BookLife

“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. Continue reading →

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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