Getting it together

Welcome to the Frederick Nolan website.
(a sort of autobiography in the making...)

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Getting it together:
biographical details on the left,
autobiographical musings on the right ...

FREDERICK NOLAN was born in Liverpool, England, and was educated there and at Aberaeron in

Wales

. He decided early in life to become a writer, but it was some thirty years before he got around to being one. While working as a shipping clerk, typewriter salesman, and even a squiggler in a chocolate factory, he somehow completed his first book, The Life and Death of John Henry Tunstall, became an authority on the history of the American frontier, founder of The English Westerners' Society, and something of a connoisseur of western fiction in the days when it was a flourishing literary genre. Moving to London in the early Sixties as an editor for Corgi (Bantam) Books also made it possible for him to pursue another consuming interest: the history of the American musical theatre. Also at this time he began writing western fiction as Frederick H. Christian, a pseudonym derived from his own, his wife Heidi's, and his older son's first names.

Over the next decade, while working in publishing in New York and London – Nolan produced fourteen westerns and half a dozen children’s books, as well as a considerable body of journalism. Between 1971 and 1975 he also edited and co-published The Gee Report, one of the most widely-read and influential international book trade publications of its time.

By that time he had quit his job as a highly-paid publishing executive and signed a contract to write eight (!) full length novels in a year. The first of these, The Oshawa Project (published in the US as The Algonquin Project), was a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic, and was later filmed by MGM as Brass Target, starring Sophia Loren, John Cassavetes, Max von Sydow, Robert Vaughan and George Kennedy. Two years later came The Mittenwald Syndicate, also a major international bestseller.

Since then he has written many successful thrillers (Red Center, Wolf Trap, Sweet Sister Death, Rat Run), historical novels, biographies, childrens' books, and translations from French and German, as well as many radio and television scripts; other fiction has included a highly-praised series of legal thrillers written under the pen-name Christine McGuire. He has contributed profiles of songwriters such as Cole Porter, Johnnie Burke and Sammy Cahn to the Dictionary of American Literary Biography, and is also the author of a biography of the lyricist Lorenz Hart, A Poet on Broadway and a joint biography, The Sound of Their Music: The Story of Rodgers & Hammerstein. In 1998 he acted as historical consultant on, and appeared in, a one-hour BBC-tv film The Rodgers & Hart Story, which was broadcast in the US on the Discovery Channel.

A leading authority on the outlaws and gunfighters of the Old West, he has scripted and appeared in many television programs both in England and in the United States, and authored numerous articles in historical and other academic publications. His award-winning books on Southwestern frontier history include The Life and Death of John Henry Tunstall (1965), The Lincoln County War: A Documentary History (a New York Times ‘Book of the Year’ in 1992), Bad Blood: The Life and Times of the Horrell Brothers (1994), The West of Billy the Kid (1998), an annotated edition of Pat Garrett’s Authentic Life of Billy the Kid (2000), and a popular introduction to the history of the frontier, The Wild West: History, Myth and the Making of America, published in 2003. Two more books were published in 2007: Tascosa, Its Life and Gaudy Times, a comprehensive historical study of the Texas Panhandle cattle town, and The Billy the Kid Reader, a new anthology. As well as working as a script consultant for, and appearing in a BBC/Discovery “Timewatch” examination of the life and times of Billy the Kid, he has also featured in a German TV production, Der Tod von Billy the Kid, and more recently, a National Geographic "Mystery File" on the Kid which was broadcasts early in 2010. He has also completed the script for a film about the life of the Kid which is currently in development.

