In True West’s annual “Best of the West” January 2014 issue, I highlighted the best authors and books of 2013. A new category I’d like to introduce in 2014 is the best in independent/self-publishing, a growing and important option for many Western writers of numerous genres of local history, fiction and family history. Here are three titles published late last year that I recommend:
Arizona historian Nancy Burgess self-published An Arizona Auto Adventure: Clarence Boynton’s 1913 Travelogue (Prescott, Arizona: Badger Mountain Press). This is a well-researched and illustrated account of an early-auto adventure that foreshadows the role of the automobile in the growth of the Western United States.
Goldminds Publishing of Nashville, Tennessee, has recently expanded its line of historical fiction genre to include Western writer Bill Markley’s first novel, Deadwood Dead Men, a murder mystery set in the Black Hills gold rush of 1876.
A provocative addition to Wild Bunch lore, Bringing Sundance Home: The Real Sundance Kid—My Great-Grandfather by Jerry Nickle as told to C.J. Del Barto (Gilbert, Arizona: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform) provides readers with his well-researched conclusion that his great-grandfather was William Henry Long, a.k.a. Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid.
—Stuart Rosebrook
