Notes From Texas: On Writing in the Lone Star State

9. Barbarians, Cowboys, and Private Eyes: How I Became a Texas Writer

J A M E S R E A S O N E R A P R O F E S S I O N A L W R I T E R for thirty years, James Reasoner has written more than 200 novels, including mysteries, historicals, and westerns. His work has been praised by Publishers Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, among others, and several of his books have appeared on the USA Today bestseller list. Reasoner is perhaps best known for his cult classic private eye novel, Texas Wind, which was reprinted in 2004 by Point Blank Press. Most recently, under his own name, he is the author of a contemporary crime novel entitled Dust Devils, published by Point Blank Press, and a western mystery, Death’s Head Crossing, published by Pinnacle Books. 141 Shayna Reasoner BARBARIANS, COWBOYS, AND PRIVATE EYES: HOW I BECAME A TEXAS WRITER T H E I M P A C T of Texas on my writing starts with the fact that I was born and raised here and have never lived anywhere else, nor wanted to live anywhere else. And if anyone was born knowing that he wanted to be a writer, it was me. As far back as I can remember, I was making up stories. When I was six years old and “playing guns” with the other kids in my neighborhood (because in the late fifties we did things like playing guns), they were content to run around yelling and pretending to shoot each other. That wasn’t good enough for me. I insisted that we determine who everyone was supposed to be (“Dusty, you’re the sheriff , and Ronnie and I are outlaws . . .”) and figure out why we were shooting at each other (“We robbed the bank and you’re chasing us, see, and we’ll go over behind the chicken coop, and you’ll come around the other way and shoot us, but then . . . but then you see that we’re really your long-lost brothers . . .”). I didn’t say I was good at plotting back then, but that’s definitely what I was doing. It’s a wonder any of my friends would play with me at all. By the time I was in fifth grade I had progressed to writing down my stories, scribbling away with a fountain pen on sheet after sheet of notebook paper. Most of my stories featured myself and my friends in the starring roles, solving mysteries that were heavily influenced by my avid reading of the NO T E S F R O M TE X A S 142 Hardy Boys books (the original ones, where Frank and Joe raced around in a roadster with their chums; I never liked the updated ones nearly as well). My friends read the stories, and thought I was crazy for spending so much time writing them, but found it borderline cool that I had turned them into fictional characters. What they didn’t understand was that I wrote because it was so much blasted fun. My stories kept getting longer and longer, running over a hundred handwritten pages. I called them novels, and considering my small, cramped penmanship, some of them probably approached 40,000 words, so they almost qualified. In the back of my mind, some small, insistent voice was already muttering, “I want to be a writer. I want to be a writer.” But writers weren’t real, normal people. At least, not any that I knew. Then my cousin Richard Finley, who was considerably older than me and in college, wrote a story that was accepted and published by his college literary magazine. It was about hunting rattlesnakes along the edge of the Caprock in West Texas. I remember reading that story and being fascinated by it, not so much because it was a good story (although it was) but because it was written by someone I knew, and its setting was someplace I had been. If Richard could do it, that voice said, so could I. Then something else happened involving an even bigger snake than the rattlers in Richard’s story. Being an avid reader, bookstores and libraries are some of my favorite places in the world. Back then, since I was still several years away from being old enough to drive, I pestered my mother into taking me to Fort Worth as often as I could so that...