This is an another astounding piece of work by JCB. This work is someting of a departure from his previous work i.e., "Pancho Villa", "The Pistoleer" et al insofar as "Borderlands" consists of several pieces of short fiction and the characters are contemporary. Blake again plumbs the depths of ...
James Carlos Blake’s In the Rogue Blood is set in a dystopian, ultraviolent version of the American southwest. It begins in the 1840s, in Florida, and later moves to the borderlands of Mexico and Texas. There are untold murders, a gang of scalp hunters, and a writing-style that often harks back t...
From the raw clay of historical fact, James Carlos Blake has sculpted a powerful novel of both a man and an America at war with themselves. Here is the brutally honest story of free-spirit William Anderson, who is pulled into a savage conflict of state against state in the years leading up to the...
I always keep a mental running tally of my own Top 25 Best Books Ever-This one, "Red River Grass," by James Carlos Blake, ALWAYS stays in the mix. A brilliantly written book capturing a slice of life I was surprised to find fascinating. Gangsters? In the twenties? Hiding out and seeking refuge in...
Harry Pierpont and John Dillinger were die-hard and deadly partners who made national headlines with their daring bank hold-ups and gun battles -- and they had a lot of laughs while they were at it. They were known as the Dillinger Gang but at its heart was "Handsome Harry" Pierpont -- tough, fea...
If this site had half stars I'd give Under the Skin a solid 3 1/2...it's not as tightly woven or as emotionally charged as other Blake works I've read, and frankly I felt that a few of the situations were resolved awfully conveniently, but even so anything by Blake is better than most of what's c...
In 1928 New Orleans, eighteen-year-old Sonny LaSalle is a top prep student and champion amateur boxer -- and he venerates his fraternal twin uncles, Buck and Russell, armed robbers who love their profession. Sonny secretly believes that he, too, is a natural outlaw and persuades his uncles to tak...
John Wesley Hardin, In All His Bloody, Ugly GloryJohn Wesley Hardin was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a 'good person'. As part of a generation of young southern males who were too young to join the Confederate Army, but old enough to strap on a gun when the insults and injustices of Rec...
Hailed as "one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life" (Entertainment Weekly), James Carlos Blake turns to the blazing story of Stanley Ketchel, the legendary ragtime-era middleweight boxing champion and daring rakehell, whose brief and meteoric life burned with violence...
The fitful breezes off the Gulf moistly warm as dogbreath. Hordes of mosquitoes. Regular evening rainstorms that flared whitely at the windows and rattled the glassware with their thunder and sometimes became downpours that lasted for days. All such was familiar to him. But winter’s occasional bl...
She’s lying on her side. A knot of pain pulses in the center of her chest. She’s wrapped in a blanket, her head half-shawled with it, her face only partially exposed to the grayness before her. Despite the blanket she’s cold. She makes no move, no sound. Takes shallow, sil...
Along with the family house, she had inherited the business after her parents were killed in a train derailment returning from a trip to Denver. She was tall and auburn-haired and twenty-five years old. She knew who he was before he introduced himself, having seen his picture in the local newspap...
At least Russell can hope for a better tomorrow, since a guy doing life can always try another break. Me, they’re going to finish off in the morning. They wouldn’t have to bother if they had simply let me die. They say I took seven bullets, including one to the head and one in the spine, but I re...
A gift from her great-great-granddaughter, the phone still looks to her like a makeup compact when closed and like some kind of silly toy when open. By her definition, a true telephone is one that has a wire leading into the wall and then running out to a high pole outside. There is such a phone ...