The Fleecing of Fort Griffin was the first comic western I wrote, but it didn’t see print for more than a decade until I retired from my day job, even though it had commitments that eventually fell through from two New York Publishers.
On Tuesday, a new edition of the novel will be published by our Bariso Press, and bring to conclusion a circuitous journey for the book to ever see print, much less two editions. The book chronicles the arrival in 1870s Fort Griffin, Texas, of a wealthy English baron with a satchel full of money and the ambition to start the first buffalo ranch in the West. The baron’s appearance in Fort Griffin draws con artists like flies to try to relieve him of his cash.
It’s a story of gentry, grifters and greed, where English royalty meets West Texas duplicity. Kindle and trade paperback editions of Bariso Press’s Fleecing are now available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Fleecing-Fort-Griffin-Western-Caper-ebook/dp/B0GK1KK8C9
Originally in the early 1990s, Doubleday acquired the rights to Fleecing and paid a decent advance for inclusion in the Double D western line, their prestigious imprint for the library audience. The December before Fleecing was to see print in February, Doubleday ended their Western program for libraries. I got to keep the advance.
Then the editor for another New York publisher agreed to publish the book a couple years later, but the company decided to reduce their Western line before we signed a contract. Once again Fleecing was a casualty to publishing cutbacks.
After retirement, Wild Horse Media publisher Billy Huckaby contacted me about publishing some of my books since he had purchased Eakin Books, the venerable Texas publisher that had released a pair of my middle reader books. So, Fleecing was finally published in 2016, after my first three books in the comic Western series The Memoirs of H.H. Lomax appeared in the mid-1990s.
Fleecing received the Elmer Kelton Award from the West Texas Historical Association for best creative work on West Texas. I was so pleased with the book’s storyline that I decided last year to adapt it to a screenplay of the same name. The script has done well in screenplay competitions being a finalist in the Austin and Portland comedy film festivals and a semifinalist in the Georgia Comedy Film Festival and the Filmmatic Comedy Screenplay Awards in Los Angeles.
We got word last week that the screenplay has been selected for inclusion in the Beverly Hills Film Festival’s screenplay competition with winners to be announced April 19 with a black-tie awards ceremony in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
So patience has paid off in nursing Fleecing in its various iterations. It remains one of my favorite works because of its oddball characters, amusing plot twists, and surprise ending. It is the only Western in publishing history that uses a rooster—and I don’t mean Rooster Cogburn—for a guard dog!
