Last week we lost a writer more should have known. Billy Kring crafted over a dozen self-published novels. Mark Pryor and Craig Johnson became admirers. Often culled from his experiences, serving up books like a fine mescal that goes down smooth and hits you in the gut when you least expect it. His best known and respected work was his series featuring herione Hunter Kincaid. The character came out of the female colleagues he worked with as an agent for The Border Patrol. He

Reavis Z. Wortham combines what he does best with something new in Comancheria, a book that came to him in a dream. It is part western with Texas Rangers Buck Dallas and Lane Newsome chasing down Quanah Parker on his famed raid on Adobe Walls. It then becomes another genre as well when in a skirmish a medicine man turns Buck into one of the undead. Lifting the curse is connected to returning a Comanche captured girl to her home and a magical spring tended by a woman the Coman

There's something about Texans that make them great candidates for the weird western. From Robert E. Howard in the west of the state practically inventing it to Joe Lansdale to the east expanding it, the mixing of the horror and western must come from seeing unnatural in those natural landscapes. Reavis Wortham, a favorite of mine from Frisco, takes on the odd genre with Comancheria. For his story, he drops history into the horror, centering it around the story around The Se

Maxim Jakubowski is one of the most prolific and creative anthology editors. He comes up with some of the best themes that push authors and create entertainment no only from the story themselves but how each author approaches the the theme he establishes. His latest, Birds, Strangers, and Psychos, is fiction that pays tribute to Alfred Hitchcock. He was kind enough to talk about the project with us. SCOTT MONTGOMERY: What drew you to Hitchcock for an anthology? MAXIM JAKUBOWS

With Gray Dawn, Walter Mosley uses his famed private eye, Easy Rawlins, to examine the concept of family, the ones we are raised in and bound by blood as well as those we build and choose. He portrays the strength and struggles of both and its effect on its most grounded members. The book pulls a great hat trick of dealing with such heavy concepts while being light on its feet. Things kick into gear when Santangelo Burris hires easy to find his aunt Latisha James for his sic

I never saw myself as a fan of the locked room mystery. I thought of them as more about puzzle and plot, pushing character and style aside. As if laying a gauntlet down, one of my favorite writers, Bill Pronzini, releases Tales of the Impossible, a collection of many of those stories in the genre divided into sections of stand alones and with his series characters The Nameless Detective and Quincannon. He recently put out The Hangmen & Other Western Stories that proved the ra

.Joe Lansdale's multi-genre career started with horror. Tachyon Books recently released The Essential Horror, celebrating both his four decades in the genre and the range he has has in. It's a dark, bloody, harrowing and even sometimes funny greatest hits that makes for perfect Halloween season reading. I asked Joe some questions about working in the genre and a recently published short story he and his son, Keith, wrote for a collection inspired by Alfred Hitchcock. SCOTT M

In the latest novel to continue the adventures of Robert E. Howard's Conan, Tim Lebbon looks at the man in middle age as king. In keeping a word to an ally from his past, he travels a dangerous road to save the man's family from slavers lead by Grake, a barbarian who wishes to face off with him and joined to people with magical powers who have their own reasons to kill Conan. Mr. Lebbon was kind enough to take some questions. SCOTT MONTGOMERY: H ow did you get the opportunity

Few directors have had as much cultural and artistic impact as Alfred Hitchcock. For close to a century, his films influenced as many fiction writers as filmmakers. Therefore it made sense for writer and editor Maxim Jakubowski's latest anthology to look at Hitch in Birds, Strangers, and Psychos. Some of the authors take a Hitchcock trope or concept and play with it in their own sandbox. Joe and Keith Lansdale track how a misunderstanding at a "Coat Check" escalates into a co

This Saturday, October 11th, will be the hundredth year of Elmore Leonard, a writer who had influence on both western and crime writers...