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Always a Character: Larry D. Sweazy on Writing the West, Part 2

The prologue of Larry D. Sweazy’s The Rattlesnake Season is a real kick in the gut. In a few short pages the protagonist Josiah Wolfe and the reader go through emotional hell together. Wolfe staggers, the reader staggers, and a (hopefully) long-running series begins.

Sweazy’s Josiah Wolfe novels feature outlaws and Texas Rangers, a small family farm and vast distances.  The central character is a single father trying to balance grief and happiness, career and family.  The novels are fast-paced, full of action, and still very much character-driven.

Picking up where we left off in Part 1, Sweazy and I continue our conversation about writing the West with an emphasis on that which he does so well — characterization.
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A year ago, give or take a few days, I picked up a copy of The Rattlesnake Season by Larry D. Sweazy. It was the day of release, the paperback original was fresh from the cardboard shipping box, and pulp still dusted the shinny cover. It was glorious!

 Honestly, I had not read Sweazy’s fiction before, but there were blurbs from the iconic Loren D. Estleman on the front and the iconoclastic Johnny D. Boggs on the back so I ventured past the cover.

 The Rattlesnake Season is the first in a series about Texas Ranger Josiah Wolfe. The series continues with The Scorpion Trail and the forthcoming The Badger’s Revenge. Sweazy also writes award-winning short fiction and poetry and the Wolfe novels benefit from an economy and precision of language. The sentences are tight, the imagery crisp, and the characters painfully real.

 And the story is exciting, too.

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