Can War Novels Cure the Plague?

Seems weird to me but in these shut-in pandemic days my war novels are selling better than my other books and I can’t figure why.

Coming soon, I promise, even tho’ it’s not a war novel…

Does escaping into a war story beat watching one more computer-generated flash-bang action flick on Netflix?  Or does a novel’s hard truth mean more in these hard times?

I was a soldier in the great Vietnam war but the stories in my war novels aren’t my stories.  Just fiction.

Well, yes, Uncle Sugar wouldn’t give me a rifle.  That’s a vague similarity in my history to these novels.  Ours was a beggar-army and Uncle expected me to find my own.  I grabbed one dropped by a dead GI.  I didn’t think about how I got it.  I had to have a rifle to keep from being dead myself.

Yes, Uncle wouldn’t give me a pistol to hug in my sleep to repel Chucks crawling up on my foxhole.  I scrounged some Swedish submachinegun ammo for a battalion armorer who had a Swedish sub but no ammo.  Yep, you can find anything in a combat zone.  He gave me in trade a bright spanking new Mr. Colt’s semi-automatic .45 life-saving pistol.  I slept with it in my hand every night in the boonies.  That’s how scared I was.  All the time.

Yes, Uncle wouldn’t give me a campknife for chopping down brush and tree trunks to layer over my foxhole to keep out enemy mortar bombs.  So I bought one from a pretty, knife-selling Vietnamese girl at her roadside stall in the rundown, beaten up, impoverished refugee hamlet outside basecamp.  She sold her knives to GIs in the daylight hours and to Chuck at night.  What else could she do?  She had to keep herself alive.  She was scared of all of us.

We Army beggars also had to scrounge for eatable ration food, hijack beer from passing transport trucks, and beg or steal whatever else we needed.  All Uncle gave us free was the chance to go into combat and be killed.

He gave Vietnam even less.  My war’s Vietnam was a beautiful country and the people there, though not the ones anxious to kill me, were good and decent folks.  We in Uncle’s beggar Army made that country a ruin and made its people beggars.

How we all – Americans and Vietnamese – stumbled out of that mess of war with even a trifle of humankindness for each other is a grand mystery.  How we eventually came to be something like friends is a greater mystery.  Sometimes human beings prove better than they ought to be.

And maybe that’s the good news that war novels can offer us in this grim plague year.

© 2020 Steven Hardesty 

Keep Safe & Read On (Shortly)!

Short stories don’t sell but so what?  I love ‘em.  Especially when COVID-19 is  banging at my door and I barely have time to read a few dozen pages before heaping more furniture behind the door to keep the @#!&! out.

Just published and begging for your attention!

Or when I want a quick escape into another galaxy far, far away from the latest bad news on the telly.  Or when I just want to write something to help me get through a bad case of quarantine PIM (that’s Pandemic-Induced Malaise).

That’s how my latest short story collection – Fire, She Said and Other Stories – came to be (and to be published yesterday on Amazon for its StorytellerUK2020 competition).

By “latest” I mean the latest to see publication.  I am a slooow writer.  Decades slow sometimes (well, many times).  The lead story – “Fire, She Said” – I began in notes thir(mumblemumble)ty years ago.  Had it just about right ten years later.  Fiddled with it another ten years.  Finally got it in shape four-five years ago.

Then had to think about it some more.  Decided last year it was ready.  Yesterday, momentarily shaking off my PIM, I figured I’d better publish before I found myself sliding back into zombie mode before Netflix.

The other stories in the collection have somewhat less old pedigrees, though the incidents that sparked some of them go back to my childhood (yes, that was in the Stone Age) and my war (in the Late Stone Age).

Writing, unlike wine, doesn’t necessarily improve by being aged in a cool, dry place, like the bottom drawer of my desk.  But slooow is how I work, and I hope that works for you, too.

I hope that this collection of shorts helps you through your own PIM and your own worries about that beast banging on your door.

Keep safe and read on! 

© 2020 Steven Hardesty

The Big "Why?"

A reader writes, “Dear Sir or Madam or Other (whichever you prefer):  Why do you write?”  To which I reply, “Why do you read?”

To find something fresh to fire the mind, isn’t it?  Ah, yes, so do I.  Write for the same reason, I mean to say.

Billions of lovely books on library shelves, from Beowulf’s thoughtful memoirs to Superman comics.  But only a scant few that really fire the mind, right?  So you, the Dear Reader to whom I write this note, scour the offerings to find what you most need.

But I, perhaps a trifling year or two older and a year or two more worn by scouring bookshelves, choose to write the stories I can’t find to read.  If you like to read what I like to write, then we’ve done a mindmeld and this planet continues to spin unwobby on its axis.

Of course, if I told you the true truth about why I write, wobbly would not describe what happens and you would run howling from my books and I can’t have that.  I need the money.

My Dear Reader writes once again, asking timorously (lovely word, “timorously,” isn’t it?), “What, Dear Sir, etc., is the true why of why you write?”

Ah, as you’ve twisted my arm, I’ll admit it all:  Every book I write, even those that seem least likely, is about the war.  My war.  Vietnam.

Everybody knows war is horrible.  Everybody knows war is adventurous.  Everyone of any age knows war appeals to the young – I mean to those chosen by the stupidity of youth to go to war by those old enough to know better:

And when the war is done and youth stone dead,

I’d toddle safely home and die – in bed.

– Siegfried Sassoon, “Base Details”

War can be noble.  Mostly it is ignoble.  War can get you pretty ribbons and fame and maybe even make you President (that last thing has happened too many times).  War can get you chopped to pieces and send you home (if you still have a home after what war does to you) without your legs or your arms or your face or your brains.

Sometimes war just sends you home with bad dreams that never go away, day or night.  Sometimes you cannot stop remembering war.  This thing or that thing that happened there.  The weary soldier on jungle patrol who fell asleep leaning against the track of an armored personnel carrier and when the engine cranked up the track ground his skull to mush.  Or the helicopter pilot with whom you were radio-chatting who suddenly broke commo when his chopper fell out of the sky, no reason, bang! his life done.

