Showing results by narrator "Chris Abell" in All Categories

Two thrilling Western stories set in Arizona, in which strong and silent cowboys use their wits to overcome bullies while avoiding gunplay as much as possible. The first story, "Scalisi Claws Leather", is set in Arizona during the Prohibition era. The notorious Chicago gangster Pete Scalisi has come to the Bar BQ dude ranch to hide out for a while. In the title story, "Long Texan", Boone Sibley arrives in Tough Nut, Arizona, just in time to save a small child that wanders into the line of fire in a shootout, putting him on the wrong side of Whip Quinn and his gang.

William Clarke Quantrill was a hated name during the War Between the States by the Federals of the Union Army, as well as by many non-combatants. Even the high command of the Confederacy distrusted him. But there were others who were passionate sympathizers. He was both friend and mentor‚ but also manipulator and opportunist.

Sheriff Dan Rhodes knows it's going to be a bad day when Bert Ramsey arrives at the jail with a neatly wrapped arm and lays it on Dan's desk. He has another out in the truck, he tells the sheriff, and "a couple of legs, too, but they don't match up". Then Bert Ramsey is shot to death, and serious crime takes over. A tattoo on the body discloses that Ramsey was once a member of Los Muertos, a violent motorcycle gang from the city, and current members of the gang turn up in Blacklin County.

Joe Sullivan is framed by a biker gang and vows revenge when he is released from prison. Unable to wait, he breaks jail with the help of his girl, Pat. But the bikers kidnap Ann Martin, a stranger who sympathetically corresponded with Joe while he was in jail. As his plans to exact revenge are complicated by Ann's presence, Joe works to find a way to rescue her.

Since Wilde's condemnation of modern biography, the genre would appear to have accelerated its descent into bad taste. As Carl Rollyson points out, writers as various as Rebecca West, Ted Hughes, and Joyce Carol Oates have deplored biographers' tendency to cut up lives and render the bloody data so as to make their subjects seem unhealthy, unwholesome, and unsound. Janet Malcolm has compared biographers to burglars; modern novels feature the biographer as grave robber and victimizer.