The Story Behind the Story

When I first came across Harlan Ellison's short stories, I often enjoyed his opening anecdotes more than the fiction that followed. 

Not that the stories aren't top-notch, but it's rare for a writer to divulge what led to a certain character or plot twist. Ellison's explanations weren't just fascinating to me as a reader, but became highly educational to the beginning writer I was.  He may tell people tongue-in-cheek that all his ideas come from a warehouse in Schenectady, New York, but for anybody who's paying attention, the source of his ideas are incredibly well documented. 

Growing up, I was also a fan of Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story radio program. Many were the summer afternoons I spent doing field work, suffering through the dreck of a static filled AM radio, waiting for that ten minutes where Harvey explained the unheralded connections between people and events, revealing cause and effect.

So just for fun I suggested to Cheryl Pierson a series of blog posts that will emphasize the Fictioneering part of Western Fictioneers. It's a challenge for myself to write a new story for the blog each month, and hopefully it'll be interesting to you, the readers, to see where the idea came from and how I put it together.

This month's story, “The Girl in the Yellow Shirt,” owes its heart and soul to James Reasoner, who first pointed out to me that many of the pulp western titles of the 30s and 40s offer similar cover paintings featuring a red shirted cowboy and a yellow dressed gal.

Sometimes they look different, sometimes uncannily the same.  Who were these two? I set about to find out.

Meanwhile, as some of you know, my grandma left her home late last year for a nursing facility. The experience of sorting through a lifetime's worth of boxes, books, furniture and keepsakes, informed this story too. What surprises did we find? What memories that were completely forgotten?

It all sort of gelled here in three sittings over the course of two days: roughly three hours and 2700 words.

Please read The Girl In the Yellow Shirt here.

After growing up on a Nebraska farm, Richard Prosch worked as a professional writer, artist, and teacher in Wyoming, South Carolina, and Missouri. His western crime fiction captures the fleeting history and lonely frontier stories of his youth where characters aren’t always what they seem, and the windburned landscapes are filled with swift, deadly danger. In 2016, Richard roped the Spur Award for short fiction given by Western Writers of America. Read more at www.RichardProsch.com

Review Roundup: Rio Concho

The Rio Concho Series
By Alfred Wallon
Piccadilly Publishing

Rio Concho #1: Showdown in Abilene (ASIN: B00CJ89IZY, April 2013, 60 pages, $0.99 Kindle)

Rio Concho #2: Gunfighter’s Legacy (ASIN: B00DX5YMDU, July 2013, 59 pages, $0.99 Kindle)

Rio Concho #3: Kiowa Rebellion (ASIN: B00IOMNMV0, February 2014, 61 pages, $0.99 Kindle)

Turning even well-behaved drovers loose in nineteenth-century Abilene after a cross-country cattle drive is a recipe for trouble. Add the still-wet-behind-the-ears son of a powerful Texas rancher and a gang of thugs with designs on other people’s money, and something’s bound to explode.

It does, in Alfred Wallon’s Showdown in Abilene, the first in the Rio Concho series of western novellas.

Wallon’s cowboys are basically good guys, if more than a little rough around the edges. They really do want to stay out of trouble. Trouble dearly loves them, though, following them around like an adoring puppy. For three books (so far), the men of the Rancho Bravo in Texas get into one scrape after another. Through dust-ups with townies, Indian attacks provoked by outside forces, and sundry duels to the death with villains of all stripes, the Rancho Bravo cowhands and those they embrace as friends stand like pillars of granite, ready to face whatever the wild landscape throws at them next.

The Rio Concho series calls to mind both Karl May’s Eurowesterns and the American pulps of the mid-twentieth century: pure escapist entertainment based on enduring romantic notions and high on drama. Wallon, who is German, grew up glued to classic western TV shows made in America. His stories reflect that tradition. They’re different from the western fiction written by many contemporary Americans. That’s not a bad thing. The author has a finely tuned sense of — and an undeniable reverence for — the kinds of stories most Americans of a certain age read and watched growing up, in which the residents of the West were as big and bold as the territory they roamed, if not always entirely realistic. There’s nostalgic charm in Wallon’s West.

Some caveats: The stories were written in German and translated into English; consequently, some artifacts of translation can be distracting. In a few spots, German words slip through. Perhaps there were no literal English translations. Likewise, the occasional dip into German grammar — which sometimes differs from American grammar in the relative placement of the various parts of speech — can lead to unintended amusement. In other spots, primarily in dialogue, the colloquialisms I suspect Wallon intended didn’t translate well. A few anachronisms (“red-light district” for example) may bother history purists, and Texans may chafe at the apparent relocation of the historic Brasada region from far southern Texas to West Texas. (In fairness, Texas is an enormous state. Its geography confuses even those of us who live here.)

None of the minor idiosyncrasies destroy the read, and they certainly don’t diminish the author’s palpable love for his subject. The camaraderie among western historical fiction writers and readers increases when one realizes how the American West continues to capture the imagination of people worldwide. Thank goodness it does.

Admirers of classic pulp westerns will find much to enjoy in the Rio Concho series. At about sixty pages each, the stories are short and easily digested in one sitting. Full of action and quirky characters, the books continue an honorable tradition. Kudos to Wallon for keeping a disappearing art form alive.


Kathleen Rice Adams is a Texan, a voracious reader, a professional journalist, and an author. She received review copies of the first three books in the Rio Concho series from the author. Her opinions are her own and are neither endorsed nor necessarily supported by Western Fictioneers or individual members of the organization. Links in the review are for convenience only; they do not produce affiliate revenue.