Ken Coleman

The very fact that you are visiting this website means that you have perhaps, a little more than a passing interest in the Western genre of books. So please read on and consider if the type of western I write are the kind that may hold your interest.

   Some western readers like their heroes and heroines to be whiter than white, maybe akin to a knight in shining armour or a Roy Rogers figure.

Clean shaven, dressed in buckskins wearing a white stetson and matching pearl handled revolvers worn in fancy holsters slung low on each hip. The kind of men and women who play fair and give their adversaries a chance to overturn the upper hand. Where Indians are evil and outlaws are always ugly, dress in black and growl a lot.

   If the above are the kind of western heroes you prefer, then my stories are not for you. My tales are of the old, authentic West where pioneers and settlers died in great numbers trying to make their way across the Great Plains and mountains of the unforgiving terrain during the early eighteen hundreds.

   Life was tough for those early settlers. Their clothing was mainly, made from homespun material or animal skins. Often the children wore ill fitting hand-me-downs and though they were often in danger from Native American Indians, their greatest foes were the many diseases that blighted the tight knit communities of travellers as well as unbearable heat, thirst, hunger, freezing snow and drowning. Not to mention the great peril many of them faced at the hands of their own countrymen. Desperadoes, outlaws, and men who killed just for the hell of it.

   However, most of my stories take place during the post, Civil War era when men from both sides, unable to make a legitimate living, turned to crime and more often than not their crimes involved guns and shooting. Men like the James Younger gang who rode with Quantrill’s marauders during the war, then turned to train and bank robbery with many of them including Jesse James himself, dying by the gun at the hands of a so called friend.

   You will find my heroes, if you can call them that, are the kind of men and women who shoot first and worry about the consequences later. None of them are averse to shooting a man in the back if it means it will increase their chances of self-preservation. To give an adversary any kind chance during those turbulent years could be deemed as foolhardy and downright perilous to one’s life.

   These books hold gritty and often violent tales of the old west, where men and women sought to make their way through life by any means they could and if that involved brutality and killing, so be it. But please don’t go away with the idea that my books are just page after page of wanton and gratuitous violence, that is not the case at all. Of course, there is much violence as befitting that mainly, lawless era. But you will also read inside these books, damned good stories with much humour and lots of romance and tears. Please read the reviews to get an idea of what other readers thought. Then please try reading one of the books, you might find yourself pleasantly surprised and hopefully, come back for more. Enjoy the ride.