Michael A. Black is the award-winning author of over 50 books. A retired police officer from the Chicago area, he has done everything from patrol to investigating homicides to conducting numerous SWAT operations. Black was awarded the Cook County Medal of Merit in 2010. He is the author of over 100 short stories and articles. He did eleven novels under the name Don Pendleton in the Executioner series and numerous westerns in the Gunslinger series under the name A.W. Hart. His Executioner novel, Fatal Prescription, won the Best Original Novel Scribe Award in 2018. His recent novels are Where Legends Lie are Where Legends Lie and Legends of the West, A Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves Book, as well as the eight novels in his Trackdown series.

I told you I was packing. Now I’ll tell you what: the first ten people who leave a comment and correctly identify the make and model of the gun I’m carrying in the picture will get one of my short stories. (Please include your email address in your comment’s response.) How’s that for being magnanimous?

Okay, on to the questions…

Do you write in more than one genre? I do; although most of my writing has been in the mystery and thriller genres, I’ve been fortunate to have been published in a variety of other genres as well. These include Westerns, sci-fi, horror, pulp fiction, young adult, mainstream, and sports. Mysteries and thrillers will always be my first love, but I also believe in genre blending. My Western novel, Gunslinger: Killer’s Ghost, was a Western but also a bit of a monster story. And although I’m still trying to break into romance, I try to include a bit of that in all my stuff.

Your latest books have been Westerns. What are the challenges of working in that genre? You’re right. I seem to have gravitated to the Western genre. My book, Where Legends Lie, is listed as two stories told as one. It begins I913 with a disillusioned veteran returning from combat overseas (the Philippine Insurrection) and getting a job at a fledgling movie studio filming a motion picture about a famous western shootout. The scene then drifts back to 1880 and the events leading up to the real shootout. The two stories continue in tandem until they coalesce at the end.

I’m familiar with the book. It also has some real historical figures and events, right? It does. Writer Ambrose Bierce, a combat vet of the Civil War, is in the book, as well as allusions to the Mexican Revolution. Bierce actually disappeared in Mexico in 1913 during the fighting. He was a journalist, too, and went south of the border to meet Pancho Villa and cover the Revolution. It’s conjectured that Villa, or his compadres, murdered Bierce, but his body was never found. I read his stories back in high school and loved them. I wanted to give him one more grand adventure, so I put him in the book.

You’ve also got another western featuring Bass Reeves, don’t you? Right. It’s called Legends of the West, A Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves Book. Reeves was an actual historical figure, too. He was born in slavery and freed after the Civil War. He became one of the first Black federal marshals to police the Indian Territory, which is now the state of Oklahoma. There’s a popular theory that Reeves was the inspiration for the Lone Ranger because he rode a big grayish-white stallion, often had Indian companions ride with him, gave out silver dollars (instead of silver bullets), and often used disguises like Clayton Moore did in the TV show and movies. While this theory has pretty much been discarded as B.S., I poked some fun at it in my book. I also paid tribute to a late friend of mine, David Walks-As-Bear, who was an American Indian. I made him and Reeves partners, and the books unfold like a modern-day buddy picture.

You just said books? As in the plural? Precisely. Legends of the West actually was published in hardcover and large print a few years ago and was just released in paperback by Genius Publishing. It’s on track to become a series featuring Reeves and Bear, as I called him. The second book, Retribution Trail, is due out in early summer. It’s about a renegade Confederate officer who escapes prison and is determined to start a new conflict between the Indians and the federal government. Naturally, Reeves and Bear have to stop him, but it ain’t gonna be easy. The renegades united with some of the Cherokee Indians who fought with him against the Union during the Civil War. I’ve got a few more planned featuring Reeves and Bear.

Indians fighting against the North in the Civil War? Is that historically defensible? Yeah, when the war broke out, the South recruited a lot of Indians to fight against the North, promising them sovereignty if the Confederates won. In fact, the last Confederate general to surrender at the war’s end was half-Indian and the leader of a large Indian force.

It sounds like you have to do a lot of research on those westerns. I love research and strive to make my stories and books as accurate and real as possible, whether they’re westerns, mysteries, or thrillers. Getting an idea and them doing research to flesh it out is an enjoyable task for me. I usually get a bunch of ideas for more stories as I do research.

What else have you got coming out? Funny, you should ask. <Grin> I’ve got a police procedural story coming out in the new issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. It’s called “Nobody Cares” and involves the murder of an apparently homeless man. I actually started it a few years ago in a workshop session at the PSWA Conference in Las Vegas. I wrote an essay about how I came to write the story that was posted on the magazine’s Trace Evidence blog.

The PSWA Conference—that’s where you and I met. Yeah, I’ve met so many lovely people and excellent writers through the PSWA (Public Safety Writers Association), and you’re one of them. We have our annual conference every year in mid-July in Las Vegas. It’s one of the best writer’s conferences around, and you’re not going to find a more supportive group for writers. You don’t have to have a background in public safety to join the organization or attend the conference. You just have to include some mention of public safety in your writing. For more information, check it out.

Anything else you’d like to tell us about yourself and your books? I’ve written over 50 books under three different names in various genres. I hope you’ll check some of them out. As they say, every artist wants someone to appreciate his work. And don’t forget to take a shot (pardon the pun) at identifying the make and model of that gun I’m holding in the above picture. Many thanks to you, Big George, for this opportunity to be on your blog once again.

How do our readers contact you?

Give me a shout at DocAtlas108@aol.com

Please give me a list of any groups you belong to. I try to (usually) make a Facebook post and then share it with the groups I am able to reach. I suggest you do likewise by sharing it with your social media and other fans.

I’m a proud member of:

VFW- Veterans of Foreign Wars –THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE
FOP (Fraternal Order of Police)
WWA (Western Writers of America)
PSWA (Public Safety Writers Association)

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