His name was Nolan, and he was as harsh and uncompromising as the western frontier he prowled. he dealt with the killers and brawlers by being more violent than they were, and it was his motto that dead men can't resist arrest.
When he went after an outlaw he got the outlaw -- by any means necessary. Nothing stopped him until he met Callie, the fiery redhead who became the only person who could reach the heart of this hardened gunfighter and lawman.
The cover of the 1981 hardcover published in Great Britain.
1979 by Jason Manning Manor Books (New York) 188 pp ISBN: 0-532-23212-7
By 1979 I had been writing stories for fifteen years, across all genres. Then I wrote a western that was novel-length by the time it was done. The protagonist was the anti-hero that was so in vogue in the Seventies. More as lark than anything I started submitting it to New York publishing houses. I really didn't expect to be published; I didn't think I was good enough and I'd read about writers who papered their walls with rejection notices. Imagine my surprise when the third or fourth house which received my manuscript offered me a contract. I think I was to be paid an advance of $1,500. I never got it. The cover of the American edition claimed I -- or the book -- was the "winner of the Colt .44 Award" and to this day I have no idea what that is. I didn't even know that in 1981 a hardcover edition was published in Great Britain by Robert Hale, Ltd. (see image, above.) And finally the American edition was replete with printing errors.
Needless to say I was pretty disenchanted, and a decade passed before my second novel, Gunsmoke on the Sierra Line, was published. In that time I worked a variety of jobs, sowed too many wild oats, played some music -- and kept writing stories that I allowed very few people to read.
This novel is pretty hard to find. I remember seeing it offered somewhere online for a few hundred dollars a few years ago. I have no idea if anyone actually paid that much for it. More recently saw one of the GB versions on sale for about $30.