Back in the Black Horse saddle again

I'm pleased to report that The Crowood Press have agreed to publish my western Marshal of the Barren Plains.

I actually wrote this book last year. I'd finished it, printed it off, and stuck it in an envelope ready to post to Robert Hale. Then I logged on to Royal Mail to print off a stamp only for the site to clog up and refuse to print, so I amused myself for a few minutes while I waited for it to clear. And it was then that I read the news that Hale had just announced they were closing.

Anyhow, I waited a while before trying the new publisher of the Black Horse series and I was delighted to find they are just as approachable and just as quick to report back as Hale was. So I remain hopeful that the series is in good hands and should keep going for a while longer, or at least until Dodgy Dave burns down the last library and stomps on the ashes.

This book returns to one of my favourite locales of the Barren Plains and this time, after getting several mentions in previous books, it finally has scenes set at the Bleak Point silver mine at the heart of the Barren Plains.

It'll be my 34th Black Horse Western and I guess it'll be out some time in 2017. Here's my draft blurb:

When Marshal Rattigan Fletcher failed to stop Jasper Minx raiding the town bank, the angry townsfolk forced him to leave Ash Valley in disgrace. Rattigan went west in pursuit of Jasper, and in the inhospitable Barren Plains he got a chance to put right his mistake.

 

Rattigan is hired to find out why men from the Bleak Point silver mine have been disappearing in mysterious circumstances. As Jasper now works at the mine, Rattigan doesn't have to look far for a culprit, but Jasper claims he's not responsible. With the miners siding with Jasper, Rattigan will need to rediscover his tarnished instincts as a lawman if he is ever to solve the mystery and bring his Nemesis to justice.

Bad Moon over Devil's Ridge now available on Kindle.

Bad Moon over Devil's Ridge is available on Kindle. It was originally my 14th Black Horse Western.

 

 

 

As I mentioned earlier on this blog this is the fifth Cassidy Yates tale, but I labelled the fourth one as being the third McBain book, so this one is now labelled as Cassidy Yates, Book 4. I hope that's clear because I'm already getting confused.

 

This story features Sheriff Cassidy Yates's long-lost brother Emerson. That's long lost in that Cassidy didn't know he had a brother until I started writing this story. Emerson is everything Cassidy isn't.

 

The thing I enjoyed about writing this book was alternating the viewpoint character with each chapter. I've often told stories from the viewpoint of several characters, but in this case I maintained the strict discipline of having one chapter relate Cassidy's adventures while the next one turns to the newspaper correspondent, Nick Kearney, and then back again. Making sure the plot advances for each character at the same pace while leaving both characters in tricky situations was a fun challenge and it was harder than I expected. I'm fairly sure I haven't tried it again since.

 

The book is now available from amazon.

 

When Sheriff Cassidy Yates rode into Eagle Heights he never expected he would be in jail by nightfall on an unfounded murder charge. Although Cassidy answered the charge, it was only at the cost of implicating his own wayward brother in both this murder and the kidnapping of the dead man’s widow.

Against an escalating conspiracy of fear operating in the town, Cassidy gains the help of a young newspaper correspondent in his quest to find the real killer and the kidnapped woman. But with gun-toting ranchers and numerous hired guns standing between Cassidy and justice, can he prove his brother’s innocence?

The Man who Tamed Lone Pine

The Man who Tamed Lone Pine is now available. It is my 33rd Black Horse Western.

This book features the return of Nathaniel McBain and Shackleton Frost. Having given Nathaniel the job in The Secret of Devil's Canyon of escorting prisoners to jail, which at the time felt like a job with endless possibilities for plots, I found that it wasn't quite the gold mine of possibilities that I'd first thought it would be. Every story idea I came up with seemed to revolve around the prisoner claiming he's innocent and Nathaniel being concerned enough to ignore his duty and help the prisoner clear his name.

So years have passed since that story without me writing about Nathaniel again until it occurred to me that if you have a man who escorts prisoners to jail, there are two basic plots available. In one the prisoner is a victim of a miscarriage of justice and in the other he's isn't. I decided to try the second one, although, as it turned out, the matter of the prisoner's guilt was only a small part of a bigger mystery....

When Nathaniel McBain and Shackleton Frost arrive in Lone Pine to escort a prisoner to Beaver Ridge jail, they are shocked to discover it is Shackleton's old friend Sheriff Ashton Clarke. Five years ago Ashton tamed the town, but now he's been charged with killing in cold blood. 

 

Ashton claims that someone from his past has framed him, and Shackleton believes his friend. Buts as more bodies are found and with all the evidence pointing to Ashton, the case against him begins to look unbreakable. If Nathaniel and Shackleton are to solve the mystery and save their friend, they will have to turn their backs on their duty and use their trusty sixshooters instead.

Devine's Mission now available on Kindle

Devine's Mission is now available on Kindle.

 

 

 

After 2012 's Devine I knew that I would one day write about US Marshal Jake T. Devine again, although it took me a few years before I decided to let him ride again.

