Growing Up Watching Westerns

I’m sure some of you have wondered how I got into western writing.  I grew up watching Gunsmoke, Paladin, Bonanza, etc.  My dad loved westerns.  Top this with the fact I enjoy reading about history.  I didn’t mind having to read the history textbooks in school, in fact I may have been the only kid that read the whole books.  Now that math textbook was a different matter.

My first toe into western writing came with writing Hallam.  The first Lucas Hallam story which was published as a mystery, but it had western touches.  Lucas was a riding extra/PI in the first stories which were set during the 1920’s in Hollywood.  That story is available as an ebook on Amazon and Barnes and Noble along with 3 other stories I had saved on a usb drive I carried with me the day our house burned down.  This past week I have been collecting our missing stories.  The ones published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and various anthologies.  I’m hoping I can scan them and make them available by this fall.  There are many Hallam stories and he is my favorite ol’ cowboy, but my favorite town would have to be Wind River.  James and I worked on this series together.  We had all six books plotted before the first book had even sold.  The publisher insisted on one name for the author on the paperbacks, so we decided to use James’.  When we republished them as ebooks, we used both of our names.  We were told that they wouldn’t sell with two names.  This time, the publisher was wrong.  They are selling very nicely with both our names.  While Wind River seems like a just a western, we planned a long running mystery to be solved in book six.  If you’ve read the books, you know how much fun we had writing them.  If you’ve only read a book or two, we wrote it where you would never know you missed anything.  But if you read all 6, you'll see what I mean.  Lately I’ve been trying to decide if we should revisit Wind River.  I wonder if there are six more books in the town . . .  The first book is still only 99 cents for the Kindle and Nook.