And neither am I, Doc.
In fact I’m happy to report that for the last couple of years I’ve been having a small renaissance, with no less than thirty-two of my earlier books (see above for the most recent ones) reprinted in new or large print editions, plus two completely new ones which, even if I say so myself, is not bad for a creaky-knee’d senior citizen.

Most recently I finished researching, editing and annotating the memoirs of “Frank Clifford,” who not only rode alongside Clay Allison during the Colfax County War, but was also one of the Panhandle cowboys who got themselves involved in Pat Garrett's hunt for and capture of Billy the Kid in 1880.
His "autobiography" Deep Trails in the Old West -- amazingly, never published --is a fascinating eyewitness account of those final years of the western frontier, and is in my opinion as good in its own free-and-easy-cowboying way as anything Charlie Siringo ever wrote.

Here are a couple of reviews just in :

"First written in 1940, Deep Trails in the Old West is the recollections of Frank Clifford, an adventurous man in frontier America. He roamed America's most lawless lands in the 1870s and 1880s especially, often changing his nan1e (perhaps to keep one step ahead of the law) and even encountering such prominent and dangerous figures as Clay Allison and Billy the Kid. Clifford's story also vividly illustrates the day-to-day demands on the lives of ranchers and ordinary people in America's wilder lands and days. Frederick Nolan has provided a wealth of helpful annotations to Clifford's own worlds, enhancing Deep Trails in the Old West as an invaluable primary testimony of what everyday frontier life was like over a hundred years ago.
Highly recommended."
~ James A. Cox, Midwest Book Review.
***
Fresh eyewitness accounts from Billy the Kid's day are hard to come by, but Deep Trails in the Old West is one of them. [Frank] Clifford's transcribed memoirs, edited and scrupulously annotated by Frederick Nolan, are the most entertaining Western yarns I've read since Mark Twain's Roughing It. I highly recommend Deep Trails in the Old West to any reader who enjoys stories well told and wants to learn what the Wild West was really like from someone who lived there
~ Jo Ann Butler, Historical Novels Review.

You can get your copy direct from the publisher,  the University of Oklahoma Press, from all good bookshops or from www.Amazon.com.

Here's a taster in the form of the jacket copy:

Cowboy and drifter Frank Clifford lived a lot of lives—and raised a lot of hell—in the first quarter of his life. He spent the rest of it keeping a lid on what those lives had been and where that hell-raising had occurred. During the 1870s and 1880s his restless spirit led him all over the Southwest, crossing the paths of many of the era’s most notorious characters, most notably Clay Allison and Billy the Kid.

More than just an entertaining and informative narrative of his Wild West adventures, Clifford’s memoir also paints a picture of how ranchers and ordinary folk lived, worked, and stayed alive during those tumultuous years. Edited and annotated by Frederick Nolan, Deep Trails in the Old West is likely one of the last eyewitness histories of the old West ever to be discovered.

Born in Wales with the name John Wightman, the author moved with his family in 1871 to Cimarron, New Mexico, but broke all ties with them while still in his teens. As Frank Clifford, he rode with outlaw Clay Allison’s Colfax County vigilantes, traveled with Charlie Siringo, cowboyed on the Bell Ranch, contended with Apaches, and mined for gold in Hillsboro. In 1880 he was one of the Panhandle cowboys sent into New Mexico to recover cattle stolen by Billy the Kid and his compañeros—and in the process he got to know the Kid dangerously well.

Eventually the self-styled “roughneck cowboy” changed his name again, and settled down in Emporia, Kansas. Known there as J. Frank Wallace, he became chief clerk of the Santa Fe Railroad and president of the City Council, keeping most of the truth about his birth, background, and adventures in the Southwest a secret from his family and everyone else. In 1940, however, a chance encounter on a train with an amateur portrait painter named Genevieve Frickel led him to tell her his story. In further meetings, he dictated his story in greater detail, and she wrote it down as he spoke, but it was never published. More than fifty years later Clifford’s great-grandson revealed the long-hidden memoir to Nolan.

