The Brave Ride Tall — Matt Chisholm

A crazy killer loose in an Arizona cow town. A man drunk with ambition tries to blast his way to power. A sheriff, a freighter and a girl all horribly killed. So they call in Sam Spur, ex-gunslinger, now Deputy US Marshal. Spur rides the death-trail again, sided by Cusie Ben and the Cimarron Kid, all cursing hell out of each other as they challenge a dozen lawless men.
Sam Spur Westerns spell fast-shooting, tough action and blazing excitement.

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."