TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF
Not much to tell really. Left school early with few qualifications, went to work in a factory, got cheesed off, and in my mid-20s jacked it all in and went to university. My workmates were non-plussed because they knew it would mean I would be spending four years surrounded by young kids – which was true as in those days the term “mature student” had yet to be invented and out of the 250 students in my year a mere half dozen were over the age of 18. But I survived and, although my intention had been to return to industry, after experiencing the academic life from the receiving end, on graduation I thought I'd give my new-found world a spin. I got a post teaching economics in a CAT (College of Advanced Technology) which shortly afterwards became one of the new polytechnics and I stayed in the profession for the rest of my working career.
On the domestic side, I've got a couple of lads of whom I'm very proud. They are familiar with my earlier efforts at shoot'em-ups as I used to try scenes out on them when they were young, especially action scenes. Being a beginner at the fiction game at the time, I found it quite useful having a captive audience – and they literally were captive as it was bedtime and the poor blighters couldn't escape. Funny, I notice they've always been able to get to sleep quickly; maybe they have their old man to thank for that. However in the intervening years, I don't think either of them have ever actually read one of my books – they have full lives and, as long-standing professional graphic artists, they have both seen their own work in national newspapers. Bless 'em.
WHEN DID YOU START WRITING?
I first put pen to paper seriously – although it didn't result in publication – in the fifties. These early scribblings will be better understood if set against their background. It's true what they say: the past is a different country. In those days, first you were a kid and then you were an adult. There was no in between. The word “teenager” hadn't yet been invented. There were no special clothes for the “in-betweenies”, no pop music as it is understood today. You left school in short trousers at 15, the next day you put on a suit just like your Dad – and you were an adult and that was it.
Then overnight the world exploded with something called rock'n'roll, somebody coined the word “teenager” and the generation gap opened up. Clothes for teenagers became available and suddenly you could see films at the cinema that centred on young people.
Two films that transfixed me at that time were “Rebel Without a Cause” and “A Man is Ten Feet Tall” (“Edge of the City” in U.S.). Both revolved around an angst-ridden teenager wearing a bomber jacket. They also wore strange trousers called jeans. (Interestingly, at the time we didn't ape them by wearing these denims as they were also called. Jeans were too American for us Britishers, especially as on this side of the pond we had discovered the Teddy suit. In those days, to use today's vernacular, it was “cool” to look British. Only a “dork” would wear jeans and try to look American! Try telling that to today's teenagers!)Anyway, all that stuff – notably “A Man is Ten Feet Tall” – inspired me and I put pen to paper to describe this young man (me in fact but I wrote it in the third person) standing in front of the wardrobe mirror as he got ready for going out to the Palais on Saturday night. I described his silver-flecked shirt, the slim jim tie (with its essential Windsor knot), the drainpipes, the brothel creepers and finger-length Donegal tweed jacket, the sideburns, the lashings of Brylcreem. And the five minutes it took with a gunge-filled comb to get the Tony Curtis quiff and DA right. His mates call round and they go to the Palais. Meet the girls (called bints then) … and so on for six pages. At work the following Monday the girl in the office let me type it up on her machine in the lunch break.
I honed it, retyped it. Then I started showing it people. They were full of compliments and all wanted to know the same thing – what happened next? Well, that was the first thing I ever wrote seriously – but I never took it any further. Who was I kidding? I was a suburban kid, not a writer. Writers had names like Dickens or Shakespeare – or lived in exotic places like Stevenson on his Pacific island. And anyway, who'd want to know about a working class teenager in the English Midlands of the 1950s? All the new stuff coming up on that Technicolor screen down the Odeon was Yankee, glamorous, full of flash cars. The belief that I had nothing to offer meant I didn't attempt to write fiction again for another twenty years.
