Playing a Lone Hand is a collection of short and mid-length fiction that was brought out by Thorndike Press as a large print original in September of 2025. This grouping consists of six stories, four of them published before and the other two new in this presentation.
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Under Heaven’s Own Blue has the subtitle of Classic Stories of the American West. This collection consists of one short story and three novellas. It was published by Thorndike Press in November of 2024.
The first story, “Truth and Principle,” has as its narrator a character named Henry Tresh, who is the narrator and sleuth in “Return to Laurel,” a story that did well for me a few years ago. In this later story, which was published in an anthology by Five Star, Tresh undertakes to solve the mystery of the death of the son of an older woman who has some apprehensions but wants to know the truth. Along the way, Tresh meets the deceased’s ex-wife and subsequent paramour, and he sticks to principle in his dealings with them.
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Bright Skies and Dark Horses is a collection of western short stories. I wrote most of these stories in 2021, and the collection was brought out by Five Star in February of 2023.
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“Blue Is Not the Word” and “Buckskin Trail” are two separate short stories that I wrote when I was in between novel projects. I offered them to the publisher, Speaking Volumes, with the idea that they might be published as individual short stories in e-book form, as I have had several stories published that way in the past. The publisher chose to publish them first in print form, which resulted in a short book, and I was pleased to see it come out.
Continue readingDouble 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.
Continue readingKeep the Wind in Your Face was published by Endeavor Books of Casper, Wyoming, in October 1998. Although it was the first complete novel I wrote, it was not the first to appear in print. Not only did it take me a long time to assail and finish a full-length manuscript, but I also struggled finding a publisher for it.
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Like last year but quite different, this year has been a good year for me with awards. My short story “Return to Laurel” was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Western Short Fiction Story and was also a finalist for the Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award for Best Short Fiction. My novella “Leaving the Lariat Trail” won the Peacemaker Award for Best Short Fiction. Any one of these distinctions would give me an occasion to be thankful, and so I am appreciative three times over.
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Dangerous Trails, published by Prairie Rose Publications in June 2020, is a collection of twelve western short stories that (with one small exception) I wrote since my last collection (Blue Horse Mesa) came out in 2013. This is my third collection of western short stories and my eleventh collection of short fiction. It includes “Return to Laurel,” which was a Western Writers of America Spur Award finalist and a Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award finalist, both in 2020.
Continue reading“At the End of the Orchard” is a story of mine that originally appeared in a magazine called Hardboiled in May 2009. This story is a little under 10,000 words—not quite in the novella range but longer than most short stories. It is representative of one kind of fiction I have worked on in recent years. After its publication in Hardboiled, it went on to win the Western Writers of America Spur Award for best western short story in 2010.
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I’ll Tell You What is a collection of short stories that I brought out myself in the summer of 1996. It consists of fourteen stories, eight of them previously published, and it was a bit of a lark to publish.
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