Now Available: Wolf Creek: Kiowa Vengeance

The second Wolf Creek novel is out from Western Fictioneers, available in both e-book and trade paperback editions. Writing as Ford Fargo this time around is an all-star group of bestselling and award-winning authors: Bill Crider, Jackson Lowry, Kerry Newcomb, Troy D. Smith, Frank Roderus, and Robert J. Randisi. Check it out!

Yarn-spinners

There's a great post by my buddy Kerry Newcomb over on the Western Fictioneers blog this morning.  I'm lucky enough to have known Kerry for thirty years now and have heard him tell this story in person, along with many others.  I've seldom laughed as hard as I have when Kerry would start telling stories.

In fact, that got me to thinking about some of the other times I've laughed so hard.  Fall down on the floor laughter.  One name that immediately springs to mind is Joe R. Lansdale.  Guys like Joe and Kerry are great writers, but sitting down and just listening to them talk is incredibly entertaining.  The wonderful voice that you find in their writing comes through unfiltered, and it's even more enthralling.  That's one more reason I'm glad I became a writer.  It's given me the opportunity to just sit and listen.

I was at a convention a couple of years ago where as one of the programming items, Joe sat down with Bill Crider, Neal Barrett Jr., and Joe Haldeman, and they just swapped stories for a couple of hours while a large audience listened and was very entertained.  That was the highlight of that convention for me.

Of course, not all writers are great talkers.  Some of us are more likely to just sit there quietly and take it all in.  I fall into that category.  But I'm very grateful for the yarn-spinners and glad that I've been able to spend time in their company.

Forgotten Books: The Ghosts of Elkhorn - Kerry Newcomb and Frank Schaefer

The Wind River Kid is an old, old man, an aging gunfighter living out the last years of his life in an isolated ghost town during the 1920s, kept company only by phantoms of his own past. Then this relative calm is interrupted by the arrival of a young couple with plenty of trouble following them in the form of tommy-gun-toting gangsters. Wanting only to be left alone, the Wind River Kid is forced to take sides in this fight against varmints worse than any he ever came up against back in the Old West.

You couldn’t ask for a better Old West vs. New West novel than this one from 1982, nor a more mystical, beautifully written elegy for days gone by. In the spirit of full disclosure, one of the co-authors, Kerry Newcomb, has been a good friend of mine for nearly thirty years, but I read this book back when it first came out and it’s lingered in my mind for all that time, especially one evocative line towards the end. When THE GHOSTS OF ELKHORN was published, Kerry and his writing partner Frank Schaefer were already very successful authors, having written bestselling historical romance novels under the names Christina Savage and Shana Carrol, as well as historical adventures as Peter Gentry and a well-regarded thriller, PANDORA MAN, under their own names. There was talk of a movie deal for THE GHOSTS OF ELKHORN, but it never came about. As far as I know there was never a paperback edition of the novel, and it gradually faded from most memories as Kerry went on to a long and successful career as a solo novelist, producing several dozen excellent historical novels and Westerns. His books about the Anthem family of Texas, published first under the pseudonym James Reno and later reprinted under his own name, are some of the best traditional Westerns of the past twenty years. Anything you pick up by Kerry will give you a great story peopled by well-drawn characters.

But to my mind, THE GHOSTS OF ELKHORN is his masterpiece and deserves not to be forgotten . . . which is the whole point of posts like this, after all.