Booklife

Robert J. Randisi has written at least 13 novels a year—every year—since 1982.  The tally so far is somewhere over 550.  That number wouldn’t be as impressive if not for the fact that they are all good.

Okay, I haven’t read all of his books.  (“No one has,” Randisi once told me, “not even me.”)  But I’ve read a lot of them, as many as I can get my hands on, and I’ve enjoyed every last one of them.  In fact, I have to be careful with a Randisi novel.  If I start it, I will finish it in as few sitting as possible and that can be problematic if I have things like papers to grade, deadlines to meet, or… sleep to get.

What’s the shortest distance between reality and another world, another place and time?  Simple.  Page one of a Randisi novel.

Most of Randisi’s novels have appeared in The Gunsmith action-western series (formerly adult Western series) under the name J. R. Roberts.  (The Gunsmith #353: The Deadly Chest came out this month.)  Randisi has written in just about every form and every genre—from action-adventure to science fiction to erotica–but he is best known for writing private eye fiction and Westerns.  The sixth book in his Rat Pack Mysteries series, Fly Me to the Morgue, comes out this June, and a new The Gunsmith novel comes out each month with one Giant Gunsmith each fall.

Below, Randisi and I talk about writing, getting knocked down and getting back up, and about always moving forward but looking back every now and then.
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“The West,” says Raymond Foster below, “is full of legends.”

And so is the Western.

A legend is both a tale from the past–a time polished mixture of truth and myth–and the hero (or heel, as C. Courtney Joyner points out) featured in that tale.  There is the story with all its elements and there is the character with a story.  And there’s time between then and now.

Below, eight of the contributors to A Fistful of Legends edited by Nik Morton and Charles T. Whipple talk mostly about the legend as the character—what is the stuff of legends and what goes into the creation of a legendary character in Western fiction.
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Journalist and novelist Charles T. Whipple writes most of his Westerns as Chuck Tyrell. Recent Chuck Tyrell titles include Guns of Ponderosa, The Killing Trail, and Hell Fire in Paradise all published as part of Robert Hale Ltd.’s Black Horse Western line. Whipple has also written a Chuck Tyrell novel, The Snake Den, for Solstice Publishing.

Whipple writes character-driven novels and stories in which the setting is very much a living, breathing character. (Whipple usually sets his Western novels in his native Arizona, but his new collection of short stories, A Matter of Tea and Other Stories, features stories set in Japan where he currently lives.  All proceeds from the book will go to relief efforts in Japan.) Below, Whipple talks about where his Western novels start and how he develops characters and settings.
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Charles T. Whipple’s Westerns are written with an old man’s wisdom filtered through a child’s wide-eyed sense of wonder. His stories ripple with the feel of folk tales and local legend, without losing the immediacy and realism of someone who’s been there. Whipple grew up in the American West, in a time when the pioneers had aged but were still living—at a time when a child dreamed as much of the 19^th century as 20th.

Whipple is an award-winning American journalist living in Chiba, Japan. His articles have appeared abroad in magazines such as Tokyo Journal, Boating New Zealand, and Honolulu Magazine and a bit closer to his native country in Time and Newsweek. Whipple also writes book-length non-fiction, in English and Japanese, with titles such as Seeing Japan and Inspired Shapes.

To get a taste of Whipple’s writing check out his brand new collection of short stories, A Matter of Tea and Other Stories. All proceeds from the book go to relief efforts in Japan following the recent earthquakes.

Charles Whipple doesn’t always write under his own name. For 300 or 400 words a day, he becomes someone else—Chuck Tyrell–and he returns to the land of his childhood—the American West. (more…)

Bad Boys by Frank Roderus opens with a man about to tell the woman he loves about his wild and rowdy past.  The novel ends…  well, it ends where it needs to end.  In between, the story ranges, in tone and content, from the romping good times of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to the more mature The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the picaresque tales of highwaymen and outlaws.  The prose is fast, tight, and as clear as spring water.  Each chapter moves deeply into the life of the central character, Danny Southern, and then moves on with only the faintest hint of sentimentality and a steady maturation.

At the three-quarters mark, dread sets in—not simply because of some impending doom, but because it becomes increasingly hard to deny that the story will soon end.  It’s hard to stop reading Bad Boys—hard to put it down while in you’re reading it and hard to accept that it’s over when you finish.
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Why do I like Westerns so much?  Why do Western stories—the characters, the settings, the situations, the writing styles, the tropes—resonate so profoundly with me?  Anthologies like Express Westerns’ A Fistful of Legends edited by Nik Morton and Charles T. Whipple always get me thinking about the power of Western fiction.  Legends came out in 2009 and contains 21 original Western stories.

In his introduction to the anthology, novelist (and legend) James Reasoner speaks lovingly of the Western’s “tremendous power to entertain” and its “universality”:

You can tell any sort of story as a Western: comedy, tragedy, action, romance. You can pit man against nature, man against his fellow man, man against himself – or woman against herself, since strong female characters have been a tradition in Westerns going back decades…

In many ways, the Western genre remains as boundless and new as the Western frontier once was.  Just west of that ridge, as it were, anything is possible.  And as a result, the genre, like the characters and settings at its core, is larger than life.
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“Above all else, Howard Hopkins can make a story rocket forward, make you shiver and look over your shoulder, make you chuckle–frequently on the same page,” said Matthew P. Mayo, author of such Westerns as Hot Lead, Cold Heart and non-fiction as Cowboys, Mountain Me, & Grizzly Bears: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of the Wild West.  “I read Howard Hopkins’ work for enjoyment–and as a bonus, I get to learn from someone who really knows how to tell a compelling story. I’ve also been fortunate to have him as my editor on a few projects, and I’ve learned that he applies that same detailed attention to other people’s work. 
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Each new novel by Howard Hopkins reminds me that the possibilities are endless, that anything goes—within the publisher’s guidelines, of course.  Hopkins writes horror novels and Westerns, such as The Dark Riders and Pistolero, under his own name and Westerns as Lance Howard.  His recent Lance Howard Westerns include Dead Man Riding, The Killing Kind, and the forthcoming Hell on Hoofs for Hale’s Black Horse Westerns line.

“Howard Hopkins’ Westerns are tight, well-written stories peopled with believable characters,” said Matthew P. Mayo, author of such Westerns as Hot Lead, Cold Heart and non-fiction as Cowboys, Mountain Me, & Grizzly Bears: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of the Wild West. “These aren’t cookie cutter good-and-bad guys. His good folks come across as downtrodden, perhaps abused, but not without hope. His baddies can come across as vile, fractured, perhaps unhealable, but wholly believable. And he puts them all in situations that ring true–even those tinged with the supernatural and fantastic. Howard’s novels are also about something–there is powerful subtext in his writing. Not every writer offers that.”
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