Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (A Caleb York Western Book 6) by Mickey Spillane (books recommended by bts TXT) 📕

novel, Hot Lead, Cold Justice), I again consulted Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West (2017), Christopher Knowlton; and The Real Wild West: The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West (1999), Michael Wallis; as well as the more recently published article “The Big Die-Up,” Chuck Lyons, Wild West magazine, April 2019. Sources new to this novel include Happy Trails: A Dictionary of Western Expressions (1994), Robert Hendrickson; and Famous Sheriffs and Western Outlaws (1929), William MacLeod Raine.

I really don’t know how I managed to write historical novels prior to Internet search engines, when I had to depend on such old-fashioned methods as newspaper, magazine, and book research. Now—as I imagine is the case for most writers of fiction working today setting their stories yesterday—I do a lot of it as I go, utilizing Google.

Web addresses are not included, as those change and disappear from time to time, but I will provide selected article names and authors (and sometimes Web sites).

Helpful in my depiction of a real-life Las Vegas, New Mexico, crime boss, was “Vicente Silva—Leading Silva’s White Caps Gang,” Kathy Weiser-Alexander (at the excellent Legends of America site); “Hiding in Plain Sight—Frontier Crime Lord,” Tom Rizzo (at his Web site); and “Crime Boss Vicente Silva,” Mark Boardman, True West. That magazine’s column “Ask the Marshall” by Marshall Trimble has been helpful in a more general manner. Also useful was “Las Vegas, New Mexico—As Wicked as Dodge City,” Kathy Weiser (again at the Legends of America site); and “Getting Lost in History in the Other Las Vegas,” Steven Talbot, New York Times.

I also wish to acknowledge the Western Fictioneers, an organization founded by Robert J. Randisi, James Reasoner, Frank Roderus, and other professional writers of Western novels and short stories (I’m a member). Their discussion group was extremely valuable to me here, on several occasions fielding research questions I couldn’t answer in my source books or on the Net. Thanks in particular go to Vicky Rose and Gordon Rottman.

Also, thank you to my supportive editor, Michaela Hamilton; my agent and friend, Dominick Abel; and my wife (and in-house editor), Barbara Collins.

photo by Barbara Collins

About the Authors

MICKEY SPILLANE and MAX ALLAN COLLINS collaborated on numerous projects, including twelve anthologies, three films, and the Mike Danger comic book series.

Spillane was the bestselling American mystery writer of the twentieth century. He introduced Mike Hammer in I, the Jury (1947), which sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed. The controversial P.I. has been the subject of a radio show, comic strip, and several television series, starring Darren McGavin in the 1950s and Stacy Keach in the ’80s and ’90s. Numerous gritty movies have been made from Spillane novels, notably director Robert Aldrich’s seminal film noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and The Girl Hunters (1963), in which the writer played his own famous hero. His posthumously published final novel, The Last Stand (2018), published to celebrate the centenary of his birth, received rave reviews and extensive national coverage.

Collins has earned an unprecedented twenty-two Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” nominations, winning for the novels True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1993) in his Nathan Heller series, and for “So Long, Chief,” a Mike Hammer short story begun by Spillane and completed by Collins. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award–winning film starring Tom Hanks. A filmmaker in the Midwest, he has had half a dozen feature screenplays produced, including The Last Lullaby (2008), based on his innovative Quarry novels, also the basis of a recent Cinemax TV series. With A. Brad Schwartz, he wrote the acclaimed non-fiction work Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness and the Battle for Chicago (2018). As “Barbara Allan,” he and his wife Barbara write the Trash ’n’ Treasures mystery series (recently Antiques Fire Sale).

Both Spillane (who died in 2006) and Collins received the Private Eye Writers life achievement award, the Eye, and were presented “Edgar” awards as Grand Masters by the Mystery Writers of America in 1995 and 2017, respectively.