Devine goes large

Marshal Jake T. Devine returns to Large Print in his second adventure Devine. I guess neither of the riders look sufficiently tough enough to be Devine, but the background image adds a nice touch.

Pinkerton detective Nimrod Dunn is hired by Lieutenant Governor Maddox Kingsley to infiltrate an outlaw gang. But when Nimrod's cover is blown, an innocent life is lost in the raging gun battle. The fearsome US Marshal Jake T. Devine then sets about bringing the outlaw Cornelius to justice - but his methods are as brutal as those whom he pursues. With Devine's blood-soaked trail making a mockery of the governor's promise to clean up the county, Maddox must call on Nimrod's services once more - to kill Marshal Devine. . .

Bullet Catch Showdown now available

My 30th Black Horse Western is now available to borrow from all good libraries.

The stage magician Malachi Muldoon is the world's most dangerous practitioner of the arcane arts with his performance of the notorious bullet catch. And his show in Bear Creek draws the interest of Adam Clements, and Deputy Hayward Knight, although for very different reasons. While Clements is keen to join Malachi on stage and become part of his act, Hayward is out to try and solve an old mystery: it seems that wherever Malachi Muldoon performs, a trail of bodies is left behind. 
Before long, Adam and Hayward are embroiled in Malachi's web of deception. Can they unmask the guilty when they are forced into a showdown with a man who hides the truth in plain sight?

The Devil's Marshal goes to Large Print

I've received the welcome news that last October's novel The Devil's Marshal will be published as a large print paperback. It'll be my 23rd Linford Western and it should appear late on in 2015.

In a travesty of justice, bounty hunter Brodie Latimer's sister Lucinda is found guilty of murder. Thwarted, when a witness is killed, but convinced of her innocence, he vows to find the real killer and, as more of Hamilton's leading figures die in mysterious circumstances, the clues lead him to Derrick Shelby, a man known as the Devil's marshal. 

The only trouble is, Derrick died a year ago. How can Brodie clear his sister's name and bring the guilty to justice when the killer appears to be the spectre of a long dead lawman?

Yates's Dilemma now on Kindle

My latest Kindle title is now available. Yates’s Dilemma was my 6th Black Horse Western and it first appeared in 2004.

 

 

This was my third Cassidy Yates tale and the first without his sidekick Nathaniel McBain. The tale is a straightforward yarn centring around the mystery of whether Wendell Moon is a cold-blooded killer or just a cold-blooded businessman. With a heap of people wanting to kill Wendell, Cassidy has to keep the peace while struggling to work out whether he should arrest Wendell or protect him.

The original title for this story was Wendell Moon is Back, which the publisher rightly pointed out was an awful title even before considering that it didn’t even sound like a western. They asked for alternate titles and so I decided to provide five. I came up with four rip-snorting titles suggesting lots of gun-toting action quite easily, but I struggled on the fifth and eventually plumped for Yates’s Dilemma. They went with that one.

This change of title rather ruined my blurb where I’d made several references to Wendell Moon’s decision to come back ending with the ominous warning that Wendell Moon is back. That no longer worked and so the blurb got jigged around and a new closing line was added with the even more ominous line that: Real trouble lies ahead! At the time I was amused by that sentence as it felt like the lamest ever line to sell a book, but ten years on it no longer feels so odd.

The other main thing about this book is that I was lucky enough to get my first really classic cover. I still rank it as one of my favourites with both gunfighters being nicely rendered and the setting even being appropriate for one scene.

Anyhow, the book is now available from all good Amazon stores

When Wendell Moon hightailed it out of Monotony, he left in his wake a murdered lawman and a mob braying for his blood. Fifteen years later the word is out – Wendell Moon is back! But, for Sheriff Cassidy Yates, Wendell’s unwelcome return rekindles old vendettas and ignites three days of raging gun battles.

Now the sheriff has the impossible duty of keeping the peace, but as if that isn’t enough Wendell also claims he never killed the lawman!

If Cassidy doesn’t unearth the truth quickly, Wendell’s trigger-happy enemies will deliver their own form of gun-toting justice. Real trouble lies ahead!

Many a mickle makes a muckle

Yes.

Sorry for the lengthy political post, but that's all I have to say on the matter.

The Mystery of Silver Falls

I’m pleased to report that Hale have agreed to publish my latest western The Mystery of Silver Falls.

I usually like to bang on about the inspiration for my stories, but in this case I can’t say too much. The original idea behind the story doesn’t appear until the third act where I hope it’ll be a surprise plot twist and provide a slightly different scenario for the conclusion.

What I can say is that it was one of those ideas that was off-the-wall and which clearly stood no chance of working in a western without making it into a complete fantasy yarn. Except the idea just refused to go away, and the closer I got to writing the part where I had to use the idea, or not, the more I felt that it was the only possible solution to the plot.

