“Well, every wedding I’ve ever attended has been beautiful. Ours was the most beautiful of all.”
“Yeah,” Smoke said. “It’s almost a shame it wasn’t a real preacher, and we aren’t really married.”
“What?” Sally shouted.
Smoke began to laugh, and Sally started hitting him on the arm. “You are impossible. Why would you say such a thing?”
“I don’t know. Maybe to put a little excitement in your life?”
Sally laughed as well, then kissed him on the cheek. “Kirby Jensen, being married to you is all the excitement I will ever need . . . or ever want.”
JOHNSTONE ON JOHNSTONE
William W. Johnstone was born in southern Missouri, the youngest of four children. He was raised with strong moral and family values by his minister father, and tutored by his schoolteacher mother. Despite this, he quit school at age fifteen.
“I have the highest respect for education,” he says, “but such is the folly of youth, and wanting to see the world beyond the four walls and the blackboard.”
True to this vow, Bill attempted to enlist in the French Foreign Legion (“I saw Gary Cooper in Beau Geste when I was a kid and I thought the French Foreign Legion would be fun”) but was rejected, thankfully, for being underage. Instead, he joined a traveling carnival and did all kinds of odd jobs. It was listening to the veteran carny folk, some of whom had been on the circuit since the late 1800s, telling amazing tales about their experiences that planted the storytelling seed in Bill’s imagination.
“They were mostly honest people, despite the bad reputation traveling carny shows had back then,” Bill remembers. “There was one guy named Picky, who got that name because he was a master pickpocket. He could steal a man’s socks right off his feet without him knowing. Believe me, Picky got us chased out of more than a few towns.”
After a few months of this grueling existence, Bill returned home and finished high school. Next came stints as a deputy sheriff in the Tallulah, Louisiana, sheriff’s department, followed by a hitch in the U.S. Army. Then he began a career in radio broadcasting at KTLD in Tallulah that would last sixteen years. It was here that he honed his storytelling skills, creating oddball characters and unusual situations to put them into, for his radio program. Bill played all the parts as well as writing them. “My favorite was a flimflam man named Skip Towne, a con artist who operated one step ahead of the law and was always trying to sell you stuff like left-handed screwdrivers and Norwegian smoke snifters. And then there was Newton Chickenheart, the most cowardly man in the West.
Bill turned to writing in 1970 but it wouldn’t be until 1979 that his first novel, The Devil’s Kiss, was published. Thus began the full-time writing career of William W. Johnstone. He wrote horror (The Uninvited), thrillers (The Last of the Dog Team), even a romance novel or two. Then, in February 1983, Out of the Ashes was published. Searching for his missing family in the aftermath of a post-apocalyptic America, rebel mercenary and patriot Ben Raines is united with the civilians of the Resistance forces and moves to the forefront of a revolution for the nation’s future.
Out of the Ashes was a smash. The series would continue for the next twenty years, winning Bill three generations of fans all over the world. The series was often imitated but never duplicated. “We all tried to copy The Ashes series,” said one publishing executive, “but Bill’s uncanny ability, both then and now, is to predict in which direction the political winds were blowing.” (The Ashes series also, Bill notes with a touch of pride, got him on the FBI’s Watch List for its less than flattering portrayal of big government.)
In late 1985, Bill’s first western, The Last Mountain Man, was published and it was here that Bill has found his greatest success. In fact, western fans couldn’t get enough of Smoke Jensen, so Bill created Preacher. Next came Blood Bond, the western adventures of blood brothers Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves.
Today, Bill’s western series, co-authored by J.A. Johnstone, include The Mountain Man, Matt Jensen the Last Mountain Man, Preacher, The Family Jensen, Luke Jensen Bounty Hunter, Eagles, MacCallister (an Eagles spin-off), Sidewinders, The Brothers O’Brien, Sixkiller, The Last Gunfighter, and the upcoming new series Flintlock and The Trail West, most of which have propelled him onto both the USA Today and New York Times bestseller lists. Coming in May 2013 is the hardcover western Butch Cassidy: The Lost Years.
“The western,” Bill says, “is one of the few true art forms that is one hundred percent American. I liken the western as America’s version of England’s Arthurian legends like Robin Hood or the Knights of the Round Table. Starting with the 1902 publication of The Virginian by Owen Wister and followed by authors like Zane Grey, Max Brand, Ernest Haycox, and of course Louis L’Amour, the western has helped define the cultural landscape of American entertainment.
“I’m no goggle-eyed college academic, so when my fans ask me why the western is as popular now as it was a century ago, I don’t offer a 200-page thesis. Instead, I can only offer this: the western is honest—we can’t change the way real events turned out. Sure, we can embellish, exaggerate, and yes, I admit it, occasionally play a little fast and loose with the facts, but only to enhance the enjoyment of readers.
“Put another way, there’s a line in one of my favorite Westerns of all time, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where the newspaper editor tells the young reporter, ‘When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.’
“These are the words I live by.”
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2012 William W. Johnstone
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
The WWJ steer head logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.
ISBN: 978-0-7860-3042-2
Strike of the Mountain Man Page 25
