BookLife

“In a lot of ways, Westerns are the most American of stories,” said novelist and editor Russell Davis, “but I think what any writer might gain in reading good westerns is a sense of landscape and how important, even critical, landscape can be to a story.”

And in Westerns, that landscape is often presented on an epic scale, regardless of how short or long the novels is.

Russell Davis writes across the genres under his own name and a variety of house names.  I first encountered his fiction with Fire Zone, an action-adventure novel in Don Pendleton’s Executioner series.  A new writer to a long-running series, Davis brought a Western feel, including richly descriptive prose, hard-hitting action, and a sureness, to a series that can be a little uneven from month-to-month. 

After I read Fire Zone, I looked up Russell Davis.  And that’s when things got interesting…
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Raised in the Arizona desert, Thomas Cobb now lives “back East” where writes anti-romantic stories set in the West.  He is the author of the short story collection Acts of Contrition and the novels Crazy Heart and Shavetail. 

There is a twenty-plus year gap between his first and second novels.  The sharp edges of his prose reflect great care and precision. There’s also a certain stubbornness throughout his work – a stubbornness in his characters and in his desire to get the prose just right. 

The recent Shavetail tells the story of an under-aged teenager, Ned Thorne, who has lied his way into the army in order to escape his past and finds himself on a suicide mission of revenge, rescue, and misguided atonement. 

The novel’s title refers to Thorne.  A shavetail is the not entirely complimentary army slang for “a willful, untrained mule.”
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“Anytime you write in a long-established genre, the challenge is to find themes and plots that haven’t been done a thousand times already, and characters who are not caricatures,” said Western novelist Cameron Judd.  “When you sense you are achieving those goals the writing is fun.”

Cameron Judd is the author of more than 30 novels written under his own name and pseudonyms.  He got his start in 1980, on a lark, and has referred to himself elsewhere as a sort of unintentional novelist.  Yet, there is nothing unintentional about his historical novels set in Tennessee and traditional Westerns.  The plotting is intricate and intense and the characterization rich.

To put it poker terms: Cameron Judd writes with a cool hand, but he most definitely isn’t bluffing.
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“An appreciation of the American West and its literature is not a genre—it’s a state of mind,” said Susan K. Salzer.  “I lose myself completely when researching, reading or writing a Western story. It’s a wonderful escape from the grind of everyday life.”

Susan K. Salzer is a journalist by training and a character-based novelist by inclination.  Her debut novel, Up from Thunder, takes place in Missouri during the Civil War.  The protagonist, 16-year-old Hattie Rood, must take care of a wounded 17-year-old Jesse James.  If Hattie Rood is the heart of the book – her losses, her courage, and her growing love for young Jesse James – then the state of Missouri is the ravaged body of the book.  Despite the horrors being waged around them, Salzer remains focused on the characters.

As a result, Up from Thunder is an achingly beautiful book.

“I think Susan Salzer will be a voice and a force to be heard and recognized in the coming years,” said Johnny D. Boggs, author of Northfield and for president of the Western Writers of America. “Susan does her homework, and can tell a great story. Besides, she’s a strong writer of fiction as well as nonfiction. A lot of writers get caught up in the blood and guts when they tackle Missouri during the Civil War, but her first novel was deeply human, quite moving, just a really wonderful read.”
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