Larry D. Names's Blog

TEXAN'S HONOR and the Spook Light.

When I began the research for TEXAN'S HONOR, I came across something of a ghost story in northeastern Oklahoma lore. It's called the Spook Light. Now I didn't actually see it, but I know some truly honest people that have and I believe them.

The Spook Light is supposedly the ghost of a Native American woman or warrior who is haunting this one particular area east of Miami, OK. I incorporated the tale of the Spook Light into TEXAN'S HONOR because it was both scary and romantic.

Let me just say this: it gets the book off to a nicely chilling start.

When I was doing research for another yet unpublished book, I came across another Spook Light tale in North Carolina. This one was told to me by a Sheriff's Dept. detective sergeant who had actually seen it. Again, the Spook Light is supposed to be the ghost of a Cherokee warrior killed in battle who lost his head and is still looking for it.

If you read TEXAN'S HONOR, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did writing it. Good reading, friends. - Larry NamesTexan's Honor

Nearly five years have passed since I last posted on my blog. A lot has happened in my life during that time.

My brother Gerald Names died in February 2015, and my closest friend in writing, Frank Roderus, died on my daughter Tegan's birthday in December that same year. I miss both of them so much.

In between their passings, I tried to pass myself. A mild heart attack hit me when I was in the ER for something else. This led to a triple bypass three weeks later. Four more hospitalizations that year kind of put a damper on my writing.

Then my wife Peg decided 23 years on job was enough, so she retired. That was good for me. No, it was great for me. You see, before we had our son Torry back in 1980, Peg and I traveled a lot. By a lot, I mean we took four trips a year doing research for my novels. Until Torry started school, we continued to travel at least three times a year, taking Torry with us on most of those adventures. When he started school, we were limited to one trip with him in summer and another shorter one at Christmas.

Our daughter Tegan was born in 1990, and traveling time was reduced even more.

Peg started that full-time job in 1992, and our days of adventure on the road came to a halt. Oh, we did travel twice a year, but those trips were limited to visiting Peg's parents in Arizona. We were no longer taking in history on our travels.

Finally, when Peg retired, we started adventuring again, meaning doing research for my books. So during the past two years, we've taken 11 trips totaling 170 days.

We have done a lot of research for several books I have in my project file. Now I just have to write them. So stay tuned, dear readers.

Larry Names - August 21, 2017

PS - Oh, yes, my health. My doctors tell me I'm good for 20 years since they gave me a new knee back in March.

I wanted to share a moment of my past with you.

Twenty years ago, I was in Texas doing some media promotions and book signings under my pen name Bryce Harte. I attended an Arbor Day festival, an event to raise money for a local library. While signing, this sweet lady who was so tiny and must have been in her 70s stepped up to the table and said, "I've read all of your books, Mr. Harte, and I just want to tell you that you make me feel like I'm part of the story." Well, I was so moved by her words that I jumped up from my chair, leaned across the table, and hugged her before she had a chance to get away. The poor woman was startled so much that I thought for a second I might frighten her to death. I said to her, "That is the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me about my work. Thank you."

I have always tried to make my readers feel like they aren't just reading a book but that they are actually "stepping" onto the page and joining the characters in an adventure. I hope you get that feeling if you should ever read any of my novels.

Kindest regards,

Larry Names

Back in the early 80’s, my good friend and agent, the late Ray Peekner, advised me to join the Western Writers of America (WWA). I had already written three books that Doubleday published as westerns; therefore, I was qualified to join that fine organization. However, I had no desire to be Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour. I didn’t want to write westerns for the rest of my life.

After a dry spell of not being published for four years, I wrote another book for Doubleday, THE COWBOY CONSPIRACY, which I considered to be a mystery. (Read my previous post to learn about that title which is now PROSPECTING FOR MURDER.) Of course, Doubleday published it as a western.

Ray pushed me all the harder to join WWA after that. So I agreed to do it, mostly because Ray was dying of cancer and I wanted to do it for him.

Peg and I loaded our son Torry and my son Paul from a previous marriage into the car and off we went to the WWA convention in Sheridan, Wyoming.