In unveiling this work, Nolan faithfully preserves Clifford’s own words, providing helpful annotation without censoring either the author’s strong opinions or his racial biases. For all its roughness, Deep Trails in the Old West is a rich resource of frontier lore, customs, and manners, told by a man who saw the Old West at its wildest—and lived to tell the tale.

The deluxe edition of DEEP TRAILS IN THE OLD WEST - limited to twenty signed copies only -- SOLD OUT before publication!

Tiptoe-ing warily around the old saying (if you want to make the Gods laugh, tell them you have plans), my next project will be a collaboration (something I swore I never would do again – see below) and when the preliminary resarch for that is done (it's already taken up most of of 2011) I might even get around to trying my hand at fiction again, something I haven’t done for a couple of decades .

More on that nearer the time, but just so you’ll understand my hesitation, here’s the sad story of why I gave up on fiction in general and collaboration in particular.

Ω

It began, as it always did back then, with a phone call from Artie Pine. He had taken on as a client Christine McGuire, a Californian assistant district attorney who had co-written a book about a sensational case she had tried, involving the kidnap, imprisonment, sexual abuse and eventual escape from her astonishing ordeal of a young woman who became known as "The Girl in the Box." The book--Perfect Victim– had been a bestseller, but McGuire had fallen out with her co-author (you'd think that would have been enough of a warning) and was looking for another. She had what she felt was an ideal follow-up true life thriller, this time about a serial rapist who had terrorised her small town for several years before he was tracked down and sent to prison. The proposition– and especially the fact that the criminal had been known as "the Pleasant Point rapist" –intrigued me, and McGuire and I agreed to meet. Although it was a long way from love at first sight, we wound up agreeing to work together and that the books would be published in her name, so she could publicise them in person, with me getting a fulsome thank you in the prelims. Smart move on my part, huh?

The proposition was that McGuire would provide all the legal know-how and documentation and I'd write the book. Simple enough, eh? Don't believe it for a second. From its inception (in December '89) the project--which en route turned from non-fiction into fiction when McGuire's boss refused her permission to use the real-life case--did not finally become a finished novel until September, 1991. In the process, real-life assistant DA McGuire was subsumed into her alter ego, Kathryn Mackay. As in real life, our "fictional" ADA had a school-age daughter, to which I added a sometimes-good, sometimes-not-so-good relationship with her investigator, Dave Granz, to add to her travails as she pursued a serial rapist with an M.O. not all that different from the real life one we'd originally planned to write about. I have to tell you, I was not at all sad to go with the fictional rather than the factual variety and within a week we were off to the races.

This was BEM, remember--Before E-Mail--and so a lot of Fed-Exing, faxing and phoning were involved.. I would write, she would cross out, add, elide, emend, we would argue. I would rewrite, she would cross out, add, elide, emend, we would argue. Not very good for the blood pressure (especially the crossing-out); not very good for the writing, either. And that is why, children, Until Proven Guilty took almost two years to write. But when it finally appeared, the story of the hunt for a serial killer who calls himself the Gingerbread Man got pretty good reviews, selling to the UK, Holland, Germany, Poland and Japan, with a book club sale on both sides of the Atlantic. So we all agreed to do another.

The follow-up had an even longer gestation. According to my worksheets, in 1992, I did four completely different outlines before our editor at Pocket Books even liked the storyline and work could commence. Once again the long-distance collaboration was difficult, and as a result—I won't bore you with an account of the vicissitudes, but I readily confess I found it pretty damned hard to sit still while someone who clearly knew little or nothing about plotting, timing, or character development jumped on whatever I wrote and proceeded to tear it to shreds—it was another two years before Until Justice is Done was completed. 

So protracted and so frustrating was the process that while the ball was in McGuire's court, as it were, I happily returned to other projects, first completing Bad Blood: The Life and Times of the Horrell Brothers and then rewriting Lorenz Hart, A Poet on Broadway (a sad tale told elsewhere in this compendium). Finally, the finished manuscript was delivered to Pocket Books, and when they--eventually--made up their minds that they liked it, I again flew out to California--by now it was March, '95--to work on a third Kathryn Mackay thriller, Until Death Do Us Part. This one, miraculously, only took until the end of January, 1996 to finish. Despite all the sturm und drang, the series did pretty well--upwards of 250,000 copies each, not too shabby for a couple of paperback originals with next to no publicity or promotion going for them!