Years later, when I'd got a few publications under my belt, I was a tutor at writing schools and for one weekend session we invited Stan Barstow. Over a drink he told me he kind of envied me. Why? I asked. I've always had this secret wish to write a western, he said, but I just wouldn't know where to start. The irony is – virtually at the same time that I was starting my aborted Teddy Boy saga, Stan was sitting in his kitchen penning “A Kind of Loving” – which was to become a main thrust in the “kitchen sink” revolution where the media became focused for the first time on young English working class. But back in those black-and-white days I couldn't see anybody being interested in my mundanities and gave up; he persevered. When I explained why I stopped, he said he had had exactly the same uncertainty. Who'd be interested in the tatty life of a poorly-paid trainee draughtsman in Yorkshire? The fact was that millions were to be.
There's a moral for beginners in there somewhere. Something like, if you have an idea that fires you – but then it seems to turn cold, still stick with it!
WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO WRITE WESTERNS?
The odd thing is I'd never read a western until I'd written my first. Of course, I've read many since – either to see how others do it or to read the books of writer-friends – but I originally fell into the genre quite by accident. It was the mid-70s and in line with my lecturing career I'd already got some articles and research papers in academic journals. On the strength of these my name was getting known enough for me to receive invitations from universities and other institutions to address them on my research areas. This was a tremendous boost to the confidence of someone who only a few years earlier had been wearing overalls in a factory. For instance I was invited to give an open lecture on one of my theories (“Social Balance: an Application of the Transformation Curve”) at Aston University – and afterwards received questions from the floor from an audience that included professors!
This spurred me to have a go at a textbook and I burnt the midnight oil putting together a complete draft. I was very excited about the project because it aimed to teach economics using mathematics and computing – and I could see nothing like the book on the shelves – it would be unique! This was going to be my big breakthrough!However, there were two things that I, as a greenhorn, didn't know about academic publishing. Firstly, publishers are interested in maximum market size which in practice means the first five years of secondary school. My effort was confined to degree students, a very specialist text to boot, so would only sell a few hundred at best. (It might be different today since there is now a university on almost every street corner in the country. But that's another story.)
The second thing I didn't know: while the first-time novelist needs to submit a complete manuscript, academic publishers only want to see a scheme and treatment – that is so that they can check that it is being geared to the market all the way through its construction. That was another thing I had done wrong!
Moreover, there was an unwritten law that you only submitted to one publisher at a time – and they could take up to six months to assess the proposal! The upshot was I was found myself twiddling my thumbs while I waited for rejections to come in – very slowly. As I now knew how to put a book together I was getting itchy and I looked for something into which I could channel my energies while I waited. I figured there was no point in trying another textbook until I'd sold my first textbook so I started scribbling a western – for no other reason than it was undemanding and a world apart from academic theorising.
When I'd finished it (The Avenging Four – boy, do I wish I could change that title) I went to the library to plan my next step. In those pre-Black Horse days there were several hardback western publishers but even then Robert Hale dominated the shelves. I did a word count and found that mine was far shorter than the average. Conundrum. I didn't want to put any more effort into it unless it was a “goer” as I still had hopes of my textbook project. So I sent it to Hale as it was, asking did it have the potential for expansion.
Mr Hale was very encouraging. He said he'd like to publish it as it stood without expansion (they could put blank pages between the chapters to eke it out!) and he'd like to see another one from me!
I don't have to describe to writers the feeling you get on that first acceptance. It puts you on Cloud Nine. (No, higher, more like Nine Squared.) The only snag: there were to be no royalties and the one-off payment just about covered stationery, postage and the second-hand clapped-out portable I'd bought to type it on. What to do? There had to be some area of novel-writing that offered proper money. (We're not talking Jeffrey Archer here, just aiming at something that gets you in shouting distance of the minimum wage. While punters will think I'm exaggerating or pleading poverty on this matter, fellow writers will know of what I speak.) Well, espionage stories were still in vogue so I turned my hand to a spy novel. It was completed at double the length of my western but when Hale turned it down (and subsequently most of the UK publishing industry) I panicked and quickly knocked out another western to keep my foot in the door.Well, that pattern of Box and Cox was repeated for the next decade. I knew I could handle other genres because by then I was beginning to sell short stories in the fields of science fiction, crime and horror – and hearing actors speak my lines on the BBC no less. In fact I got a better return from one these short pieces that I could knock out over a weekend than a western that took months. So I tried to expand into another area – I completed several historical novels, thrillers, a horror novel – and each time that my new project got a universal thumbs down I would fall back “into the saddle”.
