[Storm Family 01] • Riders West

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!

RIDERS WEST

Having quit Civil War devastated Texas, the Storm family – father, mother, three sons, two daughters – found their promised land in Colorado. But Colorado was then the American West’s furthest frontier, rich in fertile land but dangerously short on law and order. There were wild animals and Indians – but wildest of all were the desperadoes on the lookout for easy pickings …

Colorado’s Three Creeks country was a hard land indeed, where the strong took whatever they wanted to satisfy their greed and the weak were gunned down if they got in the way. Ed Brack ruled supreme in this brutal territory, thinking he could scare the Storm family off. But the Storms didn’t scare easy. They stood their ground. So the cattle king burned their house… and took their women.

Mild Will Storm, his brother Mart and black Joe Widbee saddled and rode against Brack, guns in their hands and a murderous hatred in their hearts …

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."