In 1993 Frederick Nolan received the Border Regional Library Association of Texas’ Award for Literary Excellence. In 2001 he was awarded the first France V. Scholes Prize for outstanding research from the Historical Society of New Mexico and during the same year, he received the first J. Evetts Haley Fellowship from the Haley Memorial Library in Midland, Texas. In 2005 the Western Outlaw-Lawman History Association (WOLA) gave him its highest honour, the Glenn Shirley Award, for his lifetime contribution to outlaw-lawman history. In 2006, The Westerners Foundation named his The West of Billy the Kid one of the 100 most important 2oth-century historical works on the American West. In 2007 the National Outlaw-Lawman Association (NOLA) awarded him its prestigious William D. Reynolds Award in Recognition of Outstanding Research and Writing in Western History and True West magazine named him “Best Living Non-Fiction Writer” for 2008.

e-mail: Frederick@fredericknolan.com

"Let's start at the very beginning ..."

First, the golden oldies (or some of them, anyway) ...

The first job I ever had in publishing was as a "reader" for Corgi (Bantam) Books. That in turn came about because in 1954 I had founded the English "Corral" of The Westerners, an American organisation of history buffs interested in the true history of the American West. For something like six years I edited, printed, published, mailed out a monthly magazine called The Brand Book to, first, ten founder members, then gradually to a larger audience.

In the process of trying to attract new members I contacted Corgi's editorial director, Michael Legat, who with enormous generosity donated advertising pages in the end pages of many of the western novels and non-fiction Corgi then published (That was in the days when westerns were one of the top-selling genres of fiction and most nights there were American western series like Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, Wyatt Earp, Cheyenne and many more on TV). The result was a massive surge in membership for the English Westerners and a warm friendship that has lasted to the present day.

When some time later Michael contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in being a reader, I could hardly believe my ears -- you mean you could get paid for reading books? I remember particularly that Michael was apologetic that Corgi could only pay fifteen shillings (75p) per title--only!!! It was like being tapped on the shoulder by God.

At that time I was working as a salesman for Remington Rand, the typewriter manufacturers (notice that even in that there was a distant 'western' connection!) and was able to read everything Corgi sent me on my daily commute from Liverpool to Manchester. I did that for four or five years, I think, until one day Michael contacted me and asked me whether I would be interested in a job as an assistant editor at Corgi Books. Whaaaaat? I mean, would a donkey eat strawberries?

I joined Corgi in January, 1960, and I loved it from Day One. Although my "specialty" was still westerns, I was allowed later to spread my editorial wings into all the other genres then being published: crime, nurse romances, science fiction, war books and general fiction, not to mention writing all the back jacket "blurbs". My big coup, in those early years, was to propose the publication in paperback of a series of westerns about a gunfighter called "Sudden" which had been written in the late 1930s and early 1940s by an Englishman named Oliver Strange.

The publication of the "Sudden" books had two remarkable effects--first, their incredible success in paperback, and second, their opening the doors for a new brand of English western writers to make a name for themselves. They would become known, not unaffectionately, as "Piccadilly cowboys" (because none of them had ever been further West than Piccadilly Circus). Oliver Strange was one of the first but there would be many, many more --Terry Harknett, the creator of "Edge," Laurence James, Angus Wells, John Harvey (yes, the award-bedecked crime writer), Mike Linaker and even J. T. Edson, although he was a whole different proposition. If you'd like to know more about the Piccadilly cowboys, try
http://gggandpcs.proboards33.com/index.cgi

The day inevitably came, of course, that all ten of the Oliver Strange books had been published. They had all sold so well--a quarter of a million copies each--that I proposed we get the Strange heirs (Oliver Strange had died in the 1940s) to allow us to continue the series, written in the Strange style. They agreed, but finding the writer was another matter--the Piccadilly cowboys hadn't saddled up yet--and as the deadline loomed, my boss (Michael Legat again) suggested that I take a shot at it. However, to avoid accusations of nepotism, it was decided I would have to use a pseudonym. The one we came up with was "Frederick H. Christian," and in 1966 ...

with the deathless opening sentence "Back off, mister, or I'll blow you to hellangone!" Sudden rode again. And again, and again, and again...

and all of a Sudden I was a bestselling author, for each of these modest little three-weeks-to-write westerns went on to sell a couple of million copies in paperback and remained in print for more than twenty years.

Those were the days, my friend. But although I didn't know it then, there were even better ones to come, both for Frederick H. Christian and for me ...