Oh, sure, there were fun times in that war.  There always are in war, aren’t there?  Novels tell us that.  Sometimes I remember them.  Like riding holding onto the rear deck of a tank chasing the enemy when the tank jerks to a sudden stop and we realize we’ve run over our own barbwire and it’s so tangled in the road wheels the tank is stuck and the enemy is laughing at us and scampering away into jungle hiding.  Oh, did we laugh about that.  Later.

Now, Dear Reader, I’ve written four novels about the Vietnam war and the last, Poisoned Hearts, does the best job answering your question.  But my historical Westerns, such as The Gunfighter and Broken Spur, tell a lot, too, set as they are in the years just after the collapse of Reconstruction when the West was filling up with Civil War veterans white, Black and Indian discovering their own shattering dreams.

Even In the Season of Poison, a psychological horror novel set in Burma in some bizarre forgotten time, is a breed of war story because it talks about personal treason.  Also the wild space opera An Earthman Born about a young man’s thoughtless conquest of the universe.  And, if Civil War history is your kick, Confederate Origins of Union Victory tracking through the colossal battles of Franklin and Nashville, Tennessee, in 1864, where too much horror was done that needn’t have been.

Well, you asked, and that’s my answer.  If you read my books you may decide – before you take your own chance going to war, before you risk all the nights that follow remembering what you don’t want to remember – that you won’t make war except when the safety of your family and your country is honestly at stake, then you got my message.

Now go read a Harry Seaburn caper novel and take your mind off all this.  Until the moment comes when war rears up before you and you have no choice but to decide.

© 2020 Steven Hardesty

(Secret) Pizza Recipe #5

The best pizza in this or any other universe is the pizza I made in Vietnam.  In the bottom of a foxhole.  Cooked over a piece of blue-burning C-4 plastique explosive.

He’s really just an old teddybear…

I’ll give you the recipe.  You  can dig your own foxhole and give it a try.  Tastes even better if people are shooting at you, though that may be hard to arrange in your backyard.

Start with a box of U.S. Army C-rations.  Choose the soup-can size tin of Beef Spiced with Sauce (yum!).  Scissor it open with your P-38 (a can opener old-fashioned before your grandmother’s old-fashioned manual can opener).  Dump the beef and sauce into your metal canteen cup.  Set aside.

Open the little tin labelled B-2 for the Hardtack Biscuits and the pimento Cheese Spread.  That’s All-American cheese spread from contented cows.  You will be as content when you’ve eaten this pizza, I guarantee.

Have all your ingredients handy?  Yes.

In the bottom of your foxhole crouching over a small lump of plastic explosive ready to ignite it with a match (don’t worry, it won’t explode without a blasting cap)?  Yes!

Are you ready for me to reveal to you the secret Army Pizza Recipe passed down from soldier to soldier and lost only when C-rats went out of fashion and soldiers began to get their combat rations in silly plastic bags?  Oh, yes! you cry out of your pizza-hunger.

Grip the can from which you poured into your canteen cup the Sauced Beef.  Use the C-rat plastic spoon to spoon a few lumps of Beef and Sauce into the bottom of the tin.

Lay over the beef one Hardtack Biscuit.  Smear some Cheese Spread on the Biscuit.

Put more lumps of Beef and Sauce on the cheesed biscuit.  Continue making layers of beef, biscuit and cheese until you fill the entire can.

Light the plastic explosive.  Stick the can full of pizza ingredients over the blue flame.  Watch for the sauce and cheese and beef to bubble.

If you lumped the C-4 properly, the dying of the blue flame and the bubbling of the can will happen at the same moment.

Grab the can (how you hold the hot can is your problem) and drive your Army-issue plastic spoon into the steaming goo in the can.  Savor the first hot mouthful.  Mama mia!

C-ration pizza and a slug of canteen water flavored with germ-killing iodine makes the grandest meal in the universe.  When you’re in a foxhole.

When you’ve lapped up the last pizza, you can settle back with the Fudge Disc dessert from the B-2 can, even if the fudge has gone waxy white in the jungle heat.

And that, dear friends, is a meal to beat the finest restaurants in the world.  Go dig a foxhole and give it a try and you will agree, I know you will.

© 2020 Steven Hardesty

Fireworks for Gun Control

Something about the smell of fireworks on the Fourth of July – today! – makes me think of gun control.

“I believe in absolute gun control – no one should have a gun but me,” says Eliot Cobb, protagonist in my Vietnam war novel Poisoned Hearts.  “Because I don’t trust all of you out there.  The war taught me that.”

That’s what the war taught me, too.

I really ought to call Poisoned Hearts a pre-war and post-war novel as it’s as much about what happens to a young man in love and in confusion during the turmoil of the 1960s and what happens to him in the long years after as it is about his time in the Vietnam war.

War.  Trust.  Untrust.  That’s the awful story of the Sixties.  If you were there to fight in Vietnam or if you protested in the streets risking prison to try to stop the war, you know the awfulness.

But if the Sixties are the Stone Age to you, let me tell you about the gun control in the United States in those war years.  Oh, I won’t go into graphic detail about what an assault rifle – say, an M-16 (or a civilian AR-15 illegally rigged for automatic fire) – does to the human body. To the bodies of little children in their classrooms or parishioners in their pews shot to pieces – literally to pieces – by deranged mass killers or vicious racists.  Ie, the news stories we hear about nearly every day.

No, let me tell you about the gun control back then.  It was called Never Happen to Me.  For true believers in that idea, getting shot to pieces never happened because they were lucky enough never to be in a place where it could happen.  They never stood on “hot ground.”

Take a look at the Vietnam war statistics for officer deaths by rank and you’ll see what I mean.  Young combat officers – like Eliot Cobb – in the infantry, artillery and cavalry died at a substantially higher rate relative to their numbers in the officer corps than did higher ranking officers.

That’s not just absolute numbers but “in proportion to.”  Meaning that 18- and 19-year old lieutenants leading platoons were cut down wholesale, and their captains – the company and battery commanders in their 20s – with them.

But, reach the rank of major, not so many risked dying.  Ranks above major, even fewer faced risk.  In proportion to their numbers in the combat zone.

