Tag: original westerns (Page 1 of 2)

Riders of the Skull Author Commentary

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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Rose of Greenwood Author Commentary

Rose of Greenwood is my thirty-third western/frontier novel. I wrote it in the spring of 2022, when the Five Star western/frontier line was still going, but submission of the manuscript was delayed, and when Five Star discontinued its western line later in 2022, this novel went in search of a home. Thanks to the efforts of my agent, Cherry Weiner, the novel was accepted by Speaking Volumes and was published in October of 2023.

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Coldwater Range Commentary

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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Great Lonesome Commentary

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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Dusk Along the Niobrara Commentary

Dusk Along the Niobrara is my twenty-eighth western/frontier novel, my ninth book with Five Star, and my fourth Dunbar novel. I wrote it in 2017-18, and it came out in June of 2019. As of this writing, in July of 2019, it has received good reviews. When I did the proofreading on it about five months ago, I thought it held together pretty well.

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For the Norden Boys Commentary

I continue to post commentaries I have written about my own work, with the assumption that anyone who ends up here is interested in knowing about things I have written.  For additional images, book descriptions, and review excerpts, one may go to the “Books” tab above and browse there.

For the Norden Boys is my eighth traditional western novel.  It was published in June 2002 by Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing).  As with Black Hat Butte and Lonesome Range, I consider it to be at the center of my work, as it is a literary traditional western with strong interest in character and landscape. For the Norden Boys is available at Amazon.

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Coyote Trail Commentary

I continue to post commentaries I have written about my own work, with the assumption that anyone who ends up here is interested in knowing about things I have written.  For additional images, book descriptions, and review excerpts, one may go to the “Books” tab above and browse there.

Herein I introduce a bit of commentary I wrote in 2009 about Coyote Trail, which is available on Amazon.

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Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon Commentary

I am back at the blog after being away for a while.  I am continuing to put up information about my work, so that interested readers could find out a little more about an item of information.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, Sundown Press, operated by Cheryl Pierson and Livia Washburn Reasoner, has brought out my first three novels as reprints in e-book and print format.  Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon is now available at Amazon. I am grateful to Cheryl and Livia, as always, for their kind and considerate treatment as they have brought out these works.

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