Gun — Matt Chisholm

Sam Spur was in trouble -- gun-trouble, law-trouble, bandit-trouble … and finally, the worst trouble of all -- woman-trouble.
Right at the start he was in a mess and he thought matters couldn't be worse. But he was wrong. They could be a lot worse. The beautiful girl he didn't want to marry could be kidnapped, a priceless shipment of gold could be stolen, Spur could find himself out-gunned and in mortal danger. His partners, Cusie Ben and the Cimarron Kid, had their own share of trouble -- the Kid shot up; Ben left horseless in desert country. It all ended violently on the Mexican border in a shoot-out with the most vicious organizer of crime in the Arizona Territory.

MATT CHISHOLM, ALIAS CY JAMES

“I was trained as an artist and given an art school scholarship. Writing interested me from the age of about fourteen, and I never saw myself as being anything but a writer. Strangely enough, I have long been a professional writer and an amateur artist. In my late teens, I knocked about as a factory worker and such-like, did a little commercial art and then went to war like most other people of my age. That meant the Western Desert and the Burma border. All good stuff for a writer. I wrote steadily through the war, but had all my notes pilfered before I could bring them home. What thieves could do with a hundred thousand words of bad writing I'll never know. Maybe they had a literary turn of mind, and turned them into bestsellers! Since the war, I have been a civil servant, as which I initiated an edited two official magazines -- which was surprisingly interesting and I loved it. My first novel, Out of Yesterday, was published about 1950. Getting the second one into print seemed to be almost impossible. Many writers have experienced the same difficulty with their second book. I was just not good enough. A veteran writer looked at my work and told me that what I was producing could not be called writing at all. He told me in no uncertain terms the difference between what I was doing and real writing. In short, I knew nothing about the craft whatever. I swore I would never write again. I did, of course, but did not get another book in print for another ten years and about ten books later. This was a western called Halfbreed, which was bought outright for fifty pounds by Panther Books. It was a marvelous feeling."