Readers Have Spoke! — STEVEN HARDESTY

Readers have decided that I should write Westerns and war novels. That is what they choose to buy out of my offerings that include international thrillers, comic space opera, Arthurian fantasy, and bawdy romcoms (well, bawdy by my blushing standards). You’ve spoken. I’ve heard you. Glad to comply! But…

You do realize, don’t you, that all my books, whatever the genre, are about my Vietnam war? Can’t say why. They just come out that way.

Even a romcom featuring lovers diving and swooping over New York City after being relieved of the burden of an airplane is colored by that war. (They’re in Love on the Edge, about to be published.) So, too, the Arthurian fantasy The Sword and the Quest, with its singing swords and off-key merlins, and the novels of globe-trotting assassins in the Dirty Wars series.

The war novels, of course, are Vietnam war novels (starting with Ghost Soldiers), so nothing surprising there. But the Westerns, featuring veterans of the Civil War struggling in a post-war environment of the Gilded Age and westward-surging people, also have a lot to say about that war (The Outlaw). Or what it’s like to fight and survive war and then regret it all in sleepless nights. And find that the war continues all around you and will never go away (Broken Spur).

Honest. True. Hard. But not grim, no, the war seeping into everything I write doesn’t make it grim. We had a lot of fun in that war, didn’t we? (Didn’t we?) And, just like “comic relief” in old movies, that seeps into my stories.

As when a fellow I knew turned his artillery the wrong way and blew up the basecamp’s fuel depot. Burned for a month! Oh, what jolly fun to think of all those basecamp bunnies without generators for hot water showers while the rest of us were tramping the muddy boonies. That little story, shifted to 1877, helps dress up the weird Western I’m currently writing, called The Glass Horseman.

Or how about the officer who had to write detailed notes to himself to remember what to do on combat patrol? I shifted him into a grimly comic note-taking murderer in the thriller Running in Heels.

Or the spotter plane pilot who so much wanted a heroic medal he shot a pistol bullet through his own plane’s engine and crash-landed to claim he was shot down by snipers? He’s there in Soldiers of Misfortune. Or maybe it’s the comic space opera An Earthman Born about how tasty humans are to alien golf fanatics.

There’s also the Harry Seaburn series about a small-time thief who can’t keep the fortunes he steals or the women he loves (my personal favorite is The Dimpled Python set in the Harry-devouring Everglades). Which is pretty much how most soldiers in my war felt about themselves.

So it’s Westerns and war novels from here on out, or until you tell me otherwise. Cheers!