Very quickly I picked up the necessary “gun and horse lore”, backgrounds, the needs of the genre etc so it became easier, eventually second nature. In that period, there were still original western paperback series being produced that were quite lucrative for the writers and I was attracted by the possibility. However, I soon realised I had been fazed by the paperbacks on the shelves. They were there all right but they were merely the last remnants of a boom.
The fact was the British boom in westerns had been short-lived. There had been stalwarts around for some time before – Matt Chisholm, J T Edson, of course – but the new impetus was really triggered as a delayed reaction to the spaghetti westerns of the mid-60s when Terry Harknett began novelising them (along with his Edge series) around 1970. Other contributors included Fred Nolan (“Sudden” and “Angel”), Mike Linaker, John Harvey and his colleagues who wrote under a multiplicity of pseudonyms. But the bubble burst around 1975 and most of the foregoing writers had “lit a shuck” and gone on to better things by the time I inadvertently picked up my western pen in 1976.
But I carried on because I could do it and enjoyed it.
WHO/WHAT ARE YOUR INFLUENCES?
As I said earlier until I started writing them I hadn't been a western reader. On the other hand I've always enjoyed western films. When I was first taken to the cinema the vogue was for singing cowboys. Bizarre as it seems now it was a sine qua non that the hero should wear glittery shirts and break out in song every reel. There was Gene Autry and others – but my favourite was Roy Rogers. I liked most of the western stars – Johnny Mack Brown and the rest of them – but there was one that I always felt uneasy about, even as a youngster. That was John Wayne. And when I grew up and learned of his politics I understood why. So it was the tinselly, black-and-white B western films of the 40s that initially fired me.
As to my literary inspiration, I came to reading fiction rather late (that's all fiction, not just westerns) but in my catching up period I steeped myself in Schaeffer, L'Amour, LeMay, Huffaker, Leonard and so on. Here I have to mention Mr Edson. Although his writing has not been an influence on me personally in the same way as the others, I do owe it to him for showing that a Britisher could do it. Of course, once in the game, I learnt that a goodly proportion of westerns have always been domestically produced – from Oliver Strange up to the present.
But, at the end of the day, the main influence on me in terms of approach and feel has been the spaghettis: the smell, the look, the sound, the longueurs. There is so much feeling in those films that I would often run a Morricone score or a spaghetti video while writing. And readers might spot this influence in my occasional use of Ennio and Sergio as names for subsidiary characters.
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE BLACK HORSE WESTERN SERIES?
Obviously I have a soft spot for the house, with their having published much of mine over the years, but as I have never been a regular western reader I am not the best person of whom to ask this question. To paraphrase Mr Hale, “I enjoy a good book whatever the genre”. However, I have sampled many over the decades and have found a wide variety – there are enjoyable ones and others that are, well let's say, not my cup of tea.
Through Hale I have benefited from the old stalwarts of the genre that the house has thankfully reprinted from time to time. On the other hand, Hale's list has enabled me to enjoy the first efforts of newcomers to the stable and in particular I will mention three. The debut novels of Dave Whitehead (The Silver Trail) and Adam Wright (Ghost Dance) both came across like they had been penned by veterans of the genre, demonstrating that they had what it takes to produce further works of quality. Here, I might mention an early entry by Irene Ord (who writes under a variety of pseudonyms) in which I was fascinated to find all her characters riding camels – which she tells me was based on fact.