Of course, I’m not saying that everybody must face the same risk in war.  But it might not be a bad thing.  When I was in Vietnam, lieutenants and captains were plentiful in the fighting areas.  But it was a rare thing to see a major on hot ground, meaning tramping his polished boots across the dirt and blood of a firefight just ended.

Lieutenant colonels – battalion commanders – were rarer still in the field.  Seeing a full colonel out there was as much a surprise as seeing a ghost waft by.  If you spotted a general on the ground, you knew Bob Hope or Walter Cronkite was right behind him.

We lost that war for many reasons – and we still have not learned our lessons.  But chief among them is that the men (and now women) who plan and lead combat operations must stand on hot ground to know the task to be done, its possibilities and impossibilities.  The senior officers in my war rarely stood on hot ground.

Which brings us ‘round to Eliot Cobb, a broken politician, yearning lover and furious veteran worn down to, well, his cob, and his radical attitude on gun control.  He stood on hot ground.

Fourth of July fireworks, their gunpowder bang! and smell and glitter, make me happy to remember 1776 and all that the date promises. But the fireworks also ought to remind us to stand up with Eliot Cobb. And to say, Let those who oppose any sensible control of weapons in civilian hands stand on hot ground.

Let them stand among the ruins of children in their classrooms, among the ruins of worshippers in their churches, synagogues and mosques, among the ruins of shoppers in malls and ordinary people on city streets – and then dare let them say, Never, no gun controls.  Because it will never happen to me.  Or those I love.

Hot ground teaches a different lesson.

© 2020 Steven Hardesty

Buffalo Billing in the Plague

Nothing like a war novel to help you forget that COVID-19 is at the door slavering to get in to kill you.  The virus death toll in my county is slowly rising, so I escaped the frights by diving into the Autobiography of Buffalo Bill, which led me to think about war novels.  Sound strange?  Let me tell you how that happened.

Folks on my street are huddled in self-quarantine, only coming outdoors to shoo the gators out of the pool or jog socially-distancing down the shoreline for a breath of sea air.  We are lucky to live in a large county populated by more gators than people.  But seven more people died last night of the virus in local hospitals, our highest one-day death toll so far, and that’s scary.

Yep, we do all the recommended things – we raid for groceries only once in ten days and then masked and gloved, stand across the street from neighbors to chat about the fruit rats getting into our mango trees, do our own machete work on drought-withered sea grape hedges, and put off until whenever travel to visit our children in distant cities.

To take my mind off all that, I spent lots of happy hours reading the gaudy tales in Buffalo Bill’s Autobiography.  If you're huddled in your virus/bomb shelter or drowsing ‘neath a spreading chestnut tree hoping the plague won’t notice you, it’s a read worth your reading.

Must be lots that’s inflated in William F. Cody’s storytelling but the guy did run wild on the frontier from age fourteen through the early Pony Express days and into his mid-thirties when he took up playacting and began to build his Buffalo Bill’s Wild West & Rough Riders of the World extravaganzas.

But what I, as a veteran of a jungle war and writer of four war novels, found most curious was his description of the casual style of the Indian wars in which he fought as a scout.  First, young Bill carries dispatches 150 miles to General William T. Sherman through the most dangerous Indian country and sees no Indians.  Then, he rides a scant few miles across safe country to grab a beer with his pals but has to fight for his life the whole ride.  This is guerilla warfare on the Great Plains with the vast distances rather than gloomy jungle hiding potential ambushers.  Like combat in space must be one day.

What really struck me, though, is the casual readiness of settlers and Indians to jump to attack one another without immediate provocation.  And the surprisingly equal combat for most of the frontier period.  While Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee well-describes the awful genocidal nature of the frontier wars, too much of the Autobiography reads like a young man’s hunger for the chance to fight.  Just to fight.

Which made me realize that, although I was a young man pushing through Vietnam’s Central Highlands of jungle and mountain in 1968-69, I did not feel that hunger.  Nor did I know a single soldier in that war who really wanted to fight.  We fought, of course we fought.  We did the job we were sent to do.  But we just wanted to get out of there alive.

Oh, well, there was this one guy who wanted to go home a hero.  He was a big, strapping fellow so certain of his heroicness that he wore a white T-shirt into combat instead of his regulation green fatigue jacket.  A white T-shirt, for Pete’s sake.

A dozen of us were caught in a spray of bullets from a Vietcong machinegunner hidden in a spider hole.  Everyone else hit the deck to stay alive.  This guy ran into the bullets to attack the gunner barehanded.  His white T-shirt caught the gunner’s eye.  Got his elbow shot off next to me.  Another fellow – one who didn’t want to be a hero but only wanted to go home alive to his wife and kids – crept up on the gunner from behind and shot him in the head.  Then we all tossed in grenades.

You see how worrying about the plague brought me through Buffalo Bill’s adventures to thinking about that moment, don’t you?  Being distracted from the plague into a bitter war memory may seem small relief to you.  But it reminded me that fighting the fight you have to fight, and only that fight, is the way to win through to what we hope to find at the end of all this misery.

Best wishes to you in this plague year, and keep up the fight.

Cheers!

© 2020 Steven Hardesty

Cheapies! (or, Horror for Hard Times)

In the Season is the story of a man, a woman and a boy adrift in the weirdly exotic landscape of Burma in a year unfixed. Gold-gleaming pagodas, snapping jungle, a murderous mansion house. Men and women who seem too real and yet not real enough. Each one driving some fabulous scheme after fortune and twisting dreams. And of one desperate man who comes to believe too much in the terrors he sees, and then too little.

Freebies! (or, Cheap Thrills for Hard Times)

Here you’ll find all of Harry’s wild and gaudy adventures struggling to make himself rich on the fabulous Tamiami Trail twisting through Florida’s Everglades while sidestepping the murderous greed of his local mafia chapter.

And his clumsy attempts at love as he rescues damsels from yachts he sets on fire in shark-infested water (to steal a fortune in counterfeit modern art) or pulls out of down-sucking sinkholes (after he loses the original original of the Mona Lisa) or is stunned to see his own personal orange-furred supergeek steal away the swamp girl he raids a millionaires’ commune to find.

