers, some of them good friends, who have done that work and have found it rewarding in a variety of ways, including giving a sense of professional achievement. It has not worked out for me, and this is not the first prospect I have considered. I have been glad that everything I have written (with the exception of one short story, which is a story for another day) has come out in my own name. But if tomorrow or the next day someone were to write me and share an interesting prospect, I would consider it.

Riders of the Skull is available at Amazon.

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