Now Available: Old Haunts, A Steve Dancy Tale

Honest westerns. Full of dishonest characters.

 Old haunts is now available in hardcover, trade paperback, and Kindle. Get a copy while they're still hot off the press.

No Peace, A Steve Dancy Tale — Available Today

No Peace, A Steve Dancy Tale

Available in paperback (6X9 Trade Paperback) and for Kindles.

Excerpt

“Stay put. You’re not leaving until I see my wife. Bring her to the door.”

“Hell, she’s fine. I was just trying to rattle you. You know how it is.”

“No, I don’t know how it is. That’s why I want to see her.”

“Which one’s your wife?” he asked tentatively.

“The older one,” I answered automatically, thinking only of Virginia and Jenny.

He laughed. “That old hag. I thought she might be your mother. Hell, she’s right as rain.”

I flipped my rifle up, grabbed the end of the barrel, and rammed the butt as hard as I could into the man’s face. I hit him square on the bridge of his nose, and I heard the cartilage crushed into his skull. I pulled back to hit him again, when I noticed the other men were going for their guns. Damn it. I dropped the rifle and went for my pistol, hitting the wall with my shoulder to get behind the collapsing man I had just hit. The first shot rang out from the next man on my side of the hall. I grabbed the lapels of the man I had bludgeoned and tried to pull him in front of me. I saw other muzzle flashes, one from my side of the hall and two from the men on Sharp’s side. I jerked my human shield away from the wall and extended my arm behind his head, firing at the second man on my side. I shot him three times before I shifted my attention to the other men. Both remained standing but writhed in pain. I shot them both again.

If the outdoor shooting had been noisy and hazy, the confines of the hallway made this fight ten times worse. If Virginia opened the door to see what was happening, I would never see her through the gun smoke. My ears rang, my eyes stung, and my throat felt raspy. The battle seemed like it had lasted for at least ten minutes, but I knew that was an illusion. The fight had lasted under five seconds.

I glanced behind me and felt relief to see Sharp still standing. I surveyed our assailants. None were dead yet, but three of them would die soon. I still held up the man I had clubbed. His bloody face appeared lifeless. Then I felt my shirtfront getting wet. Had I been shot? I let go of the body, and it fell to the floor. My entire front was soaked in blood. I ran my hand over my stomach and felt a wound. I probed a hole in my shirt with my finger and could feel a bullet just inside my skin. That didn’t make sense. Then I reexamined the man on the floor. He had been shot at least twice. I kicked him over with my foot. One exit wound. Damn. The bullet had spent its energy passing through his body, or at least most of its energy. I began to feel pain in my stomach.

 Someone put his hand on my shoulder and turned me around. Out of fear or shock, I almost fired my Colt but recognized Sharp at the last moment. I wasn’t reacting right. What was happening? My stomach hurt like hell, and Sharp’s mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I felt wobbly. Is this what it was like to get shot? I didn’t know. I didn’t know because I always won my gunfights.

My legs felt weak, and I knew Sharp was holding me up. I was passing out.

Buy it today

Honest Westerns. Filled with dishonest characters.

New Review for the Shut Mouth Society

JackBoston.com has reviewed the Shut Mouth Society.  Read the full review here:

The Shut Mouth Society was a great and unexpectedly satisfying read. I’ve read several (not all) of Jim Best’s Steve Dancy novels and enjoyed them, but this novel is considerably more sophisticated and, well, interesting. Kind of like Russian Kachinka dolls, its setting is contemporary but within that it’s a historical novel. Like any historical novel, fact is married to fiction, and in this book it all works well together: the story carries the day and you don’t really know or need to care if every single thing is factual.

No Peace, A Steve Dancy Tale

Honest westerns filled with dishonest characters.

My new Steve Dancy book takes place in 1885, three years after Steve and Virginia took off for their honeymoon in San Diego. A lot has happened off-page. You'll soon be able to catch up with Steve and all of his friends in his latest adventure titled No Peace.

Maybe soon is the wrong word. I've finished the second draft and now two of my beta readers are spreading red ink all over the manuscript. When I finish incorporating their notes, it will be ready for my professional editor. Then she'll send back another red ink-stained manuscript. After I incorporate her changes, it will be ready for the book designer, who will format the word files for print and electronic versions. Simultaneously, my son will design the book cover. (As I've mentioned before, I'm getting back his Art Center tuition one book cover at a time.)