Then, of course, there's stablemate Jeff Sadler who, along with his many one-off contributions, continues to spin rollicking, fast-moving tales around a linked group of characters centring on his main protagonist Anderson.
YOU HAVE WRITTEN UNDER PEN-NAMES AS WELL AS YOUR OWN NAME. WHAT PROMPTED THIS DECISION?
I remember JT Edson saying that he never used a pseudonym because he was not ashamed of anything he wrote and I followed the master's philosophy for many years. However, finally cheesed off by interviewers asking what my pen-name was, I decided I to use one – just once – merely so that I would have an answer to their darned question. I chose “Ethan” as western-sounding (it was the name of the lead in “The Searchers” and Biblical forenames were common in the Old West) together with “Wall”, my mother's maiden name which had an extra significance in the fact that one of mom's forebears had emigrated to Massachusetts, so it had an American connection of its own.
The irony was, Ethan Wall's first book got a better library readership than mine! From then on I decided to use Ethan Wall for one-off stories and reserve my own name for anything which stems from earlier books such as sequels (three so far) and my Reaper series (seven to date).
A little later, I envisaged a series in which, although the characters would be different, each book would revolve around an assassination and, as a gimmick, would have the word “Hit” in the title. For this I resurrected a pseudonym that I had used when trying to market contemporary thrillers years ago. At that time I'd needed a pseudonym because publishers were telling me that in no circumstances should I mention my track record in westerns when aiming at the mainstream. (Outside the genre, “western writer” is “the kiss of death”, one had eloquently phrased it.) Anyway, for those books I had come up with “Charles Langley Hayes” which seemed too good to waste (had a touch of class, I thought in my working class way) so I slapped that on the “Hit” series. [Montana Hit, Dakota Hit, Utah Hit ] Doesn't seem to have done the readership figures any harm.
WHAT PROCESS DO YOU GO THROUGH TO ARRIVE AT A FINISHED MANUSCRIPT?
When I was teaching creative writing, I put a lot of thought into analysing this process and realised that I approached a book in one of four very different ways. Firstly there was simply having a theme. No plot, just an idea, such as the conflict that can arise between brothers. With my first book, for example, all I had at the beginning was the idea of a group of strangers being forced together in pursuit of a common goal. The book slowly grew out of that theme.
Secondly, a book can germinate from one scene. Here you dream up a scene in isolation. It can be action, dialogue, contemplative – but whatever form it takes it must be something special, something that interests, fascinates or excites you. Then, without worrying about what it will lead to, put all your effort into writing that one scene as vividly as possible, rewriting several times if necessary. During this process, particularly in the rewriting, ideas will magically come.
This scene is likely to be the first in your story because through its writing you will be asking yourself – what happens next? If it intrigues you, so will your readers be intrigued. For example, I'm sure this is the way Richard Litchfield began Blood Will Have Blood (Hale). The whole of the first chapter is taken up with a lone man in the middle of nowhere undertaking some unnamed technical process. We are given lots of intriguing detail of his actions. We ache to know what is he up to and we have to wait till the end of the chapter for the explanation. What is he doing? He is pickling a body so that he may transport it bounty-hunter style over a long journey. Famously, Agatha Christie usually began with the last scene and worked back. I've done that also, choreographing some elaborate shoot-out without knowing what preceded it!
There again, I've even begun in the middle of a story. As an example, I'd noticed that when my young lads stood on the edge of a steep precipice they would spit and watch the ball waft down. Out in the Peaks one day I'd seen them do this and, once I had left them to their own devices exploring (safely) somewhere else, I took the opportunity to describe a man doing the same thing but on the edge of a massive canyon .
Questions arose – what was he doing? Answer, he had a problem. A wagon had gone over the edge and was lodged partway down. He needed to retrieve the wagon and its equipment. And he was contemplating his falling spit globule as he thought through the engineering problem of elevating the wagon. The retrieval of the wagon took a whole chapter and by then I knew where he was going, which became the second half of the book. But then: how did he get into the spot in the first place? That became the first half of the book and the total effort was eventually released as “Shard”. In other words, I started in the middle and worked backwards and forwards in turn.
