I figure the best way to illustrate this is to post one of my own proposals. This is a recent pitch that has not yet been sold (though I have had an offer on it), as I'm still trying to find a new home for my Frank Leslie novels, since I recently haven't been able to agree on terms with Signet. So here's my brainstorm for a book that pairs up two of my favorite and most popular western heroes...or maybe I should say anti-heroes...the half-breed Yakima Henry and the young redheaded pistoleer, Colter Farrow.
If you're a writer, I hope you find it useful if not inspiring. If you're an editor in the market for the next big western, send an offer Mean Pete can't refuse in a limo with a good-lookin' starlet, a bottle of coffin varnish, and some sandwiches, an' we'll talk in the morning...
Gidyup.
BLOOD ON THE BORDER
A Western Proposal
By Frank Leslie
(Peter Brandvold)
The half-breed
adventurer Yakima Henry has a bounty on his head. Apparently, the man who’d been roughing up a
whore in the brothel Yakima was cooling his heels in was a deputy sheriff with
a stable full of loyal amigos. Yakima
wishes he’d known that before he shot
the man though it probably wouldn’t have made much difference. The hombre had needed killing.
With hot lead and
drumming hooves warming his backtrail, Yakima heads for Mexico for some rest
and relaxation. Likely, several years
worth, and that’s all right with him. He
has nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.
Things hadn’t worked out with the woman he’d met in Wyoming (see Dead Man’s Trail, Signet 2012). Lasting love hasn’t so far been in the cards
for Yakima Henry. He could use a warm
winter with a sweet senorita along the shores of the Sea of Cortez.
Meanwhile, Colter
Farrow--the young, red-headed pistolero who wears a nasty S-brand on his cheek
compliments of the sheriff of Sapinero up in Colorado Territory (see The Guns of Sapinero, Signet 2010) has
an even larger bounty on his head. Young
Colter not only killed the man who branded him but he’s been framed for the murders
of another pair of U.S. marshals.
Colter, too, decides
to drag his ass down to Mexico, only he does so in a storm of dust and hot lead
with a whole pack of bounty hunters barking at his heels. When the scar-faced gunslinger crosses the
Rio Bravo and finds a night’s solace in the arms of beautiful senorita, he lands
himself in even more trouble.
The senorita didn’t
tell Colter that her father was a Rurale captain who’d been bound and
determined that his daughter retain her virginity until she married the man of
the captain’s dreams.
On the run once
more, Colter runs into Yakima Henry.
Since they’re like-minded and share similar problems, they decide to
team up and head to Baja together. Not
even the craftiest bounty hunter could track them across the Mojave Desert.
Only, when the pair
makes it to Baja, they run into a mad Irishman and former General in the U.S.
Cavalry. General Ciaran Yeats’s crazy
dream, influenced by baconora as well
as marijuana, is to carve his own private empire out of the Mexican State of
Sonora.
Yakima Henry and
Colter Farrow, down on their luck, pockets empty, agree to work for a wealthy hacendado, Frederico de la Paz, whose
hacienda has been plundered for gold and weapons--as well as his daughter
Alejandra. The patron wants Yakima and
Colter--both of whose impressive reputations have made their ways to de la Paz--to
find the gang, led by a gringo in U.S. Cavalry gear, that attacked his ranch
and kidnapped his daughter.
Yakima and Colter
follow the marauders’ trail to the old Mexican prison that has been taken over
by Yeats and his small army of kill-crazy cutthroats. Some of the most vicious pistoleros on either
side of the border, Yeats’s gang is comprised of Americanos, Mexicans,
half-breeds, blacks, and everything in between.
The General calls
his fortress Castillo de Luna,
Fortress on the Moon. (The landscape is decidedly moon-like.)
Outnumbered seventy-to-two,
Yakima and Colter decide that the only way they have a shot of getting the
gold, the weapons, and the girl is to join Yeats’s ranks and destroy his army
from within. Only, the odds get even
steeper when they discover that young Alexandra has no desire to be freed from
her captors. In fact, she hadn’t been
“captured” at all. She’d gone willingly
with the General’s gang. She intends to
marry General Yates despite his being nearly as old as her father--she’s
intoxicated by money, power, and marijuana--and live as his queen once they’ve
wrestled Sonora away from the Mexican Army.
But when the lusty,
ravishing girl falls in love with Yakima and tries to convince the powerful,
gun-handy half-breed to double-cross the General, so she and he can rule Sonora
together, a chinking in the General’s army reveals itself. And it’s one that Yakima and Colter decide to
exploit most thoroughly...with the help of a Gatling gun and several hundred
pounds of dynamite.
In the end, Castillo
de Luna a smoking ruin behind them, Yakima and Colter head back north to Don de
la Paz with the guns, the gold, and the girl tied to her saddle and cursing
like a hard-rock miner.
Blood on the Border, like all of my other seventy-plus novels,
will be kick-ass action from front to back, with a gripping, unrelenting pace
and characters that vault right off the page!
Who Is Frank Leslie?
Peter Brandvold has penned over 70 fast-action westerns under his own
name and his penname, Frank Leslie. He is the author of the
ever-popular .45-Caliber books featuring Cuno Massey as well as the Lou Prophet
and Yakima Henry novels. Recently,
Berkley published his horror/western, Dust
of the Damned, featuring ghoul-hunter Uriah Zane. Head honcho at “Mean Pete Publishing,”
publisher of harrowing western ebooks, he lives in Colorado. Visit his
website at www.peterbrandvold.com. Follow his blog
at: www.peterbrandvold.blogspot.com.
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