classic westerns | robertpeecher

After a few days of some kind of glitch that prevented the cover from showing up in searches on Amazon, I’m pleased to announce that my 14^th book “Trulock’s Posse” is now live on Amazon.

Trulock’s Posse is a standalone work and not part of a series.

While it is full of the kind of action you’ll find in my other Westerns, I think it is much more character-driven than some of my other books.

It features a dozen-man posse consisting of business owners and ranchers who chase after a gang of desperadoes after they murder a town marshal.

The conflict is driven in part by the members of the posse themselves and also the action that takes place around them.

The question I’ve gotten from almost everyone who has read it so far is this: “Is Profanity a real place?”

Profanity is a real place name.

Near Escudilla Mountain in Arizona there is a “Profanity Ridge” marked on the maps, a truly beautiful place that slopes down into a large stand of quaking aspen with big ponderosa pines behind. It’s a really lovely spot.

But the outlaw town of Profanity as described in the book is pure invention.

However, these outlaw towns along the border of Arizona and New Mexico territories in the late 1800s were real.

Most of them are gone now. The small town of Luna, New Mexico, is one of the few that still exists.

Ike Clanton (of OK Corral fame) was hiding out in one of these outlaw towns when he traveled to Springerville, Arizona, and was shot and killed there.

I love this notion of an outlaw town and may well write about one again. Maybe I’ll even resurrect Profanity as a setting in another book.

I really enjoyed writing the characters in “Trulock’s Posse.”

I also like that the title character is not the main character and the main character is not the hero.

Among fiction writers, we talk about ourselves as either “plotters” or “pantsers” (ie: Those who plot their books and those who write by the seat of their pants).

Some books I carefully plot while others I pants.

Trulock’s Posse was definitely a pantsed book.

As such, the roles of the characters unfolded for me much in the same way they will unfold for readers. When I started writing, I couldn’t have told you where it was going. I also didn’t know who the main character was going to turn out to be, nor did I know which character was going to be the hero.

Trulock’s Posse was also a “surprise novel” in that I had no plans to write it. The idea came to me for the novel, and I just started working on it. I put everything else aside and even changed my publishing schedule for 2018 to accommodate “Trulock’s Posse.”

I had already developed one of the characters who appears in Trulock’s Posse for a different novel, and when I started writing Trulock’s Posse it was not in my mind to include that character.

So my “surprise novel” also had a “surprise appearance” by a character from another book that isn’t even written yet.

When you write fiction, any damn thing can happen, and my experience is that the best books are the ones where any damn thing does happen.

So if enjoy reading Westerns, I hope you’ll give Trulock’s Posse a read. It’s very much in the vein of Louis L’Amour or Robert B. Parker Westerns.

If you’ve been looking for an opportunity to read one of my novels but you don’t want to make the commitment of a series, Trulock’s Posse is a great option.

Another really good option Is Too Long the Winter. If you’re curious because you know me personally and want to know what I’m doing at 3 a.m. but you don’t even want to commit to a full-length novel, Too Long the Winter is a good option because it is much shorter than Trulock’s Posse.

If you’re fully committed and you want to jump into a series, the Two Rivers Station series is currently three novels deep and will be growing soon. Two Rivers Station is a traditional sort of Western. I’ve told people it’s my “Gunsmoke” series if you’re familiar with the old James Arness TV show.

The Jackson Speed Memoirs is my first series. Those books are much longer and there are currently six of them. Jackson Speed, set in the 19^th Century in events like the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the California Gold Rush, is similar to traditional Westerns in terms of themes and settings, but the character is not a traditional Western character (that’s your fair warning).

And if you don’t have any interest in reading a novel or a shorter novel or a series and you don’t care what I’m doing on my computer in the middle of the night, then why are you still reading this?

You can find all of my novels at Amazon.com.

A Rocky Mountain landscape scene with cowboy. Original illustrative composition, partly done with Terragen 3D software and the other part hand done.

If you follow me on social media, you might have seen where I’ve hinted in the past few months that I’ve been working on expanding my catalog beyond the Jackson Speed novels.

I wanted to try my hand at writing some more traditional Westerns, and I have spent several months writing those novels.

I’m actually writing in three different and unrelated series, and I also wrote a standalone novel, though the main character in that novel may end up appearing in one of the other series later.

Having spent almost six years writing novels set in the 1800s, the Western genre seemed like an obvious place for me. It’s not much of a transition to go from the Jackson Speed novels to a traditional Old West adventure novel.

In the next few weeks I’m going to start releasing some of these new novels.

My goal with these was to get large portions of the series (or in one case, the entire series) written before publication. I know with the Jackson Speed novels, readers sometimes get frustrated waiting a year for the next book. So I really threw myself into these projects so that I could publish books in each series within a few weeks of each other.

The first book to release will be “Too Long the Winter.” This is the standalone novel set in Colorado Territory in the early 1870s. The novel tells the tale of mountain man Bear Le Vrette who abducts a girl and takes her into the mountains (if you were one of my wonderful beta readers, don’t be confused … I changed the title after I sent out the book to beta readers).

In “Too Long the Winter,” U.S. Marshal and the girl’s distraught father turn to Le Vrette’s friend for help in tracking the mountain man and attempting to save the girl.

It is a fast-paced novel with a good bit of action to it, and it was so much fun to write. I never really intended to turn it into a series, but I liked the main character (Luther Corbett) so much that I figured out a way to work him into another series that I’ll be starting later this year.

The first series I’m releasing is the Two Rivers Station Western series. The focus of the series is Jack Bell, a Confederate veteran who after the war returns to the Texas farm his father had. These books are classic Westerns – badges and gunsmoke, good guys and bad guys.

The second series I’m releasing (look for it in March) is the Lodero Western series.

Lodero is the classic sort of gunslinger from the Old West, but he’s on a mission to learn what happened to his father who went to seek a fortune and never came home. This is a 4-book series, and my intention is to release all four books this spring.

I’ll share this with you: In my family’s history there is a story about an ancestor who went west to Oregon or California. No one in the family ever heard from him again. But some years after he left, someone shipped his trunk (empty) back to the family.

I’ve heard that story several times since I was a little kid, and that was some of the inspiration behind the Lodero novels.

After Lodero, probably sometime this summer, I’ll be releasing another series of books. These are much shorter, but my intention is to publish a story once a month in this series at least for a few months. The series is character-driven and is set in a gold rush boomtown in the Colorado mountains in the 1870s. The location Animas Forks, was a real gold mining boomtown and is now a ghost town.

To give you a flavor, if you enjoyed the HBO series Deadwood, you’ll probably like “Animas Forks.”

If you’re a Jackson Speed fan, I hope you’ve had an opportunity to read “Jackson Speed In the Rush.” I am still working on the next book in the Jackson Speed Memoirs – Jackson Speed and the Regulators. My hope is that I will have that book ready to publish sometime in August.

If you enjoy classic Westerns, I hope you’ll give some of my new books a chance. I’m thoroughly proud of them and very excited to see how readers receive them.