A third way of getting started is to sketch out the whole plot on a single piece of paper right at the beginning. In some cases, I have made up my own plot. In others I have used a classic plot – and I have borrowed from them all – from Greek myth to Shakespeare and Henry Fielding. A final way is what I call the jigsaw method. In the early days I was lucky enough to get some stories published in the Norwegian Western Magazine.
I'd just got into the swing of knocking these things out regularly – when the magazine folded. And I was stuck with a load of finished stories with nowhere to go, plus a file full of ideas for western shorts.One afternoon, unhappy with the wasted effort (the economist in me again), I spread the stories around the lounge carpet and studied them from the vantage of the settee. I moved the bundles around the floor like a jigsaw puzzle. If I made the central character of each story the same fellow and arranged the episodes in some logical order, there was enough material for a complete book!
Over the years I have done quite a few like this and readers that I have questioned have been quite surprised to learn that the novel they have read (and told me they enjoyed) started life as a bunch of separate stories. Of course, you have to know how to cover the joins! The first time I did it I had the arrogance to think I had discovered a completely new writing process – until I found that it was as old as the hills. Most Raymond Chandler novels were put together in this way.
YOUR CHARACTER JONATHAN GRIMM (“THE REAPER”) HAS APPEARED IN NUMEROUS BOOKS. DO YOU THINK THERE ARE ADVANTAGES TO USING A SERIES CHARACTER?
Bounty hunter Grimm first appeared in a one-off and there were no plans for a series. But once I'd done a second I saw the obvious advantage of using the same central character and relationships – they are ready-made and you have less work to do! Also, at the end of a book there are often a few loose ends, usually minor, which can be used as the springboard for the next one – you have an automatic beginning. Again less work! Moreover, once a series becomes regular, one gets into the habit of deliberately leaving a loose end that can be picked up subsequently if required.
One thing that I did enjoy about building this series was it allowed me to spread out from the usual format. I'd started when Grimm was an established bounty hunter in his middle years and, prompted by readers asking what happened before, I went back to his youthful days and wrote some prequels. Charting his life from youth to old age through seven books enabled me to envisage the story on a grander scale – as a saga taking in the sweep of American history from the 1850s, early Indian troubles, through the civil war up to the turn of the 20th century.
The only snag is, once I have sent off the final proof I never read my own books – but with a series I'm forced to go back and wade through my old stuff to check mundane details like the colour of eyes!
HOW IMPORTANT IS RESEARCH TO YOU?
With me being an academic, scratching around for facts is enjoyable and second nature. To make a story believable it has to be correct in details, so one needs some knowledge of geography, history, flora, fauna, weaponry, horses and so on. But there is research and Research.
“Research” with a capital R is where you become so fascinated by what you are unearthing that you build up a big file and then try to shoehorn it all into the narrative. Some writers are prone to this, including westerns writers. The trouble is, swathes of trivia bog the story down and should be avoided.
What one could call “research” with a small initial letter would be the material you turn up, absorb, then put away while you're writing. That way it should come in naturally. I'll give you an example. In building up a file on armoury I came across one long-arm – one of the Martin-Henry models as I recall – and the reference mentioned it was good but it did have a tendency to jam through heat expansion if fired quickly. At some point in a book I had a shoot-out in the hills and was seeking some advantage for my protagonist. That was it. The villain had one of these models – to be foreshadowed at an earlier stage of the narrative – and was firing too quickly at my intrepid hero so that his gun jammed.
Thus, the researched fact was incorporated into the book in a natural way within the context of the story. I pull that trick a lot.
WHICH OF YOUR BLACK HORSE COVERS ARE YOUR FAVOURITES AND WHY?