That last week of June 1987 changed my life. I met some of the most fascinating and wonderful people there. I made some friends who are still very near and dear to me. And I found another agent, which is a story by itself.

One friend I made is my present agent Cherry Weiner. She is something and someone very special, and I mean that in the best of terms. I love people who talk to you straight from the shoulder. Not a lot of people really appreciate folks like that, but I do. Cherry is about as direct and forthright as a person can be, especially with her authors. She might be very much on the diminutive side, but she’s a giant in my heart.

Another dear friend I was super fortunate to make at that convention is Frank Roderus. Yes, the Frank Roderus. The Spur Award-winning Frank Roderus. The author who has had over 300 books published and sold at least 20 million copies during his career. Maybe closer to 30 million. I don’t think he knows for certain how many have been sold because he’s that modest about his talent and his success.

But the man I met in Sheridan who had a real impact on my career and who is still my good friend is Tom Colgan, a senior editor at Berkley. Tom was 25 or 26 that year. Not sure exactly which. I can still recall the first time I saw him. He was walking outside the hotel wearing jeans and a denim jacket with his hands tucked in his back pockets as he meandered around the grounds looking lonely and lost. I heard him speak to someone and recognized a New York City accent. My first thought was he was some writer’s kid because he looked so young, like he was still in his teens. Since he appeared to be so out of place, I thought I’d talk to him and meet his “parent” through him. Our first conversation went something like this:

“New York, right?”

“Yes?”

“Mets or Yankees?”

“Mets.”

“Damn! I thought I was gonna like you.”

Tom laughed. “Why? Are you a Yankee fan?”

“Cubs.”

He laughed again. “There are worse things to be than a Cub fan.”

We hit it off and talked baseball for a while.

For the next couple days, Tom and I chatted each time we met in the course of the day, and not once did we talk about anything connected to our purpose for being there in Wyoming. Why? Because I had no idea he was the western editor for Berkley at the time. As previously stated, I thought he was some writer’s kid and was dragged along to this convention like Peg and I had dragged our boys along.

Not until Wednesday, after having met on Sunday, did I learn Tom’s true identity. The aforementioned Frank Roderus, who had since befriended me out of pity, asked, “How come you’re so chummy with Colgan?”

“Who?”

“Tom Colgan.”

“I don’t know. He’s a nice kid.”

Frank laughed at me. “Don’t you know who he is?”

I shrugged. Then Frank told me about Tom, and I felt quite the fool. Wasn’t the first time in my life I’d been so naïve. Wasn’t the last either. Babe in the woods, that was me. And like most lost children, I caught a break and was found, but you don’t get to read about that until the next post. Whenever I get a round tuit.

