On My eReader - Paul Bishop

This week's On My eReader section, in which writers talk about the books currently on their eReader features  American author, Paul Bishop, or as he is known amongst his friends, The Bish.

Paul is a novelist, screenwriter and television personality....we only feature the best at the Archive.

Paul is a 35 year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, Paul Bishop’s career has included a three-year tour with his department's Anti-Terrorist Division and over twenty-five years’ experience in the investigation of sex crimes. His Special Assaults Units regularly produced the highest number of detective initiated arrests and highest crime clearance rates in the city. Twice honored as Detective of the Year, Paul also received the Quality and Productivity Commission Award from the City of Los Angeles.

As a nationally recognized interrogator, Paul starred as the lead interrogator and driving force behind the ABC reality show Take The Money and Run from producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Based on his expertise in deception detection, he currently conducts interrogation seminars for law enforcement, military, and human resource organizations.

Paul has published fourteen novels, including four in his L.A.P.D. Detective Fey Croaker series, and one collection of short stories which includes a novelette featuring Croaker. He has also written numerous scripts for episodic television and feature films. He is the co-creator and editor of the Fight Card series of hardboiled boxing novels, which includes over forty titles, published under the pseudonym Jack Tunney. Paul’s own entries in the series are Fight Card: Felony Fists and Fight Card: Swamp Walloper, both featuring the two-fisted cop turned fighter, Patrick ‘Felony’ Flynn.

You can find Paul HERE

And so it's over to Paul -


My Kindle is completely overstocked, but that doesn’t mean I stop grabbing new books whenever something strikes my fancy. I’m a bit of an attention deficit fiend, so I always have three or four books going at the same time—two or three on my Kindle and at least one physical paperback to sniff and fondle—I mean to have and hold.

Currently on my Kindle, I’m halfway through the second book in the Charlotte Holmes series, The Last of August by Brittany Cavallaro. Jamie Watson and Charlotte Holmes—young adult descendants of their famous forbearers—are in a chase across Europe to untangle a web of shocking truths about the Holmes and Moriarty families. Like the first book in the series, it’s good fun and Cavallaro gets the voices and the Holmesian rhythms right. A cut above the normal pastiche efforts.

I’m a bit bogged down in The Fair Fight by Anna Freeman, a highly praised novel of female Victorian pugilists. The first few chapters kept my interest and raced along, but I’m now five chapters in and waiting for something more to happen. If it doesn’t pick up steam quickly, I’m out before the ten count. 

True Fiction by my friend Lee Goldberg has kept me chuckling as the electronic pages zip past—think Three Days of the Condor lite in a mashup with a Hitchcockian innocent-man-on-the-run film. His character, writer Ian Ludlow (the name an in-joke referring to a pseudonym Goldberg once used) is constantly out of his depth, surviving by whims of fate more than skill or luck. Humor is a hard thing to pull off, but Goldberg is a master at this type of light touch.

Finally, I finished reading True Grit for the third time (in preparation for a presentation) and needed to jump into another western. I chose Forty Guns West from the William W. Johnstone fiction factory. This is a hunted-turns-hunter tale in The First Mountain Man series. If I had to guess, based on the writing, I’d say the super-secret identity behind the Johnstone byline on this effort is James Reasoner   

The West is still Wild

Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my love of the western genre - it's a passion that may of you share and so I'd like to direct you to this article by author, Paul Bishop that looks at modern day westerns...click HERE

Hot Lead - The new journal of the wild west.

I've read a fair few fanzines in my time, contributed to many, but the one thing most of them have in common (apart from the enthusiasm for their subject matter) is the way they were  cheaply produced, often printed on A4 sheets and simply stabled together, with artwork poorly reproduced. Sometimes fanzine producers would splash out and produce a magazine in A5 format, but by and large  they still looked like a poor relation (even if the writing was sometimes superior)  to the professional magazines that dominated.

That ain't the case these days. And the premier issue of Hot Lead, the fanzine devoted to western fiction paperbacks, can stand up alongside any professional publication - excellently produced, using Amazon's own CreateSpace system, with artwork that is clean and vivid and words that are well edited and wonderfully written. Hot Lead then proves that there is little difference to what a group of enthusiastic fans can produce and the glossy magazines that fill the news-stands. Though in fairness Hot Lead does benefit from having Justin Marriott the man behind the excellent Paperback Fanatic in the editing chair.

The first issue comes in at a respectable 60+ pages and is dedicated to a group of western writers known collectivelly as The Piccadilly Cowboys. There is an interview with George G Gilman, the man responsible for the ever popular Edge western series, and regular readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of this series - indeed, I was responsible for bringing the first of the Edge books to the digital world of eBooks, before Malcolm Davy took over and has since brought virtually the entire series into digital print. Paul Bishop gives us an article that explains  the origins of the Piccadilly Cowboys, and Steve Mayall, a name well known to western fans, bring us the first of his regular review section, The Cowpoke Critic. These are just some of the highlights to this magazine which is  positively bursting with wild west goodies.

'Each issue of Hot Lead will have a theme running through it', explained co-editor Paul Bishop. 'Issue #2 will be Western cover art...Issue #3 will look at the Adult Westerns...#4 Western paperback series with women main characters...#5 current Western wordslingers from William W. Johnstone's and Ralph Compton's fiction factories to Ralph Cotton, Cotton Smith, and more (all of this is subject to change)...'

Me, as a  lifelong fan of the western genre can't wait for the second issue, nor those that are to follow and would like to stand both Justin Marriott and Paul Bishop a drink (a whiskey in a dirty glass) for producing my new favourite magazine. The best place to score a issue of this excellent publication is from Amazon and I do urge fans of the western genre to do so.