No contest. These have to be Dark Rider and I Rode With Wyatt which were both painted by my son Mel in his first year at art college. But other than those, it is difficult to have any proprietary feelings about covers because, as you know, covers are existing pictures taken from the file, so one is lucky if the front bears some relationship to the story. Also, illustrations are re-used. For instance I kidded myself that the gun-wielding oldster on the cover of “Dollars for the Reaper” was a good match for my Jonathan Grimm – until the same picture turned up recently as the front of Ms Taylor's “The Paducah War”.
Of the others, I rather like “Loco” which is in muted sepia. The monochrome treatment contrasts with the vivid colours of the typical Black Horse cover, giving it a certain understated appeal – which is why I have a block-pull of it framed on my lounge wall. So I'll forgive the art department for the fact that the locomotive is
about 50-years out of period.DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR ASPIRING WRITERS
Having taught a Creative Writing module for years I could ramble on ad nauseam. But looking back, the sum of my experience of the countless students who have passed through my classes and workshops is that is that you either have it or you don't. And if you have it, you'll do it. Nothing more to say. To quote Mr Sillitoe's most famous character, everything else is propaganda.
IT HAS BEEN REPORTED IN THE PRESS THAT YOU ONCE WROTE A BOOK IN THREE WEEKS … IS THIS TRUE?
Close.
Maybe because of my economics background, I kept work-logs on my hobby from the beginning. This may be deemed obsessive behaviour but it provided me with two things. For each book it gave me the date when I wrote CHAPTER ONE and when I wrote THE END. From this record the shortest period to completion was four months while the average was around six months (bearing in mind I was writing in my spare time). At the extreme, the longest was ten years – that was The Last Days of Billy Patch which presented me with more writer's blocks than should be legally allowed in a civilised country.
The second thing it gave me was the cumulative labour input that went into each book. I discovered that this was very constant at around 200 hours each book (including three hours each for copy-editing and proof-reading and a couple of hours for postal matters).
Now, this looked extremely inefficient against JT's telling me that he'd once completed one in eleven days. The fact that he was full-time and I was part-time didn't account for the difference and I'd always envied him his facility. To use the vernacular, it stuck in my craw. But with my having a full-time job, the decks had never been clear for me to test myself in an ongoing session. However, there was one occasion when the opportunity arose for me to do so.
To make sure that I was playing fair with myself and not churning out something my brain had already been working on, I put aside all existing projects and wrote the date in my work log. Without an idea in my head, I unplugged the television and began writing. The only non-writing activities I allowed myself, besides necessities, was going for the odd short walk to clear the brain (and sometimes ending up in the pub which would to some extent negated the clearing of the brain). Twenty-two days later, I typed THE END.
So that's my fastest. A shade over three weeks. I was quite exhausted but glad I'd done it as I'd learned something about my own capacity.
But never again.
WHICH OF YOUR BOOKS IS YOUR FAVOURITE AND WHY?
As I don't read my books I can't give an answer. Writers often cite their most recent which is not the cop-out that it might seem because it is the nature of creative endeavour that one is always aiming for the current project to be an improvement on what one's done before.
On the other hand, it would be easier to select my least favourite, which is Another Day, Another Dollar. This was written at a particularly bad time in my life and judging by readers' comments it shows. I wouldn't read that book if you paid me.But every book is part of your life and the writer will be able to remember the circumstances in which it was written, evoking memories. As the bulk of my life has been quite happy (apart from the above mentioned period) I have pleasant recollections of all my efforts.
To exemplify the emotional relation a writer has with his work, Viva Reaper is a book that I think ended up as pretty nondescript – but even this is special in its own way. I wasn't very well and my lady booked us an apartment with which she was familiar in Majorca. It was very isolated – we had a whole beach to ourselves – and she insisted on my bringing the current manuscript. I couldn't see why because the thing was in a blocked stage and it had been gathering dust for a while. You'll get inspiration, she promised, so you can write and recuperate at the same time. She was right. Inspiration was everywhere. Even the cacti described in a Mexican desert scene are distinctly Majorcan.
