Josiah Wolfe, Texas Ranger, rides for the State of Texas. He wears a badge and a gun and he answers to the people of Texas and to higher-ups back in Austin. Sometimes he rides alone, but, ultimately, he has the whole Ranger Division backing him up. Larry D. Sweazy, who created Wolfe, rides alone. Sweazy’s his own boss. For the last fifteen years he’s been answering only to his clients and to himself. And that’s how he likes it.
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Tag Archives: Writing the West
Mauled by Grizzlies: Matthew P. Mayo on Writing the West
Matthew P. Mayo has a keen eye for the absurd. Sure, his Westerns are steeped in authenticity and boiled in action, but it is Mayo’s skewed vision of the world that lingers long after the final page. He shows us the mythic West with the sharp, clear eye of a realist looking through rippled glass.
Mayo is the author of the novels Winters’ War, Wrong Town, and Hot Lead, Cold Heart, and the editor of Where Legends Ride: New tales of the Old West. At his finest, Mayo captures the surreal and very human quality of everyday life in the 19th century West. His protagonists meet whatever comes their way with nonchalance; they struggle in a world of misperceptions and uncertain realities, come what may. Time and again they must sort out the mythic from the mundane, the weak from the strong, the bizarre from the necessary. Yet, even deep within the most tangled cases of mistaken identity and the darkest of back alley nights, Mayo is always in control of his craft.
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Grizzly Wrestling: Matthew P. Mayo on the Writing Life
Grizzly Wrestling: Matthew P. Mayo on the Writing Life
Matthew P. Mayo is a master of starting as irresistibly close to the action as possible. In his fiction and his non-fiction, he opens with just enough that the reader cares and then he hits the character (and the reader) hard. Mayo’s sentences are lean, tough and graceful. His writing has a powerful sense of moment and of scene, of gesture and of other human subtleties.
Mayo is a freelance writer living in Maine. His recent books, Cowboys, Mountain Men, & Grizzly Bears: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of the Wild West and Bootleggers, Lobstermen & Lumberjacks: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of Hardscrabble New England, tell fifty tales each of some of the most harrowing moments in their respective regions. These aren’t dry recountings or glossy propaganda.
These are gritty stories – stories, as he says in the introduction of Bootleggers, of “showing courage, resolve, and pluck in one’s daily life, of being tough and uncompromising in the face of adversity.” Indeed, both of Mayo’s Grittiest Moments books read like Loren D. Estleman and Jim Thompson got together to re-write a Stephen Ambrose history book.
Let Your Characters Be Big: Five Authors on The Law of the Gun & Writing the West
A good Western anthology serves a number of purposes. First and foremost, it’s a thrilling read with a variety of great stories by familiar and maybe even a few unfamiliar authors. Regardless of genre, it also serves as a series of case studies organized around a theme. With Law of the Gun, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis, that theme is characterization.
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