Every book I have written has a story behind it. That makes like most authors in that sense.
The story behind PROSPECTING FOR MURDER is probably the spookiest of them all.
If you’ve read the book, then you know already that the primary locale for the story is a small mining town named Harqua Hala. This was a real mining town. I first visited it in 1972 with two friends, Bob and Phil. We made an overnight campout in the town, which consisted of a falling down adobe building and a couple to tin-roofed wooden shack. At the edge of the ghost town was a cemetery that was somewhat kept up. Most of the markers in it were wooden crosses and piles of rocks. One was a concrete slab that bore the deceased’s name and the years of his life. Buried there was one Lester T. Higgins, who happens to be an important character in PROSPECTING FOR MURDER.
Now to get up to where we were camped you had no choice except to walk. No roads. You just climbed up the side of the hill, which was literally covered with loose gravel from the mine.
Bob, Phil, and I belonged to a tiny religious group that held séances and tried to communicate with folks on the other side of the veil. That is another story for another time. For this piece here, suffice it to say we held a séance high up on the side of the main hill where the mining had been done more than 50 years before. We had a tape recorder going just in case we heard something in the night.
We did the usual ritual that accompanies a séance, then waited for something to happen. Nothing did. Or so we thought until the next day.
Over breakfast we discussed the séance of the night before. Bob asked Phil and me if we had seen or heard anything. I couldn’t recall any sounds or sights, but Phil said he thought he heard somebody climbing up the side of the hill in all that loose gravel. Well, if that were so, then we would have caught it on tape. We turned on the recorder, and, yep, you guessed it, there were the sounds of someone climbing up that hill in that loose gravel. Crunch, crunch, crunch. The rhythm was almost regular. We played it over and over to make sure we weren’t imagining what we were hearing. Crunch, crunch, crunch. It was real all right.
Phil theorized we had probably stirred up a ghost from the cemetery down by the road into the town. We went home with that thought in mind.
Two years later I took Peg out to Harqua Hala on a Sunday drive. It hadn’t changed a bit since the last time I was there.
Twelve years after that Peg’s folks moved out to Kingman, Arizona, and she and our son Torry went along with them to help out. I followed a week later. We spent the better part of the month of January in Arizona. One of our little one-day excursions was to Harqua Hala. I thought Torry would like to see a real Old West ghost town, and I wanted to do the research for PROSPECTING FOR MURDER.
Much to our disappointment, all the buildings were gone. Just a few foundations remained. Oh, well. I made a map of the town’s roads and the mine shafts and the arrastra bed. We also took some photographs.
Besides the personal onsite research, I also used a book titled GHOST TOWNS OF ARIZONA. Great book. That spring I wrote the book.
Three years later Peg and I got into genealogy for the fun of it. We spent hundreds of hours at the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison, digging through old records, genealogy books, and history books. Peg came across a rather unique book that was a collection of accounts written by women who had actually lived in the Old West. One that particularly caught her attention was written by the wife of a mining engineer who had actually lived in Harqua Hala in 1912 at the time of my story for PROSPECTING FOR MURDER.
Now keep this in mind. Peg found this story three years after I wrote the book. Much to her surprise and mine, the lady’s account of Harqua Hala included the story about the murder of the Yuma County Sheriff’s deputy who was the local representative of law and order. Somebody – nobody ever knew because the killer was never caught – dry-gulched the deputy in the middle of the night. The murder of the deputy in PROSPECTING FOR MURDER also took place in the middle of the night. Spooky enough for you?

This blog piece started on my wife’s laptop. I had written what I considered four inspired paragraphs when all of a sudden they vanished. The whole page disappeared. Apparently, I brushed my left hand against something on the computer and made it change everything.


Technology is not always everything it’s cracked up to be.


So I started writing it again, but without the inspiration. Anger had killed that. In the first attempt, I had written this bit about old dogs and new tricks that was really clever. The computer killed it. Then the next paragraph was about learning not to be late to appointments because you just might miss a great opportunity. In my case, being late cost me the chance to meet John Wayne in person. Yes, THE John Wayne, the Duke himself. It was a good story, too, and it had a lesson in it. Now how can you beat that?


After that, I mentioned my writing career, all the books, etc., etc., etc. There was a point to that. I was leading up to the newest thing for me in this business of entertaining with the written word, which is making the books on my backlist available to the Kindle Generation on Amazon. Some of those titles were originally published over 30 years ago. Best example is THE OSWALD REFLECTION. I wrote it in the summer of 1977, and it was published under the title TWICE DEAD at the end of 1978. Unlike a lot of authors, I was in print in my early 30s. Most don’t make it until they are at least 40. Oops! Sorry. Bragging. Moving on.


TWICE DEAD was a good story that was a little less than adequately written. Over the years, I developed my own style of writing, which is now far removed from the way I wrote DEAD. (Appropriate, hey? DEAD, hey? Omigod! We live too close to Canada. Sometimes Canadian speech drifts south in the ether and finds its way into my head and then out my mouth. I have no other excuse for using that expression.)


Anyway, in the mid-90s, I decided to rewrite DEAD and call it THE OSWALD REFLECTION. I had a few copies printed for personal use. Then along came Kindle and another opportunity to see my work become available to the general public. Not just OSWALD but all the books on my backlist could be revived because all of them are timeless, so to speak.


So the adventure with Kindle Books has begun. Enjoy!