If everything goes without a hitch, No Peace, A Steve Dancy Tale should be available sometime this summer.

In the meantime, if you haven't tried Deluge, download a sample onto your Kindle or buy the paperback. Deluge is the most adrenaline you’ll can experience while reclining in a Barcalounger. 
And if you haven't tried them yet, there are two Steve Dancy Short Tales in Wanted and Wanted II.

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to All ... Everyone Have a Great 2019

Christmas is great. Lots of family, friends, and good cheer. And for dessert, we leave for San Diego on the 27th for more family and friends and hopefully, lots of surfing. (I'll let you know if I can still catch waves.) We stay in California for the winter and won't return until we see a no-snow forecast for thirty days. 

I always get more writing done in San Diego because I have less distractions. I surf in the morning and have the rest of the day free. I need to focus on No Peace, A Steve Dancy Tale. I'm excited about the story which takes place a couple years after Crossing the Animas ended with Steve and Virginia getting married. It's been a happy two years for the Dancys, but as the title implies, tranquility is coming to an end. Boy, that's an understatement. 

Honest westerns filled with dishonest characters.

Anyway, if you've read all six books in the series, consider Deluge to fill the time until No Peace hits the bookshelves. 

Storms, politics, and gangs pummel California ... but that isn't the scary part.
A Santa Barbara police chief and a history professor risk everything to salvage their state from near-total destruction. While others run in terror or rush into danger to exploit the tragedy, Greg Evarts and Patricia Baldwin fight for the only action that can save California and avoid a national economic collapse.

Will anyone listen?

I mentioned in my last post that my twelve year-old granddaughter wrote a great short story that received a 100% in her writing class. I published it with Amazon and she will get paperback copies as a surprise Christmas gift. Here Lies Revenge is now available in print and Kindle versions. Man, I wish I had started that early.

 A scary story that will make you think twice before offending the odd girl in school

Deluge—New Release Now Available

Natural disaster, street gangs and political inertia … but that isn’t the scary part.

Deluge is now available in print and Kindle. This book is a little bit of a departure from my normal fare and fun to write. A traditional disaster story, Deluge will get your adrenaline going while sitting in a barcalounger.

Can Novelist see the past better than historians?

I recently read Stephen Hunter’s, The Third Bullet, which is a novel about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Through the years, I have read a half dozen nonfiction books on the assassination. Although I didn’t completely accept the conspiracy motivation presented by Hunter, I think he made a better case for a second shooter than any of the other books on the subject. Hunter clearly sees the incongruities in the official portrayal of events, imagines alternative scenarios, and then figures out what most likely happened given the existing record. He does an exceptional job while presenting a standard Bob Lee Swagger suspense thriller.

The Third Bullet made me think: Do novelists see the past better than historians?

I’m prejudice, but I believe so. Historians search for facts, facts that can be verified with attributable sources. They need those tiny footnotes for credibility. Novelists naturally go to the character of people, especially if those people are orchestrating events. Novelists search for motivation. The novelist looks for the thread of a story, which will always be about people and what drives them. They focus on why, not what. Historians at times engage in conjecture, but good historians put plenty of qualifiers around anything that cannot be proven with hard evidence.

Everything that happens in the world is not documented. Worse, much of what is recorded is inaccurate. Politicians, businessmen, and luminaries dissemble, obfuscate, and sometimes outright lie. But if someone of importance spoke it or wrote it and it becomes old enough, it takes on the stature of a documented fact. This is where a good novelist has an advantage over the historian: what historians see as documentation, the novelist looks at with a skeptical eye. The novelist imagines the circumstances that might have caused that particular piece of evidence to be created. And the novelist does not always come to the same conclusion as the historian.

My book, Tempest at Dawn is a dramatization of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Although George Washington was president of the convention, he only spoke one time at the very end. Since there is no record of Washington being engaged in the proceedings, most historians dismiss him as a figurehead. I looked at Washington’s character and knew he would never sit on the sidelines, especially when it looked like the entire nation was about to collapse. Once I came to that conclusion, I found ample evidence of him working behind the scenes. Why would he work secretly? My guess is that he didn’t want to appear to be architecting the new government he would undoubtedly lead. I could be wrong … but I don’t think so.