All of this filled with the cast of characters you’d expect to see around a man like Harry, including a fabulous lesbian stripper called The Feathered Virgin, the dreamy hired assassin Bitter Bob, a hippie-swampwoman-pacifist-sniper in her million-dollar beach shack surrounded by retired circus elephants, a mad rock&roller with the world’s most valuable jellybean, the toothless Cracker who drops Harry wrapped in duct tape from his helicopter into a nest of gators, and all the rest.

So here’s a chance to grab Harry’s story for free, and why not?

Cheers, and keep on keeping your head down until this is all over.

Writers for a Plague Year

There are only two American novelists worth reading in a plague year, as in this our own year of coronavirus, and those two are Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan.

Vonnegut tells the truth about America, a hard truth to hear.  Brautigan sings of the antique dream of America, making the hardest truth bearable.  The telling and the singing are all any writer can do for us until we Americans get up off our asses and go do something about our problems and our mistakes.

Vonnegut disguises his bitter truth in comedy and the bizarre so he can insinuate the truth into a reader’s thinking.  That works.  When I’m feeling low and blue about the politics of pandemic and all the rest of the everyday bad news, it is Vonnegut’s sleek prodding that pushes me to seek ways to help drive this country toward its better self.

But, when I’m sunk in despair for all the craziness around me and bored sheltering-in-place against the coronavirus, it is Brautigan who lifts me up.  He sings the old songs about the dream of America.  Not of the American Dream, whatever that is today.  But the antique dream of “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  That’s my America.

So let me give you some medical advice, from a fellow who never set foot in med school and feels sick at the sight of a needle:  As we crawl through this frightening pandemic, and through the misery of the economic depression sure to follow, nothing can put more steel in your spine and more hope in your heart than a double dose of Vonnegut and Brautigan.

Cheers! and best of luck to you all.

© 2020 Steven Hardesty

Good Bad Horror or Bad Good, You Tell Me

Okay, as you insist, I’ll tell you.  Yes, I’m preparing the paperback version of my psychological horror novel set in Burma (where I once worked) called In the Season of Poison. Available on Amazon in a week or two. Yes, I had to do much more rewrite than expected to improve on the e-book version that’s been out there for years.  No, I didn’t expect to have to do that.

So now I ask myself, Is this a good bad horror novel or a bad good one?

What’s a good horror novel?  One that scares the bejesus out of you.  What’s a bad horror novel? One that doesn’t.  Or maybe better put - one that only scares you but doesn’t so mess with your head that even when you walk down a cheery, leafy avenue in the bright of day you think, “Holy cow, can those ghastly things really happen and could they happen to me?”

That’s the difference between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and any slasher movie, isn’t it?

What really makes a story scary?  An idea so disturbing that, even twenty years after you read it, when you are safe and comfy somewhere else in your reading, you wish you had never read it.  Because you realize you never really wanted to think about what that scary idea meant.

Slashers are scary.  So are demons, mad murderers and swarms of venomous spiders.  But each of those things can be dealt with in the usual way. Call the police or the Army or city pest control.  Demons might take a bit of extra work, but Hollywood tells us they can be handled.

What can’t be dealt with in any ordinary way is the idea that gets into your head that says at the borders of everyone’s mind - yours included - there are bizarre and terrifying things too ready to fill the empty spaces made by fright and failure.

How do you handle an idea like that?  Who do you call to tell you this is real and that is not?  Who is there to say that you better jump! right now to save your soul or crawl into a hole and pull the sod over if you mean to save your sanity.

That is the question in Season of Poison.  Set beside a lake that is the center of a jungle that is the center of a city of phantoms in a year unfixed.  Featuring a man and woman very like you and me, and their son, who, in desperation made by failure, seek a new start in life in a place where every start is new and where every ending is old.  Where the demon telling the story is the victim and the horrified human beings living the story are the monsters.

Take a look at In the Season of Poison, please, and let me know if it’s a good bad horror story or a bad good horror or something else - something strangely else - in between.

Cheerio!

© 2020 Steven Hardesty

Confessions of a Fake Writer

Pizza!  Pizza! Pizza!  That got your attention, didn’t it?  Pizza - the most beautiful word in the English language.  Pizza - not sex, booze or rocky road ice cream - is what fires the writerly imagination.  I’m sure you agree.

Last night, over home-made pizza (what other kind?), my table full of writers fell to talking (well, shouting) about the Manic Compulsion to Write.

Some said their writing is an escape from the ordinary miseries of life, like stubbed toes and ungrateful children.  Others shouted, No, it compensates for failure in love, business and loss of the childhood dream to build a geodesic dome in wattle-and-daub cantilevered over a stark sea cliff watching China clippers clip by.  One or two moaned writing eases the pain of not having been born on a far distant planet where they could be bloodthirsty tyrants whose every word is law for groveling, twelve-eyed mutants.

I disagreed with all those theories and that’s when the fist-fighting began, but that’s a story for another blog post, after I get the cast off.

I don’t write for any of those reasons. I write for the same reason I suspect a reader reads - to step into a strange world filled with strangers confronting strange and awful problems.  To learn how they wriggle out of those problems. And to ask myself, Could I have done as well?

I’m not a writer of a story.  I’m it’s first reader.

Because I don’t really write a story but watch it unfold with my reader’s eyes.  While I ask myself, as any reader must, How the hell would I avoid that first stumble of the hero’s that led to all his other mistakes and to the astonishing wildness of the story?  Or how do I outrun that misery over there coming after her? And how will we - the he and the she and I - ever wrap up this colossal roller-coaster of a tale so I can stretch out in bed tonight without having to pull the blankets over my head?

I have a lot of weird feelings about the people I meet in my stories.  Some I like, especially those struggling against terrible odds. Those I want to step into the story to help but I know I can’t, I’m only the reader.  They are the folks I’d like to invite over to the house for pizza and say to them, “There, there, you’ll be alright because, win or lose, you stood up in the dragon’s fire when others cowered away and the world will remember you.”

Others I hate with a fervor that surprises me.  My outrage too often causes the villains or nasty side characters to fire protests at me from the laptop screen on which I’m reading (I mean keying) their evil tricks.  And we go to fist-fighting among the pixels. These are the people who could be wicked fun at wicked parties but I’d never want rapping on my front door in dark night. Not unless I’m heavily armed. Or have my blankets all pulled up.

