James D. Best

Blade Runner 1982 versus Blade Runner 2049 IMDB users rate Blade Runner 2049 at 8.2 out of 10. Pretty heady rating for IMDB...

Raymond Chandler Raymond Chandler is one of my favorite authors. I even wanted to buy a house he owned in La Jolla. I wanted to buy i...

Several book reviews have criticized Steve Dancy as barely better than the bad guys. Seriously? I believe vile villains make a story wo...

Superheroes are the polar opposite of a slice of life. Killing lifeless zombies, evil vampires, extraterrestrial aliens, or bad witches is ...

I bought the original version of 3:10 to Yuma because I wanted to compare it with the Russell Crowe remake. I liked both. Crowe ...

Frank. A true black hat villain. Characterization is a crucial aspect of fiction. We know this because it's drilled into us a...

                      The Steve Dancy Box Set Books provide hours upon hours of entertainment. If you're looking for rousi...

For me, there are three major elements of good western . The first is the romance of a new beginning, the second is the battle of good ver...

“Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simp...

Best does a great job of weaving historic Prescott into the story with accurate depictions of well-known features like Whiskey Row, the ...

Westerns Forever by MarkmBonner

For a long time, I've wanted to change the cover of The Shut Mouth Society . Although the story has strong historical elements, it...

The Virginian was published in 1902, by Owen Wister (1860-1938). The novel received critical acclaim and was a huge bestseller, eventu...

In a previous post I said that novelists should pay close attention to the personalities of minor characters. Cardboard secondary playe...

A review of Hollywood productions and published fiction might lead the casual observer to believe that the traditional hero is dead. The an...

In 2008, USA Today ran an article titled "The good, the bad, and the anti-hero." The lead sentence claimed that, “Heroes are old ...

Westerns were hugely popular for over a hundred years and then the genre suddenly fell into disfavor. Not only were Westerns popular in the ...

I asked myself this question as I tried to figure out why the Western genre had been relegated to a couple of obscure shelves in most bookst...