                         

  Then it was back to California to hack out the parameters of "Until #4" (which I wanted to call Until The Fat Lady Sings, an idea which for some strange reason horrified our editor Julie Rubenstein). We settled for Until the Bough Breaks and the outline went to Pocket Books before the end of May. While they were meditating, I buried myself in writing The West of Billy the Kid (and what a pleasure that was by comparison!).

Finally, Julie gave us the go-ahead on the new book and by mid-October I'd completed about a third of the story. When she got it, McGuire said she didn't like it at all (I found out later it was actually her husband who didn't like it) so we scrapped it and started over. By which time, of course, we were way off on our delivery date, and nothing bugged my collaborator more—after all, she was a lawyer—than failing to fulfil the terms of a contract. No matter how many times I told her that publishers understood these things and were very flexible about it, she got more and unhappy, then angry (how dare I work on anything else when I was supposed to be working on her—note the absence of the word ‘our’—book?). Her husband Richard Standridge—an accountant with lots of opinions and a yen to be a writer instead of an accountant—still didn't like anything I'd done, she said, and I sensed the inference was they felt they could do a whole lot better by themselves, without all this transatlantic hassle with a bloody-minded Englishman. So I bit the bullet and with true Christmas spirit, told her I was terminating the collaboration.

She told me I couldn't do that.

I told her I just had.

Whereupon (to quote John Milton again) all hell broke loose.

It took some time for us to get unhitched—try to imagine how many bits of paper I had to sign relinquishing my rights in this and that (there'd been a tickle of movie-TV interest) and anything else a hostile lawyer in league with an money-hungry accountant could think up—before the partition was complete, but we made it. All in all it was a pretty inglorious episode and I was glad to be off the hook.

In retrospect, however, I'm grateful for one particularly interesting experience that came out of the debacle: one midnight, in the county morgue, I actually participated in an autopsy, not as a spectator, but hands-on, with the real-life medical examiner to whom, in the books, I had given the name of my dear friend Morgan Nelson (McGuire never knew I'd given many of the characters the names of personal friends). For the record, she (and, I assume, her husband) did write several more “Until” books, but I guess either they ran out of steam or the books didn't sell too well, because Pocket dropped the series and that was the end of that. Every now and then I replay the whole miserable experience in my head, if only to remind myself that the dictionary not only defines a collaborator as a co-worker, but also as a traitor.... Ah, the joys of the literary life, tra-la!

=======================================================

Sour I'm not, however.
Whatever you say about the writing game, it ain't all grief: there are also marvellous high points and I never stop thanking my lucky stars that I've somehow managed to have so many of them.
Right now, for instance ...

 you can catch me on television! 

On January 10 2012, I was one of the "experts" appearing in an hour-long PBS "American Experience"movie re-examining Billy the Kid's life and (to a much lesser degree)  his involvement in the Lincoln County War, directed by John Maggio for Ark Media of New York.
So far, at least, the audience response seems to have been mixed, with many viewers complaining about how much was left out -- you do have to wonder how they could cover the Lincoln County War and make no mention of Alexander and Susan McSween, John Chisum, John Riley, Thomas Catron, Juan Patron, John B. Wilson, Jose Chavez y Chavez, George Kimball, and Col. N. A. M. Dudley  to name only a few.
Among those appearing were Mark Lee Gardner, N. Scott Momaday, Hampton Sides, Drew Gomber and everyone's favourite Billy the Kid expert,
UNM history professor Paul Hutton.

If you want to see for yourself, go to:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/billy/player/

... but please forgive me if I suggest
you might do a lot better watching this ...

Yes, it's here ...
the DVD "Birth of a Legend"

Go to www.btkpictures.com 
and place your order.

Then let me know what you think!

(frederick@fredericknolan.com)

Ω

And as you leave, remember ...

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on"