Thing is, when the story’s done - when I’ve read/written its last word - I miss ‘em all, the good, the bad and the in-between.  Not because the battered heroes prove so grand or the ghastly villains have some twisted charm. But because they all helped answer my question as a reader, If they can solve their huge problems, why can’t I?

© 2019 Steven Hardesty

A Bit of Noir on Wry

All right, yes, I confess!  The great and fabulous (those are his words, not mine) Harry Seaburn made me do it.  Write seven thriller novels in a row about a guy who does the crimes no other crooks dare try.

But he can’t keep the fortunes he steals or the women he loves (my, my, how he falls in dreamy love with every woman he meets).  And the Miami mafia, who hate any competition, hungers to have Harry join them – after he’s pickled in Everglades brine.

He tells his own story himself, of course, because who else could or would want to?  About blowing up yachts stuffed with million$ in counterfeit modern art, raiding villages jammed with billionaires and fighting off swamp men and swamp women and their gator hordes.

Oh, yes, and rescuing damsels from suicide among sharks or from sinking swamp submarines overloaded with coke or from disintegrating homemade helicopters.

All sounds like grand fun, you say?  Ah, well, you don’t know Harry. He’s a thief up and down the famed Tamiami Trail of Florida, all right, but what really drives him is his search for that one girl meant just for him.

She may have blue hair and an enticing smile, like the sniper girl sent to kill him.  Or the leggy Mafia queen who wants his head in a swamp watermelon. Or the trapeze artist who sets him up to fight a cannibal across the top of a circus tent.  Or his landlady, a lesbian stripper called The Feathered Virgin always ready to evict him for nonpayment of rent.

And then there are the retired circus elephants wandering angry through the Everglades and the swamp pythons snapping at Harry’s airboat and a truly mad cracker named Chester Droon, but I’ve already said too much.

Yes, yes, Harry wants me to say more – about his refusal to shoot anyone except when absolutely necessary (and how often is “necessary,” dear Harry?). And about his mentor Bitter Bob with his leg full of cancer and still the world’s last true romantic.  About the Supergeek who hates humans but loves Harry (because he considers thieves superior to all other human creatures). And, oh, that’s enough, Harry. Really enough.

If I can get a line in edgeways, let me say I wrote the seven novels telling the whole of Harry’s great and fabulous (his words again) criminal career in a furious few months, having so much fun writing them I barely noticed Harry at my shoulder egging me on (well, shoving, kicking and pushing me on).

And now I wish I hadn’t written them at all.  Or maybe I wish I could forget them. Because I’d like to open the first in the series – The Feathered Virgin - and read them all the way through to the last book – The Cracker Kingdom – fresh.  To get the full bang! of noir on wry that is Harry’s rollercoaster life story.

Or maybe that’s ham on wry, dear Harry?

© 2019 Steven Hardesty  

A Man Without Honor

Have to admit I wasn’t sure I ought to publish my latest Western novel – Dead Hand – the story of a dishonorable man learning honor. Thought, instead, I ought to drop the manuscript into a bottomless drawer and forget about it. Because the story is just too damn brutal.

Why is it that way?

Dead Hand tells the story of one narrow slice of life in the Old West, the slice filled with gunfighters, thieves, traitors and villains. All of them preying on the pioneers and Native Americans, all of them seeking to poison the dream of the West. The dream we all still share.

Too much of Western fiction makes heroes of gunfighters, a breed that doesn’t deserve the title. A professional gunfighter is not a hero. A rancher is a hero, a schoolteacher is a hero, an honest sheriff is a hero.

I chose to write a novel to show gunfighters as they were in the harsh years after the Civil War, a war that helped shape them into what they were – anything but heroes. And to tell the story of one gunfighter slowly drawn away from savagery toward a decent life. Toward something more heroic.

And there you have the explanation for such a harsh novel: The core of Dead Hand, as the core of most of my other Westerns, thrillers, sci-fi and fantasy, is war. The terrible changes war can make in even ordinary, decent human beings. And the importance of each person’s resistance to those effects.

That’s why I decided to publish Dead Hand rather than dump it. Because it tells the story of a human being who, despite war’s poisoning of his soul, pushes through to become an honorable man of the West. To become something like a hero. We live in a world with too few heroes, but this man makes one more.

© 2019 Steven Hardesty

Another "The End" for the Wild West

I’ve got the greatest job in the world. Not just because I’m a writer and can sit around the house all day eating bonbons and listening to counter-retro jazz fusion while everybody else is slaving away for cruel taskmasters. No. Because I spend all my working hours with the most fascinating people who never lived.

The kind of people who populate my thrillers, Westerns and love stories and do fabulous and exciting things, often in exotic places or in an even more exotic past century. The kind of people who make parties fun and brawls unspeakable. The folks you’re happy to have a beer with but don’t want in the house next door. Because some of the things they do – well, a lot of the things they do – are anti-social or howling nuts.

Let me give a for-instance. I just finished the first draft of my latest historical Western – Dead Hand – and, as usual after a novel’s finish, I’m feeling blue. I had such fun for so long with the people who live in the story – driving cattle, facing down outlaws, cranking Gatling guns, beating back a flood in the desert – that now, the draft finished and them gone away, I miss ‘em.

Well, some I don’t miss – the villains. They were especially villainous this time around. In fact, the two main evildoers invaded Dead Hand from another Western novel called The Bountyhunter. And I wished they’d stayed there. Ah, so did the hero, Easy Holloway, who was a minor character in that other book, but that’s a story for another post.

I can’t say I liked these two villains – Pecos Finn and Six Finger Dutch – but they proved so aggressively awful and committed such savage crimes that I took a lot of pleasure in letting my broken-armed gunfighter hero do unto them as they deserved to be done unto. Or nearly so.

That’s another joy of the writing life – you can take revenge on everyone who deserves it and get away with it. Shoot this one, stab that one, shove this one off the boat into the Arctic Ocean with the snapping polar bears. No worries about cops knocking on your door. Or friends of villains pot-shooting you in a parking lot.