I believe a good novelist can digest facts, get to know the character of the players, and draw respectable conclusions about what probably happened. The novelist can make leaps of logic that would tarnish the reputation of an academic scholar. It’s true that many novelists throw facts to the wayside and tell the story the way they wanted it to happen. Stephen Hunter is not one of those types of authors. His books are fictional, but grounded in solid research.

Here’s the bottom line, authors can’t write novels about historical events without historians, but historians can get along quite fine without novelists. So, thank you to all the historians who have helped me write better books.

Hero or villain?

Several book reviews have criticized Steve Dancy as barely better than the bad guys.

Seriously?

I believe vile villains make a story work, so I've invented some highly reprehensible characters. There has to be some tough-as-nails criminal around for Dancy to dispatch or he couldn't be a hero. Now, I also prefer flawed heroes, so Dancy is certainly not perfect. Besides being a tenderfoot, he can be a dunderhead when it comes to romance. He is especially ill equipped for the lawless frontier until he has survived a few nasty episodes.

So, what gives? I can think of only two reasons why people would think ill of Mr. Dancy. First, he is rich and prefers to buy his way out of trouble. It’s unusual for a western hero to be wealthy. Most fictional frontier gunmen own a saddle and a horse, and part of the mythology is that their lack of possessions makes them free. But surely readers don’t hold Dancy’s wealth against him. After all, television's Paladin lived pretty high on the hog, and he earned his piles of cash by less than reputable means. Dancy, on the other hand, came by his wealth honestly—he inherited it.

Gunsmoke TV series Opening Sequence

So if it's not the money, it must be something else. I suppose it could be that Dancy has never had a one-on-one stand-up duel in the middle of the street. When faced with a gunfight, Dancy always searches for an edge. He wants the other fella off balance, unaware that he is about to be shot. Now, that’s closer to how it actually was in the Old West. I remember reading about a study that concluded that most gunfights during that era occurred inside of three feet and most often in a saloon. The epic one-on-one gunfight did occur, but it was not the norm. (The stand-up duel may have faded from popularity after our United States Vice President killed a former cabinet member on the shores of New Jersey.)

Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were two famous Westerners that lived long enough to die of old age. Both were cautious when it came to gun trouble. Earp liked to sneak in the back door of a saloon and coldcock a troublemaker from behind. The practice even got him fired once from the Dodge City force for “police brutality.” Masterson counseled that if you got in a gunfight, you should shoot your opponent center chest … and more than once. 

Steve Dancy has numerous gunfights in every book. It’s the nature of the genre. I like him and most of my readers like him as well, so I can’t let him get shot dead. After all, I need him for the next book.

New Steve Dancy Tales Book Trailer

I'm not sure if book trailers sell books, but they seem to be the rage, so here is a new trailer for The Steve Dancy Tales. Comments welcome.

Mash-ups—Second Thoughts

Previously I wrote a blog posting which questioned whether Western mash-ups worked. I personally dislike mash-ups because they rely too much on a clever big concept rather than on good storytelling. I suspect Hollywood likes mash-ups because they don't think a Western story can stand on its own, especially with the younger crowd. So I openly displayed my prejudice against projects that draped a popular genre disguise over a Western in order to make it more marketable. Besides, I hated Cowboys and Aliens. I prefer unalloyed Westerns.

Except I forgot one of my favorite Westerns. Part of the attraction of Westerns is vicarious adventure, and no film caught this concept better than the Yul Brynner classic Westworld, which happened to be a science fiction/Western mash-up before someone coined the term. What would happen if an imaginary adventure became life-threatening? How would a naïve observer react if make-believe suddenly became real? Now that’s a theme for a great story.

All of this was brought to mind when I read that HBO has committed to a Westworld series pilot by Bad Robot and Warner Bros. Here is the story in Variety. So I was wrong. All mash-ups are not bad … only the ones I don’t like.

Related Posts

Has a Western mash-up ever worked?

Released: The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale

As of this morning, Amazon is offering The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale in print and Kindle formats. The hardcover large print edition is due from Center Point in the first quarter of 2014. Barnes & Noble and other retailers have not yet listed the book as available, but you can be sure I will let you know when that happens.

Amazon Print Link
Amazon Kindle Link

It's the summer of 1880, and Thomas Edison's incandescent bulb is poised to put the gaslight industry out of business. Knowing a good business opportunity, former New York shopkeeper Steve Dancy sets out to obtain a license for Edison's electric lamp. Edison agrees, under one condition: Dancy and his friends must stop the saboteurs who are disrupting his electrification of Wall Street.