Once I'd decided to start writing I had the usual problem that I have with Devine of creating a worthwhile adversary. Marshal Devine is a brutal, no-nonsense lawman who doesn't sit around waiting for the end of the story so that he can shoot the bad guys. He just kicks down the door, abuses everyone in the room, and then blasts the bad guy between the eyes. If he's in a good mood he might vary the routine by spitting on the dead man's face and whistling, but otherwise it's hard to avoid him just wiping out everyone long before the plot can unfold.

So this time I outlined a plot with plenty of twists involving stolen gold and the fiendish plans of master bad guy Scorpio Blake. Then I started writing. Three pages into the story Devine decided he'd had enough of idle chatter and killed Scorpio, which slightly destroyed my outlined plot. So, I just carried on writing and decided to see where Devine would take things. As it turned out, I was surprised by the solution to the central mystery of what had happened to the stolen gold, even though the clues had been there from the moment I wrote the title on a blank page...

Anyhow, the book is now available from amazon.

When Lachlan McKinley raided Fairmount Town’s bank, the four-thousand dollar bounty that was posted on his head attracted plenty of manhunters, but everyone that went after him ended up dead.
Bounty hunter Jonathon Lynch reckoned he could do better. Lachlan was Jonathon’s step-brother and his mission was personal, but when he joined the hunt he soon discovered that all was not as it seemed and Lachlan may, in fact, be innocent. Worse, U.S. Marshal Jake Devine was also after Lachlan.
Devine is more likely to destroy the peace than to keep it, and so can Jonathon bring the guilty to justice before Devine does his worst?

I'm dreadful sorry, Clementine

After a bit of soul-searching I've decided to change the title of my Kindle book Clementine to The Ballad of Dayton Hyde.

Since publication Clementine has taken a serene, almost zen like approach to sales and so I've now decided it needs to buck up its ideas and raise its head above the water. Perhaps the title Clementine didn't evoke the feeling of a western as much as I thought it would. Perhaps it conjures up images of fruit that goes mouldy before you can get it back from the supermarket. Or then again perhaps the world just wasn't ready for a musical version of Raise the Titanic.

Whatever the reason I decided that changing the cover, title and blurb might help, or to be more precise it was unlikely to do much harm to a book that was drifting along like tumbleweed in a dusty ghost town.

The all-old book with its all-new title is now available from all good amazon stores.

When snake-oil seller Fergal O’Brien sells a bottle of his universal remedy to the dying Leland Crawford, Leland makes a miraculous recovery, for several minutes. Then he drops dead.
In the few minutes before he dies, Leland bequeaths to Fergal everything he owns. Unfortunately, Leland’s only asset is his beloved Clementine, a 250-foot sidewheeler that once ruled the Big Muddy, until it sank.
Worse, Leland is heavily in debt and now the creditors expect Fergal to pay up. With Fergal having no money, minstrel Dayton Hyde offers him a way out, but only if he kills Rivertown’s popular lawman Marshal Swift.
To avoid carrying out Dayton’s unwelcome task, Fergal will need to use all his legendary cunning or like as not in this wet weather, he’ll share the fate of Clementine.

Large Print version of The Devil's Marshal

The Devil's Marshal has now been published as a large print paperback. It's my 23rd Linford Western.

I must admit when I opened up the parcel and saw this book I thought the publisher had made a mistake as I didn't recognize the story described in the blurb at all. I guess I can be excused as I wrote it about four years ago, but I still found myself scratching my head until I worked out what had happened.

Linford Westerns had rewritten the blurb, which I'm not sure they've ever done before. Usually they just delete a few words to fit it on the page, but this time it's all new with little reference to the original Black Horse one. I reckon that's a good move as they seem to be putting a lot of care into their books as of late, with lively title fonts, covers that often match the story and so forth. Anyhow, here's the all new blurb:

When Lucinda Latimer is accused of murdering Archibald Harper, her bounty hunter brother Brodie is convinced of her innocence. Vowing to find the culprit, he turns up a witness in the form of drunken varmint Wilfred Clay - who, minutes after admitting to seeing the real killer, is shot to death on his own front porch. All the clues point to the murderer being Derrick Shelby - the man known as 'the devil's marshal'. The only trouble is, Derrick died a year ago ...

McBain Box Set now available on Kindle

I've bundled up three of my e-books: Death or Bounty, The Ten Per Cent Gang, and Wanted: McBain as a box set.

Up until now Wanted McBain has been available on Kindle as Cassidy Yates, Book 4, but I had a change of mind and decided to rebrand it as Book 3 of the McBain series. I think this was the right thing to do as McBain and Yates are joint main characters, but on balance McBain drives the plot more than Yates does. In addition Wanted: McBain directly follows the events in Death or Bounty and The Ten Per Cent Gang, but less so the events in the earlier Cassidy Yates books.

 

The three-book set is now available from all good amazon stores.