Thunder in the West — Matt Chisholm

The brainchild of Amazon Kindle bestselling western writers Mike Stotter and Ben Bridges, PICCADILLY PUBLISHING is dedicated to issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!

THUNDER IN THE WEST

He cantered through the long New Mexico evening in a land where a man expects guitar music and the smiles of beautiful, hot-blooded women.
They came for him in the half-light. One of them knocked him out of the saddle with a single shot, then another fired point-blank to blow his brains out.
But the light was bad. The bullet no more than ripped along the parting in his hair, creasing his skull. The devil, as the saying goes, looks after his own …




MATT CHISHOLM

“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."