After two years of misadventures out West, the assignment appears to be right up his alley. But new troubles await him in New York City. Dancy has brought a woman with him, and his high-society family disapproves. More worrisome, he has also unknowingly dragged along a feud that began out West. The feud could cost him Edison's backing ... and possibly his life.

Be the first on your block to read The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale. 

Honest Westerns ... filled with dishonest characters.

Ink Tank does: The 8 sexiest cowgirls to kiss John Wayne

John Wayne was a lucky man. As the leading man in 142 films, he had the honor of working with somewhere near 142 leading ladies. Ink Tank does a fun job of selecting "The 8 sexiest cowgirls to kiss John Wayne."

Coming Soon ... The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale

Friday, I signed the final approval forms for The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale. Whew!

The Return by James D. Best

I wish that meant the book was done and the novel would be available next week. Lots yet to do for the print version and formatting remains for ebooks. Turnaround for ebook formatting is generally quick, so I expect both formats to be available within the next four weeks. Perhaps a little sooner. Center Point's Large Print version will come out the first quarter of 2014. The movie has been green-lighted for 2024, or thereabouts.

Slice of Life vs. Bigger Than Life

Superheroes are the polar opposite of a slice of life. Killing lifeless zombies, evil vampires, extraterrestrial aliens, or bad witches is not a slice of most people’s lives. At least, not people I know. Popular culture has a hard time seeing that Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird makes Gerry Lane in World War Z look like a wimp. Our heroes live in a fantasy world because heroics in real life are make-believe.

Hollywood is especially prone to fantasy. Sherlock Holmes was a cerebral detective until reincarnated by Robert Downey Jr. as a martial arts action hero. Hansel & Gretel kill witches with weapons a gamester would love. The Lone Ranger wields guns and fists like a superhero and can even leap tall buildings in a single bound. The trend is to go extreme, the more extreme, the better.

Comedy has become unworldly, as well. Real people are not that outrageous, uncouth, or ill mannered. The problem with being edgy is that you have to continuously venture ever closer to the precipice. Would On Golden Pond, As Good as it Gets, or When Harry Met Sally get green lighted today. Probably only if they added some never-before-seen shocks. (Okay, shoving Simon’s dog Verdel down the garbage chute probably qualifies.)

Am I arguing for a return to slice of life stories? Not really. I like action/adventure, clever dialogue comedies, and especially mystery/suspense stories. And I write Westerns. None of which fit in the slice of life genre. I would prefer, however, more variety in contemporary fiction and film. Fiction is not as big of a problem because good books stay around and there are thousands still waiting for me. Movies are different. When I look at a theater listing and six out of eight films are about men and women that can deflect a bullet with a sword, slice a monster’s head off while leaping six feet off the floor, or throw a paralyzing blow from a piece of stick, I usually end up staying home to watch yet another permutation of CSI. 

Murder Made Simple

In 1944, Raymond Chandler wrote an essay for The Atlantic Monthly titled, "The Simple Art of Murder." It was reprinted in 1950 in book form by Houghton Mifflin along with eight of Chandler's early stories.

Chandler was highly opinionated about art, fiction, and detective stories. There are some nifty tips in here for aspiring and accomplished mystery writers.

Here are a few snippets. 

Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic ... Jane Austen’s chronicles of highly inhibited people against a background of rural gentility seem real enough psychologically. There is plenty of that kind of social and emotional hypocrisy around today.

The murder novel has also a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions.

Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

Yet the detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than good serious novels. Rather second-rate items outlast most of the high velocity fiction, and a great many that should never have been born simply refuse to die at all. They are as durable as the statues in public parks and just about that dull.

"really important books" get dusty on the reprint counter, while Death Wears Yellow Garters is put out in editions of fifty or one hundred thousand copies.

At the end of "The Simple Art of Murder," Chandler gives a great definition of a hero that I abridged in an earlier post titled: What makes an appealing hero?

Link to the full article

Link to my Pinterest page on Raymond Chandler

Images Does Westerns

Images is a great site for film and popular culture. They have a number of articles on Westerns, but I suggest you start with "The Western, An Overview." This seven page article covers the history of Westerns in film. Here are a few Images links.

The Western, An Overview
The Silent Western as Myth Maker
Spaghetti Westerns
Western Weblinks

If these articles have whet your appetite for Westerns, I have a suggestion:
The Steve Dancy Tales

Honest Westerns ... filled with dishonest characters.


and coming soon...

