Welcome to the Frederick Nolan website.
(a sort of autobiography in the making...)
"I am not afraid of death. But I'm in no hurry to die." -- Stephen Hawking
Without wishing to make myself sound as if I'm doing a maudlin karaoke rendition of Frank Sinatra's version of "My Way," I thought you might be interested to know where I am right now, and where--if God spares me, as my old Mama used to say--I'm going. Mirabile dictu, the year 2008 saw not only the publication of two new books, but the rebirth of quite a few of the books that are dotted through these pages--eighteen in all, starting with Showdown at Trinidad in April 2007 and ending with Designated Assassin in October, 2008. That's a book a month, nearly every month, which--while it's not exactly giving Dan Brown any sleepless nights, is a lot better than OK. And here (with the exception of the last two) they all are:
Showdown at Trinidad is one of the Angel series, republished under my "Daniel Rockfern" pseudonym in Robert Hale's Black Horse Western library editions, as were Shootout at Fischer's Crossing, Manhunt in Quemado and Duel at Cheyenne. Ulverscroft did large print editions of The Oshawa Project, No Place To Be A Cop, Kill Petrosino and The Ritter Doublecross plus "The Garrett Dossier" quartet Sweet Sister Death, Alert State Black, Rat Run and Designated Assassin. Up there among them you can also see the September, 2008 reprint of The West of Billy the Kid which rectifies numerous typographical errors and even a few factual ones, not to mention the substitution of a "proper" photograph to replace a pen-and-ink drawing, and the "unflopping" of no less than six photographs that were misprinted as mirror images first time around. The two brand-new arrivals were Tascosa, Its Life and Gaudy Times published in June, 2007 (alongside which you can see a copy of the limited edition of 25 signed and numbered copies) and The Billy the Kid Reader which was published in November of the same year.
So, as the old song has it, where do we go from here?
Well, I've got a bundle of projects in hand. One is my first essay in fiction for a long time (I'll tell you why a little further down the page), one is a collaboration, something I'd sworn never to do again (I'll tell you why a little further down the page) and the third is a very exciting project, to edit and annotate the memoirs of one of the Panhandle cowboys who became Pat Garrett's deputies during Garrett's hunt for, and capture of, Billy the Kid. "Frank Clifford," as he was known, and sometimes "Big Foot" Wallace, he lived out the rest of his life as John F. Wallace. His real name, however, was actually John M. Wightman, and he was a Welshman by birth. His "autobiography" is an absolutely fascinating eyewitness document of the era in which Billy the Kid lived, and I think it will become a small classic in its field. Adding to the excitement is the news that Sunstone Press in Santa Fe, NM will be reissuing The Life and Death of John Henry Tunstall (originally published in 1965) and The Lincoln County War: A Documentary History (1992). Both will contain new Forewords and will be supplemented by additional biographical material and other revisions. More on that later.
Meanwhile, just to make sure all this froth doesn't go to your head, here's another account of the downside of the writer's life to depress you: the story of why I gave up on fiction in general and collaboration in particular.
It began, as it always did, 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 warning enough) and was looking for another. She had what she felt was an ideal follow-up to the first, this time about a serial rapist who had terrorized 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 publicize the books in person, with me getting a fulsome thank-you in the prelims.
The proposition that emerged 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 add, elide, emend, we would argue. I would rewrite, she would add, elide, emend, we would argue. Not very good for the blood pressure; not very good for the writing, either. And that is why, children, Until Proven Guilty took almost two years to write. But it came out to 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 proposition and work could commence. Once again the long-distance collaboration was difficult--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 cheerfully turned to other projects, completing first Bad Blood and then rewriting Lorenz Hart while I was waiting. Finally the finished mss. was delivered to Pocket Books, and when they made up their minds they liked it I again flew out to California --this was March 95--to work with on a third Kathryn Mackay thriller which, miraculously, only took us until the end of January, 1996 to finish. They did pretty well --upwards of 250,000 copies, which wasn't too shabby for a couple of paperback originals with next to no publicity or promotion going for them.
Then it was back to California--it was becoming routine--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 horrifed our editor, Julie Rubenstein). The outline for Until the Bough Breaks went to Pocket Books toward the end of May and 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, but 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--after all, she was a lawyer--more than not adhering to 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 book?). Her husband Richard Standridge--an accountant with lots of opinions--still didn't like anything I'd done and I sensed the inference was 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.
And (to quote John Milton) all hell broke loose.
It took some time--need I mention 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 and an 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 gone. In retrospect, however, I'm grateful for one particularly interesting experience that came out of the partnership: one midnight in the county morgue I actually sat in on 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). For the record, she (and, I assume, her husband) did five 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.