Just seeing the book on my shelf today gives me a good feeling, even though I don't think its contents are much cop. It immediately conjures up the image of the two of us, alone – stars, the sea just below, candles, wine – and my manuscript slowly accumulating wine stains, candle-wax but most importantly – words!
ANY FORTHCOMING PROJECTS YOU CAN TELL US ABOUT?
Here we come to the crunch. More years ago than I care to remember, I was struck down by some mysterious illness. I couldn't get a diagnosis, all I knew: virtually overnight I had become a different person. From a life that had been full of physical and mental activity I found myself increasingly confined to bed. In time I had to resign my post and eventually the condition was diagnosed as ME, more recently re-labelled Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. And I went to bed on a semi-permanent basis where I still am – as I write this indeed.
Annoyingly the thing had hit me while I was on a roll. Things were looking good at work and I was knocking out two to three westerns a year. More significantly I had just completed my most important research project and had been given the title of Professor when the results were published under the auspices of the University of Arizona in an international academic journal. Although it was only a courtesy title it had personal significance in that, having started my working life in a factory, I wondered how my late father, himself a factory worker, would have reacted to seeing the word Professor in front of his son's name.
But I had to forget what might have been as, not only was my physical energy almost non-existent but my mental energy too. With concentration reduced, even the act of reading presented problems. Worse, I noticed that my powers of organisation were impaired which meant that my ability to dream up characters and work out plots – so necessary for fiction-writing – were drastically reduced.
As far as I could see, not only was my teaching career over but my writing life was at an end too.
To while away the time in bed I began looking at the cryptic crosswords in my daily paper. I'd never done them before as my life had been too busy. Now they became a lifeline. To begin with they were a complete mystery to me so, as I began to learn the secrets and codes, I made notes to help me solve them. When I eventually found I could complete grids, I sent them away – and got book prizes from the likes of The Independent, The Financial Times and The Sunday Telegraph.
Eight years on, the file holding the secrets by the side of my bed (without which I couldn't solve the puzzles) had become quite thick. What helps me, I thought, might help somebody else.
So I wrote to publishers and in time the bundle was taken up by Peter Collin who packaged it under the title of The Pocket Crossword Dictionary. Moreover, there was enough material left over to make a second book! Result: The Guide to Solving Crosswords – Cracking the Code, came out on its heels. After thirty years in print and around seventy published projects under my belt, I found myself for the first time on the shelves of W H Smith – and receiving my first ever royalties. Recently the Dictionary has been taken over by Bloomsbury and we are now talking about a second edition.
And all written lying on my back! The irony didn't escape me. If I hadn't have been confined to bed I wouldn't have had the inclination or the material to produce the new books. Words like “cloud” and “silver lining” come to mind.Since the onset of my illness and its getting slowly worse, I had given up any notions of fiction-writing. But then my ever-resourceful lady came up with another idea. OK, you've lost much of your old ability, she said, but you've proved you've still got something. Maybe you find the initiating of a brand new project a daunting prospect, but there must be unsold material that you can adapt to a full-length western, thereby avoiding the strain of starting from scratch. So I called up an unsold historical novel on the computer and, just by pressing a few buttons, got the machine to change the locale from the British Empire to Texas, change Zulu to Comanche – and the result was published by Hale as North of the Bravo.
Albeit after a fashion, BJ was back in the saddle!
Since then, I've salvaged other unsold material, done some nipping and tucking, with the result that a few new westerns have lately crept onto the shelves. It's a very slow process and I have nothing out this year. But using similar strategies – some day I might divulge more about how I have managed to seem productive while using half a brain! – I have put together two more which are scheduled for release next year: Rio Grande Shoot-Out and Trail of the Reaper.
So all you western readers out there, now I've explained some of my tricks, see if you can spot the joins in those two!
I thank Adam for his interest in a decrepit old-timer. To him and western readers at large – I wish “Happy Trails”!
BJ
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