The Return

Did I just write a Western?

Working Cover

I'm about to send The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale to my editor. One step closer to publishing, but still a ways to go.

In this episode, Dancy and his friends visit Thomas Edison in New York City and Menlo Park, New Jersey. Although the story starts in Leadville, Colorado, the plot mostly takes place on the East Coast. Louis L'Amour once said, "If you write about a bygone period east of the Mississippi River, it's a historical novel. If it's west of the Mississippi it's a Western." So ... did geography change this from a Western to a historical novel? The Return includes the same characters, they act the same, and they get into more fights. (I’m talking about the protagonists, of course. The antagonists seem to keep getting killed.)

In the end, I believe it is still a Western because the characters are Westerners through and through. Even Steve Dancy has been transformed. Everyone is a fish out of water. Kinda like Crocodile Dundee meets the 19th century.

Why did I bring my characters east? As I've mentioned previously, The Virginian was the inspiration for the Steve Dancy books. I liked the end of Wister's book where the newly married Virginian and his wife visit her family in New Hampshire. It provided a great contrast between the supposed civilized East Coast versus the values and perspectives of the frontier. I wanted to do something similar with The Return.

It all depends on how you look at it—Point of View

I’m reading a thriller from a big name author. It’s a bestseller published under a Simon & Schuster imprint. Yeah, I found a few typos and stray words, but they didn’t bother me. I miss some mistakes myself, so I’m pretty charitable. What I found discombobulating were the sudden shifts in point of view. With no warning, the reader was thrown from inside one character’s head into the thoughts and feelings of another character. These were stray single paragraphs wedged into an otherwise consistent point of view. It might just be me, but when this happens, it stops me cold.

There are three proper ways to change point of view: a section break, a chapter break, or use an omnipotent point of view. (I’m not going to address tense or first, second, and third person which should be artfully reliable throughout a book.) 

Omnipotent is when the reader regularly gets inside the thoughts and feelings of different characters. An omnipotent point of view (POV) is difficult to carry off, but with a deft hand it can be done so the reader never notices. In fact, the reader should never become overly conscious of the point of view. It’s distracting.

That’s why I prefer a fourth technique. Never change POV. My four Steve Dancy Westerns and The Shut Mouth Society use a single POV throughout the entire story. This was difficult for The Shut Mouth Society because the thriller has two protagonists. I tried switching POV between the hero and heroine, but decided that it added to the mystery if the reader didn’t know what one of the major characters was thinking.

I used a different approach with Tempest at Dawn. Since this was a novelization of the Constitutional Convention, I used POV to heighten the conflict between the opposing forces at the convention. Every other chapter alternated POV between James Madison and Roger Sherman. This allowed the reader to feel the emotions on both sides of the issues.  (I first ran across this technique thirty years ago in Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer.) 




It was difficult to keep the POV consistent when Madison and Sherman were together. Revisions and editing finally scrubbed out the irregularities. In the final chapter of the book, I made an exception to a single POV per chapter. Since both men were together for the entire concluding chapter, I switched to a distant omnipotent POV. In other words, I never entered the thoughts or feeling of either man, but described scenes as if a narrator was telling a story about what he observed. This is similar to a movie, where the viewer never gets to read the thoughts of a character.

People deride the errors in indie-published books, but turn a blind eye to the increasing number of mistakes that prestigious publishers allow to get into print. Sixteen years ago, when I published The Digital Organization, Wiley had the manuscript line-edited by three different editors. They told me a single editor always missed something. I suspect that economics has forced the major publishers to cut this to a single line-editor. It’s a business mistake because this is a level of quality indie-publishers can compete against.

Saline River Chronicle reviews The Shopkeeper

"This is a compelling narrative and as good as the best of classic Westerns. James D. Best is a name to remember."

Read full book review at Saline River Chronical

Buddies in the Saddle reviews The Shopkeeper

Ron Scheer at Buddies in the Saddle has reviewed The Shopkeeper and published a companion  interview with me.

"This is an old-fashioned western in a way that goes back to the western’s roots. For the closest comparison, I’d offer Francis Lynde’s first novel, The Grafters, which was published in 1905. Both novels tell of a newcomer to the West who gets involved in a political intrigue, where influence is bought and sold, and greed rules the workings of government."

Read the review and interview.