FIVE STAR WESTERN NEWS:

MAN WITHOUT A PAST: Western Stories by T.V. Olsen

Coming in November

The short novel and eleven short stories comprising this volume are collected here in book form for the first time. Five of the eleven short stories are being published for the first time anywhere.

"Man Without a Past" is the story of a man who wanders onto the Whippletree Ranch, disoriented, suffering from a loss of memory. Angus Horne, owner of the spread, names him Johnny Green. Just what Johnny Green was in his former life is revealed by a series of clashes with members of the Long S, including its owner, Cliff Sanders, who is threatening a range war with the Whippletree over possession of Indigo Springs.

"A Time to Fight" concerns the clash of homesteaders with Josiah Winterfield, a cattle baron. When one of the homesteaders, Tate Siringo, is framed on a murder charge, only Mainwaring, an attorney from the East who has recently opened a law practice in Sun City, is willing to stand up for the man and defend him in court. Mainwaring, of course, is accustomed to the way such matters are handled in the East. A physical beating to persuade him to give up the case is only first of a whole new series of occurrences that impresses him on how differently such matters are handled on the frontier.

"The Ambush" involves Corporal Ben Griffith of C Troop and a small company of enlisted men in a fight for survival when the cavalry is attacked by Apaches while transporting ammunition and supplies.

"The Man We Called Jones" is the story of a gunfighter who decides to lose himself and his reputation by engaging in apparently innocuous work as a farm hand, but who finds that his past has a way of catching up with him to the point where he really cannot escape it.

These stories and the others in this collection, so characteristic of T.V. Olsen's Western fiction, are driven by the characters in them, men and women on the frontier imbued with a richness of texture and depth of emotion guaranteed to grip a reader.