On the other hand, when you stumble across a hero or heroine, like Easy Holloway, standing battered but determined in the face of misery and outrage, you can feel that you too are standing there alongside, ready to fight for the right and the decent. Ready to help civilize the Wild West or bring down the mafia or comfort the lost and forlorn victims of war.

It’s a great feeling when you see those things happening on the page you’re writing. You forget you’re a bum sitting on your bum in front of a computer screen tossing back bonbons. You remember the whole point of a writer’s life – to say as best you can what you have to say about being a decent human being in a world where decency too often is in short supply.

We live in a real world of sprawling tyrants, sneering bullies and gutless liars no different than the villains in my fiction. But ours also is a world of decent folk who deserve a break in life and sometimes, but only sometimes, get it.

So it’s as much a surprise to me as I bet it is for my readers when the good guy wins in my novels. Because I never know what’s going to happen in a story until I write it. I don’t write to outline, you see, I write by the seat of my pants. Flying blind through the story pretty much the way you read it, not knowing what’s going to turn up on the next page. I do that because if I plot a story in advance then I’ve told the story and it’s dead to me and I can’t write it.

Usually, I get within 30 or 40 pages of “The End” before I can see where a novel is going and how the hero is going to squeeze out of his fix. Sometimes I can’t see clearly how it will wrap up and I write many pages past The End and must go back and cut text to reach the end point.

With Dead Hand, however, I had no idea how the novel would end until a day or two before it happened. Then – bingo! – those two magic words popped up. Ending all my jittery worries that this story, unlike any other I’d written, might go on forever and ever and never find The End.

But I was shocked to see how many good and decent characters had to be sacrificed to the villains to reach a powerful The End. I liked all of them and hated to see them go. I’d hoped that one or two could become hero/heroines in their own spin-off novels. But that didn’t happen, and I really didn’t have much to do with it. All I could do was watch it all happen, stunned and wondering what was happening with all these people.

I suppose it would be cliché to say that the process of writing, like the process of living, is a mystery too full of “Whys?” and too empty of Answers.

So, too, writing, like life, is too full of villains and too short on heroes. And it feels great when a tough story like Dead Hand wraps itself up as it did, with a hero who has come to know himself. Making him a hero worth your knowing. Not just to share a beer in the tavern down the road but to welcome into the neighborhood.

That’s why, the manuscript done, I miss ‘em all.

© 2019 Steven Hardesty

Readers Have Spoke!

Readers have decided that I should write Westerns and war novels. That is what they choose to buy out of my offerings that include international thrillers, comic space opera, Arthurian fantasy, and bawdy romcoms (well, bawdy by my blushing standards). You’ve spoken. I’ve heard you. Glad to comply! But…

You do realize, don’t you, that all my books, whatever the genre, are about my Vietnam war? Can’t say why. They just come out that way.

Even a romcom featuring lovers diving and swooping over New York City after being relieved of the burden of an airplane is colored by that war. (They’re in Love on the Edge, about to be published.) So, too, the Arthurian fantasy The Sword and the Quest, with its singing swords and off-key merlins, and the novels of globe-trotting assassins in the Dirty Wars series.

The war novels, of course, are Vietnam war novels (starting with Ghost Soldiers), so nothing surprising there. But the Westerns, featuring veterans of the Civil War struggling in a post-war environment of the Gilded Age and westward-surging people, also have a lot to say about that war (The Outlaw). Or what it’s like to fight and survive war and then regret it all in sleepless nights. And find that the war continues all around you and will never go away (Broken Spur).

Honest. True. Hard. But not grim, no, the war seeping into everything I write doesn’t make it grim. We had a lot of fun in that war, didn’t we? (Didn’t we?) And, just like “comic relief” in old movies, that seeps into my stories.

As when a fellow I knew turned his artillery the wrong way and blew up the basecamp’s fuel depot. Burned for a month! Oh, what jolly fun to think of all those basecamp bunnies without generators for hot water showers while the rest of us were tramping the muddy boonies. That little story, shifted to 1877, helps dress up the weird Western I’m currently writing, called The Glass Horseman.

Or how about the officer who had to write detailed notes to himself to remember what to do on combat patrol? I shifted him into a grimly comic note-taking murderer in the thriller Running in Heels.

Or the spotter plane pilot who so much wanted a heroic medal he shot a pistol bullet through his own plane’s engine and crash-landed to claim he was shot down by snipers? He’s there in Soldiers of Misfortune. Or maybe it’s the comic space opera An Earthman Born about how tasty humans are to alien golf fanatics.

There’s also the Harry Seaburn series about a small-time thief who can’t keep the fortunes he steals or the women he loves (my personal favorite is The Dimpled Python set in the Harry-devouring Everglades). Which is pretty much how most soldiers in my war felt about themselves.

So it’s Westerns and war novels from here on out, or until you tell me otherwise. Cheers!

© 2019 Steven Hardesty

So Much for the Old West Myth (or maybe not)

What’s the point of correcting the Hollywood cowboy myth when all that nonsense is so much fun?  Well, I say the truth is a lot more fun.  Which is why I write historical Westerns full of characters and events drawn from a history that is bigger, more brawly and more complex than anything Hollywood can concoct.

I love cowboy movies and will watch one anytime, anyplace, including interrupting family dinners for my 300th viewing of Shane or The Oxbow Incident.

But I do have my limits.  I hit that limit last night.  With a cowboy movie that started the career of a famous actor, and I don’t see how that could have happened.  He was rugged, silent and god-like, as are all Western heroes.  The villains craven and conniving, and more than a little incompetent at their fiendish work.  The script the same story you’ve seen a million times after the gunsmoky opening scenes.

What was all wrong was the details.  All of them.  Infuriating!

Such as, every cowboy wore a low-slung belt and holster rig for his polished six gun.  No cowhand or gunman in the Old West wore a rig like that.  It was invented for the movies.  Wild Bill (actually “Wild Duckbill” for his enormous nose) Hickok carried his pistol in his pocket most of the time.  As did most Westerners, few of whom could afford an expensive leather holster for the even more expensive pistol they also could not afford.  Better to spend that money on shovels to plant and rope to herd.

