Riding for a Showdown

My alternative-history novella “The Last Ride of German Freddie,” a tale of Tombstone, is now available for your highly discriminating reading pleasure at Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Smashwords, Kobo, and Amazon.  It’s a mere $2.99.  At that price, you should buy lots of copies!

It’s one of two stories I’ve set in the Old West, the other being “The Golden Age.”   “The Golden Age” is a Weird Western that teeters somewhere between superhero fantasy and steampunk, but “German Freddie” may best be described as gonzo history— Friedrich Nietzsche, gone West to recover his health, ends up in Tombstone and at the O.K Corral.

When you’ve got an idea as crazed as that, there are only two ways to do it: either you wink at the audience the whole way, as in a “Shouts and Murmurs” piece from the New Yorker, or you play it absolutely straight.  I’m much more the sort of person who actually wants to seriously explore wack ideas, so I did my usual copious amounts of research, read biographies of the Earps, and read lots and lots of Nietzsche.  (Who, as philosophers go, is very readable.)  Rest assured that the setting is as authentic as I can make it, and the history is real, at least until the point when Nietzsche lurches into the story.

You may recognize the cover art as “Scout,” by the pulp artist Harvey Dunn.  It’s a fairly well-known piece of art, and fortunately for me, it’s in the public domain.  Having got a well-tailored piece of pulp art, I tried to design a cover that looked as if it might be a pulp magazine, the possible exception being the chrome letters of my name, which is intended to send you thinking of Tombstone and its lode of silver.

Have fun!