Tag: frontier mystery (Page 1 of 2)

Riders of the Skull Author Commentary

January 24, 2025 / / 0 Comments

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.

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Diamonds and Doom Author Commentary

December 29, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Diamonds and Doom is my thirty-second western/frontier novel. I wrote it in the fall of 2021, and it was published by Thorndike Press in September of 2023. It was on the schedule to be published by Five Star, but Five Star discontinued its western line, so it was released as a large print original by Thorndike. (All of my previous Five Star titles were reprinted as large print editions by Thorndike, as both companies were owned by Cengage.) This novel had a bit of a delay in its release, but it made its appearance in durable format with an intriguing cover.

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Coldwater Range Commentary

December 28, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Coldwater Range is my thirty-first western/frontier novel and my twelfth book with Five Star. I wrote it in 2020, and it came out in April of 2022.

For this novel, I wanted to write something on a par with some of my other recent novels such as Great Lonesome. For the premise of this story, I present a main character who decides he must follow his conscience when he discovers that his boss has expanded his cattle ranch through crooked activity.

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Double Deceit Commentary

January 4, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Double Deceit is a novella of 21,000 words that was published in November 2020 by Five Star Publishing. I wrote this story in the late fall of 2019, and it appeared in a quartet of frontier crime novellas entitled Perilous Frontier.

I have written a few other works in the novella range. As I mention in other commentaries on my work, I enjoy working in different lengths. Some people consider the typical length for a commercial story to be about 5000 words, while many literary magazines have limits such as 1500, 2500, 3500, and so on. Over the years, I have written stories of just about every length from 1000 to 28,000 words. In this past year alone, I have written stories at 1000, 5000, 8000, 10,000, and 20,000 words, plus a novel at 70,000. So when the opportunity came up to write a work in the 20,000 range, I was happy to give it a try. 

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Great Lonesome Commentary

December 21, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Great Lonesome is my twenty-ninth western/frontier novel and my tenth book with Five Star. I wrote it in 2018, and it came out in November of 2020, delayed by a few months as many books were during the pandemic. 

Prior to writing this novel, I gathered notes over a period of a few years. I wanted to write a story about a person who rejected materialistic and conformist values, and I thought it would be a good story if this person met another person with similar interests. And so I came up with my protagonist, Reese Hartley, and my unconventional heroine, Muriel Dulse. Both characters have come west in order to have their own land and to forge a new life. Hartley also wants to get away from systems and machines, which become sort of a correlative for a way of life in which people pursue wealth and material possessions and oblige others to cooperate with them.

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Crossing Over

February 18, 2020 / / 2 Comments

One of the best pieces of advice I received when I was trying to find a home for my first novel came from an agent. She suggested that I not be afraid to try writing a genre western. As I had been writing short stories, articles, reviews, and poems for several years and was taking a big step toward book-length fiction, I was hesitant to try a second novel if my first one wasn’t going anywhere. But with her encouragement, I went to work on an idea for a traditional western. It took me a couple of years, in and around the shorter things I was writing, in addition to my full-time teaching position, but I ended up with a western novel.

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Justice at Redwillow Commentary

May 14, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Justice at Redwillow is my twenty-third western/frontier novel and my fourth with Five Star in its hardcover frontier line. It was published in August of 2015.

I began working on ideas for this story line in 2011, but I struggled quite a bit with some of the elements. I think some of my uncertainties may have come from my status, as this was the period between the time when Dorchester ended its western line and the time when Five Star began its frontier line. As mentioned in other commentaries, I had begun working with an agent, but the various commercial publishing companies were wary of taking on new writers, and some of them had a rather narrow idea of what kinds of stories they wanted. I came to appreciate Dorchester, who, in spite of wanting things to be recognizable traditional westerns, was willing to accept stories that were a bit atypical and varied.

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