[Storm Family 01] • Hard Texas Trail

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!

HARD TEXAS TRAIL

The girl was a good looker as girls go, and Clay Storm wanted her for wife. Two ruthless riders from the North also wanted her - dead.

And so . . . Clay stepped onto the trail and said: ‘Hold it right there.’ The man on the horse clutched the girl harder. ‘Let’s talk this over like sensible men,’ he said - and dived from his horse, his gun already banging. The horse reared. Clay levered and fired. The girl screamed. A man lay dying in the Texas dust.

MATT CHISHOLM

Few indeed are the western readers who have never encountered a book by Peter Watts. For more than a quarter of a century, he produced popular, authoritative and hugely entertaining western novels as "Matt Chisholm", "Cy James" and "Luke Jones". Born in London on 19th December 1919, his writings also appeared under the names "Duncan Mackinlock" and "Tom Owen", but no matter what the name, it was the uniquely readable style he employed to tell his stories that earned him world-wide respect as a master of his craft.

“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."