Few cowboys or farmhands carried guns, and fewer still were allowed to open carry them through a Western town without annoying the local peace officer.

When a gunman, like the psychopathic Johnny Ringo, wore a holster, it was a Mexican loop holster that folded over the belt that held up a man’s trousers.  That holster rode on his waist, not dangling above his knee.

And have you ever walked a hundred yards with a holster belt around your waist its cartridge loops filled with shells?  The damn bullets tend to pop out all over the place, don’t they?  Happened to me, anyway.  That’s why cowhands and gunslingers wore vests – for the deep pockets to hold those expensive bullets they didn’t want to lose.

Wyatt Earp never carried a Buntline Special because there were none when he had his shootouts.  (Ah, but you knew that already.)  When had to gunfight, he would go in with his weapons in his hands, cocked and ready.  As would any sensible man.

But there really wasn’t that much gunfighting in the Old West.  Who but a fool duels face-to-face in an empty street at high noon?   Sure, you may be the fastest gunhand in that street.  But a distracting shadow, your pistol sight catching on holster leather or your stumbling into a pothole as you whip out your iron and you aren’t the fastest gunhand anymore.

No, no, no.  Most gunfights were shoot-‘em-in-the-back affairs, the only sensible way to gunfight.  And safer to do it with a rifle or a shotgun at a little distance.  That’s how Virgil Earp was wounded and Morgan Earp killed in Tombstone.

Even a gun brawl among heavily armed men looking for a fight, as the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, was a rare thing.  Because no sane and sober person wanted to be standing anywhere close when lots of guns went off.  Well, the Clantons and their associates weren’t that sober, and the Earps and Doc Holliday were sane.  You see who had the advantage and made sure of it.

Even then, that famous gunfight went nothing like in the movies.  At about six feet apart, nine men fired off 30 pistol rounds and two shotgun cartridges.  The result was three dead on the Clanton side and everyone but Wyatt wounded on the other.  And a lot of fence rail and nearby wooden buildings holed.  Whoa!  At six feet apart?

Last night, TV news reported a policeman had to fire four shots at an armed criminal before hitting him once.  The policeman took out a neighbor’s car, a divot of lawn and someone’s front door before he got the crook.  That was across a bit more than the distance of the OK Corral fight.  Proving that pistols, even in the hands of trained users, even close-in, are not that sure.  So why risk a face-to-face fight?

What does all this carping mean for the Western novels I write?  It means I’m determined to make my books as near the real thing as I can.  That many of the characters in my stories are based on or composites of real Old Westerners.  Many of the incidents come from events that really happened.

Wyatt Earp is there in his own name, but he’s a Wyatt nearer the man of the Vendetta Ride after his brothers were attacked than of his Hollywood myth.  Dirty Dave Rudabaugh is there, still unbathed, though composited into another name.  So are a very young Annie Oakley along with Texas Jack Omohundro and Hanging Judge Roy Bean, though in different skins.  So, too, a Choctaw bountyhunter ruined by missionary schooling and Exodusters escaping the collapse of Reconstruction.  General John Bell Hood makes an appearance in New Orleans, but the appearance he makes is a puzzle even to me.  River pirates, steamboats marooned in prairie dust and murdering Vigilantes who take time to build libraries fill out the stories.

Give them a read, if you please – The Gunfighter, The Outlaw, The Bountyhunter, Broken Spur and, soon, Dead Hand.  Test them against the non-Hollywood reality of what you know of the Old West.  Then let me know what you think of them.  I’d like that.  And I’d be obliged.

No Wild West for an Old Gunfighter

Tap the cover to order on Amazon.com

I've plenty of new writing sizzling on the laptop keyboard but I want to tell you about my latest novel just published in ebook and paperback.  Broken Spur, a classic Western, tells the tale of a hard-bitten gunfighter who discovers he has to make a moral choice in a life that has no morality.  The book is written in a gritty style true to hard lives lived in hard times on the western frontier.

Broken Spur begins a new string of Westerns that take an old gunfighter - he calls himself "Mr. William Sumpter of Georgia" - from the Legacy of the Gunfighter series and lets him show what he can do in his own series.  And what he does makes powerful reading.

The Legacy stories, if you haven't had the chance to read them yet, are about an abandoned orphan boy named Ronas whose dreary life changes in the instant Wyatt Earp tosses him an outlaw’s gun and hauls him into a wild chase after a string of psychopathic killers.  Ronas must become an accidental gunfighter to save his life.  His growth across all his wild adventures drives the three books in the Legacy series.

Writing all these stories became for me an exploration into the United States in the ten most turbulent years of the Old West – 1876-1886.  From the political end of Reconstruction through Wyatt Earp’s “vendetta ride” after the OK Corral shoot-out to Geronimo’s surrender.

It seemed to me writing about those ten years required a deep rooting of the stories in historical fact.  Particularly in the wretched failure of this country in those years to maintain the great achievement of a new national freedom won for us all at Appomattox.  And how that failure played out in the West.

True, I began to write the Legacy books as genre Westerns with the usual strapping heroes, sniveling villains and gun-totin’ schoolmarms.  I did not plan for them to shapeshift into something so very different.  But they did.  And that led me to begin writing a new series called Gunfighter Nation that begins with Broken Spur.  These will be stories of supporting characters in the Legacy series set free in their own series.  Each of those characters stunned to find himself called to a never-expected moral choice.  As each of us is called, sooner or later.

I hope you’ll read Broken Spur and let me know what you think of the novel.  I'm already hammering the keyboard writing the next in the series - tentatively called Dead Hand - and could use your comments.

Woman on Fire

I’m not so sure I was inspired to write Running in Heels so much as badgered into it. It’s the story of a lonely and self-hating woman named Kathryn Teal who is adrift in life but discovers that stealing a fortune (by accident) is all too easy while keeping it (on purpose) is tough, tough, tough.

The thing is, Kathryn wasn’t supposed to be in the book at all. I planned the story for a male protagonist. But when I’d written the first line, there she was, staring back at me and daring me to cut her out of her story.

Kathryn took over the novel, lock, stock and down to the last exclamation mark, and believe me I was making a lot of exclamations by the time I keyed the last words.

