James D. Best

  If readers are the judge, Old Haunts is a good read. After three months, Old Haunts has garnered a 4.5 Amazon score with 88 ratings and ...

  Honest westerns. Filled with dishonest characters. This feels like a major milestone, so I guess it must be. In January, The Steve Dancy T...

Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were interesting characters. Exactly the type of characters a novelist needs to carry a story. In writ...

  With the exception of the Monitor vs. Merrimack (CSS Virginia), naval battles get short shrift in Civil War books. McPherson certainly fil...

Books make a thoughtful present and are a great entertainment value. They provide hour upon hour of personal pleasure, and then they can be ...

When people talk about the film industry, they seldom mention Thomas Edison, yet he filmed the first western at his studio in New York Cit...

Western fiction has been hugely popular for almost two hundred years. Not only were Westerns popular in the United States, but the w...

My stomping ground, sans people. We winter in San Diego. Nothing against the grandkids, but everything against snow, cloud cover, ...

Update: In the Land of Men is now available. In previous posts, I mentioned that several times a year I read books about writing , the p...

John Sutherland is a literary critic and columnist for the Guardian . The sub-title of his book is "50 Key Concepts" and it...

I just returned from a great vacation that explored the northeast of North America. My wife and I flew to Montreal to meet my sister...

Today, NFReads published my author interview . They ask good questions, so if you want to know my dark secrets, take a gander. Just kidding....

Even the film poster celebrates the F-word (Spoiler alert: if you're a Deadwood fan, you won’t like what follows.) I watched ...

No Peace is one step closer to publication. I have used the same editor for eleven books, and once again, I'm beholden to her f...

The Washington Post has an article on “ The 23 most unforgettable last sentences in fiction .” Many critics and readers focus on th...

Last night we rented Crazy Rich Asians based on the book by Kevin Kwan.  I had heard a lot of good things about the film, but I was disapp...

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 ...

No Peace starts at   del Monte Hotel in Monterey (photo circa 1880s) In a previous post I wrote that I had started the next Steve Dan...

Curiosity.com published a list of writing tips from Mark Twain. Now, Twain never actually published a list, but his letters provide...

"Author/Blogger James D. Best found me on the web and sent me his novel Leadville: A Steve Dancy Tale (2nd in a series) to review! I h...