So I gritted my teeth, ignored the voice of doubt telling me this was a bad idea, and went for it. I hope it worked, and either way, at least I’ve got it out of my system until the next off-the-wall idea hits me.

Anyhow, the book should appear in 2015 and it’ll be my 32nd Black Horse Western.

When the bridge at Silver Falls was completed, the whole town turned out to watch the first train journey, but Kane Cresswell's bandit gang ensured that the day turned sour. Kane raided the train and in the ensuing chaos, fifty thousand dollars fell into the river, seemingly lost forever.

Wyndham Shelford was determined to find the missing money, but when bodies started washing up in the river, unconventional lawman US Marshal Lloyd Drake arrived. The marshal believed that the train raid wasn't everything it seemed, but with Drake's reckless search for the truth endangering the lives of everyone in town, can Wyndham find the money before it's too late?

Clementine now available on Kindle

The seventh Fergal O’Brien novel Clementine is now available on Kindle.

 

Fergal has had a rough time recently. For a while I had been writing a new Fergal novel every couple of years. They were published by Thomas Bouregy as Avalon Westerns and as their small hardbacks were an excellent product, I was suitably proud of them. The series reached book 6 in 2011 and at the time I was eager to continue writing more books, but then Amazon bought out the publisher and that sent Fergal into limbo.

The end result was that Amazon weren’t interested in publishing new Fergal novels (or anybody else’s for that matter), but they held on to the rights to books 2-6, while I retained the rights to the first book. I published that first book last year and so now the Fergal series is in the slightly messy position of book 1 being available as a self-published title, and the next five books being available as Amazon Encore publications.

Anyway, I’m now delighted to finally move forward with the publication of book 7, which in the tradition of the first 6 picks up pretty much where the last book left off. The thing I always do with the Fergal books is to leave something dangling on the final pages that drops a hint as to where the next story could go. At the time I have no idea what the actual story will be, but when I start writing about Fergal again I always start with that dangling thread and see where it leads. So, for example, book 2 ended with Fergal giving up on travelling, so book 3 relates what he does when he can no longer run away from his problems.

With that in mind, book 6 ended with the first setback for Fergal’s growing empire. In book 1 he was just a snake-oil seller with a bottle of tonic and a reluctant sidekick Randolph. In book three he acquired Kent Sullivan’s collection of authentic historical memorabilia, and since then he and Randolph have been making more authentic relics, even if they always get the details wrong. In book 4 he acquired Saint Woody’s treasure, and in book 5 he was joined by Saint Woody himself. Then in book 6 Fergal parted company with Woody and his treasure. So I reckoned book 7 had to further threaten Fergal’s assets, to the extent of him being in danger of losing everything just so he can work out what really matters to him.

I enjoyed writing this one as I’ve always done with the Fergal O’Brien series. I managed to include Twitchell Swift, the most ineffective lawman in the West, and the women of the Rivertown Decency League, who were both in Book 6 but got edited out due to size constraints. But as it turned out the first draft was a rambling series of weird plot developments and unresolved problems largely because I didn’t have a working title.

All the previous books started with a title. Usually it was a daft one such as Miss Dempsey’s School for Gunslingers or The Flying Wagon, where I just had to write the story to find out what happens. That didn’t happen with this story and so the first draft mixed up traditional western elements such as zombies, minstrels and synchronised swimming so that with a chapter to go I was wondering what the heck I’d just written. The story was in essence the Poseidon Adventure meets Night of the Living Dead, with singing, and even given that Fergal has had some strange adventures, this one might have jumped the shark. But then, suddenly, with time running out before Fergal had to find a way to resolve all this nonsense, the story delivered the title to me, and I realized what the plot was actually all about.

The best bit about this is that I’ve wanted to write a story called Clementine for a while. That could be down to the film My Darling Clementine, or then again it might because I like the line ‘Clementine, I sure do love that name, ma’am.’ in the sitcom Cybill. But whenever I tried to write a story with that title, I got nowhere because I had no idea who Clementine was or what her story was. Then along comes this story with all the answers about Clementine already written. And all I had to do to make the story work was edit out the zombies and the synchronised swimming, although I kept the singing in.

Anyhow, Clementine is now available from all good Amazon stores. It has all the usual Fergal O’Brien ingredients including western adventure on the high seas, bad jokes, cunning plans, and an all singing, all banjo-playing showdown at the end.

When snake-oil seller Fergal O’Brien sells a bottle of his universal remedy to cure all ills 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, before Fergal can celebrate his good fortune he discovers that 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, his biggest creditor offers him a way out, but only if he kills Rivertown’s popular lawman Marshal Twitchell Swift.

To avoid carrying out this 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.