Thing is, I like her.  Admire her, even.  Grateful she did what she did to my story.

And, thanks to poplar demand, I’ve decided to tell the second half of her story, of what Kathryn becomes after she’s had a taste for a wild streak of fortune (good, bad and badder).  What will I call the sequel?  Why, Stalking in Heels, of course!

Because it’s the story of getting back the fortune stolen from Kathryn by the woman from whom Kathryn first stole it, and, yes, that convolution is as hard for me to figure out as it will be for Kathryn to get rich again.  And stay rich (maybe).

Life is a wild and crazy thing, eh?

Harry Seaburn’s comic crime caper novel series had just been born – with publication of The Feathered Virgin on Amazon – and the author (me) almost got unborn.  Life, as the old Greek said, is a wild and scary thing.

Or maybe just very Dortmunder.  (You Donald E. Westlake fans will know what that means.)

I’d just pushed the “publish” button for Amazon and begun preps to follow up immediately with publishing the rest of the series – The Dimpled Python, The Laughing Camel and all the way through to the seventh book, The Cracker Kingdom, with a blue-haired sniper girl and a dozen circus elephants for the grande finale – when I had this sudden urge to climb a ladder to grab a fresh tube of toothpaste on a high shelf.

Yeah, well, it would’ve happened to John Dortmunder, too.  I sort of fell off the ladder and sort of landed in the shower and sort of banged my head against the tile wall and sort of began to bleed.

Splash blood, I mean.

My wife, expert at solving problems I create, wrapped my head in beach towels (we live by the beach so we have lots of them to spare for occasions like this) and called an ambulance.

The ER jabbed me and wrapped me in wires and made me do bizarre arm exercises.  Shoved me into a CAT scan machine (not as scary as an MRI, which feels to me like being shoved into my own coffin without the benefit of being dead).  And decided I would survive.  Or maybe that I wasn't worth much more of their trouble.

So they stapled six quite pretty metal staples into my head to close up the tear and sent me home.  My wife took a photo of my head to show me the staples – they look like some office loony went berserk on my scalp with a desk stapler.

Have to admit, though, I felt instantly better with the staples in.  Like having that “closure” you hear so much about (I know it's an awful pun but I couldn't resist).  If they were stapling me and not admitting me, then I figured I was going to be all right.

Further, the ambulance man said he would check Amazon to buy a copy of The Feathered Virgin, so my misadventure was not entirely a waste.

After five hours in the ER and early to bed, I expected to be re-energized today and ready to get back to publishing the other six books.  Trouble is, the ER gave me this long list of “Symptoms Indicating Your Concussed Head is About to Explode and You Will Die” and I discovered I have all of them.  Except the one that says you have come to realize you are as handsome as George Clooney.  That requires an extra special concussion.

To fight off those symptoms, I spent the afternoon puttering around in the yard in the fresh air and sunshine.  But the sun heated up the staples in my scalp so powerfully that I had to flee indoors.

Then I recalled from the BBC’s "Doc Martin" series that the Doc revived a man dying from concussion by using a common or garden variety household drill to bore a hole in the skull to relieve the building pressure.  I asked my wife to keep our drill handy in case I want any more holes drilled in my head.

She scoffed and went out back to inflame our oak-fired barbecue to cook up fresh fish for dinner with friends.  I’m sure their good company will cure all my symptoms.  If not, I’m ready with the drill.

Cheers!

© 2015-18 Steven Hardesty

“Oh, by the way, Harry is a great guy with one or two little problems...he’s a thief and he wants the love of a good woman, anybody’s good woman, but he tends to shoot people and what good woman could want him?”

— Melody Brooks

Life is a War Novel

Some readers ask me how my war novels can describe the wild adventure and heroism of combat yet end without trumpets and flags.  Why so downbeat?  I’ll tell you, but only if you’re a young man or woman eligible to go to war.  You are my audience, not anyone else.

Point.  War is a pisser.  It pisses on you and you can’t piss back in self-defense.  Oh, it may seem a grand heroic adventure.  You may walk away from war dressed in bright ribbons and medals and praise.  But when you are alone in the deepest part of night you will say to yourself, “Goddamn, what have I done?  What did I do to myself?  What did I do to those other people over there?”  You will feel as alone in the night as any human being ever felt because your war is still pissing on you. 

If what you did had to be done, you’ll get through the night okay.  You’ll have in you a bitter regret that it had to be done but you’ll come out all right.  If it didn’t have to be done, you’ll feel the most wretched human being on the planet.

How can you tell the difference between those two ifs?  That’s easy…

Point.  There are two kinds of war – good wars and bad wars.  A good war is the war you can’t avoid.  December 7, 1941.  You have to fight back to stay alive and keep your family alive and save your country.  You will do terrible things in this war but you are standing up for what is decent and true.

A bad war is a war of choice.  Your country’s leaders make this war when they think they have run out of alternatives, like diplomacy, politics, threats, bribery or trying to persuade all sides, including your own, to see things with good sense and common decency.  What they really have run out of is honor.  Most of the wars this country fought were wars of choice.  They had no honor.

You know the difference because good wars leave you frightened in the night.  Bad wars poison all your life…

Point.  Vietnam was a bad war.  A very bad war.  Worse because it was a stupid war fought by stupid people on our side – by stupid generals and stupid politicians who lacked the brains and strength of character to break out of old ways of thinking about our wielding power in the world.

What I did in Vietnam poisoned all my life.  I did nothing dishonorable.  I was a good soldier for my country.  But I fought a war that didn’t need to be fought and killed people who should have been allowed to live and tore up someone else’s country for no good reason and left their land sick and ruined when I marched away from it.  I remember all that in the darkest part of every night.

Bet you can guess what I have to say next...

Last Point.  If you are a young man or woman considering going to war or caught up in war or thinking about voting for war, stop.  Stop to think about the difference between a good war and a bad war.  Then decide what you must do.

Your making that decision is what my war novels are all about.  They want to remind you of the good advice offered by Davy Crockett, a man who knew something about war-making, when he said, “Be sure you are right and then go ahead.”

You do the same.  Or you, too, will pay for it in the night.

© 2016 Steven Hardesty