Perhaps now you'll understand why I'm being coy about the new fiction project. When it gets off the ground, I'll come back here and tell you more -- perhaps early in 2009. Things are changing so rapidly in the publishing business (and everywhere else!) right now that it seems like there's a new set of rules every day, but if nothing else I have learned you can't speed up the process of submitting a project to a publisher. So we wait ... and wait ... Ah, the joys of the literary life!
AND NOW ... A QUICK 2010 UPDATE
As someone or other said, If you want to give the Gods a good laugh, make plans. So I wasn’t altogether surprised when some of my plans for 2009 didn’t turn out quite the way I thought they would. The fiction project for which I had such high hopes failed to light anybody’s fire, and the way the publishing (and bookselling) biz is looking right now, I don’t see its chances improving. In addition, my collaborator-to-be got bogged down on a project he’d thought might take a few months, but which is now looking like it won't be finished until well into 2010, which put our project firmly on to the back burner. Of my two other non-fiction projects one is in reasonable health and the other is, well, ailing.
So, if that was what you might call the bad news, to a large degree it was outweighed by the good news, which is that Sunstone Press in Santa Fe signed up two of my best books on the American West, to wit The Life and Death of John Henry Tunstall and The Lincoln County War: A Documentary History, both with new forewords, additional material and corrections. And—icing on the cake—I discovered that a few years ago during the process of selling my "Sudden" series to Robert Hale for their Black Horse Westerns imprint, one of them-- Sudden, Troubleshooter—somehow got left off the list. A quick deal was done, and it will reappear in print (probably sometime next Spring) with the new title Hell in the Mesquites by Frederick H. Christian. Pretty good going for a western that first saw the light of day in 1967!
All this brings the number of my books republished in the last four years up to 42. Just for the record, the tally for the two years 2008-09 alone has been a total of 21 books -- pretty much one a month (which is a lot better than Dan Brown's output). And here's a pictorial update:
In July I attended the Wild West History Association’s “Roundup” at the Menger Hotel in
Now, as we move into Twenty-Ten, the two books I mentioned above have been published in handsome new paperback livery, and are available from the publisher (www.sunstonepress.com ) or at Amazon (just go to ‘Books’ and type in my name). Incidentally, it was I who took the photographs which adorn the covers. The idea was to convey the way the Lincoln County War was fought--on the one hand with sixguns, but on the other on paper, in the Territorial press and in letters to people in high places, including the President of the United States. I think they look great (the Tunstall is positively 3-D) but then, I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Meanwhile the “Frank Clifford” memoir Deep Trails in the Old West--in my opinion as good in its own free-and-easy-cowboying way as anything Charlie Siringo ever wrote--has been accepted for publication (probably in 2011) by the University of Oklahoma Press, and Sunstone Press are going to do an updated paperback edition of my 1995 study of that down-and-dirtiest of all Texas feuds, the Horrell-Higgins War, in Bad Blood: The Life and Times of the Horrell Brothers.
As if all that were not enough, there are a couple of additional bright spots – for instance, Ulverscroft have just published a new large-print edition of Red Centre (originally published in 1985, and "a riveting, witty, even stylish treat," according to Publishers Weekly) with a really striking cover:
Even more icing on the cake -- on February 3, 2010, viewers of the National Geographic channel on British TV were treated to a "Mystery File" about the life and times of Billy the Kid -- the mystery being who he was, how he became what he became -- "starring" Bob Boze Bell, Drew and Elise Gomber, Steve Sederwall and, ahem, me! It was a fine little essay and well worthy to be added to the roster of works that have been done on the subject (I'm informed that on the night it was screened, it got bigger viewing figures than not just National Geographic programs but across all factual cable channels. More information about the series can be found on www.mysteryfiles.com). American viewers will see it on the Discovery ID channel on Saturday, March 13, at 10.00pm EST. Nice for us Brits to be first on the scene for a change!
I have to say, though, I can't help but wonder what Billy the Kid would think if he knew the film about his life was one of a series that included such "mysteries" as Jack the Ripper, King Arthur, Rasputin and Joan of Arc!!
By the way, those of you who were fans of the late Robert B. Parker and his private-eye hero Spenser might like to look at the obituary I wrote for The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/robert-b-parker-crime-writer-best-known-for-the-spenser-series-of-novels-1887328.html … Now back to work--a feature article for Wild West Magazine on the life and gaudy times of Tascosa, Texas, and then there’s Hell in the Mesquites to come in June, and further down the line a Top Secret Project I have in the works. We may be poor, but we do see life!
Stay tuned!
