This is the cover design Robert Hale and Black Horse Westerns have selected for my next Jack Martin western, The Afterlife of Slim McCord which will be out later this year - November 30th in fact.
Hale use stock images for their Black Horse books which can mean that often the cover image doesn't represent any of the scenes in the actual book - thankfully this is not the case here. In fact the cover represents a flashback scene in which the titular character, Slim McCord is killed, shot in the back.
Yep, that's right Slim McCord the lead character in my new western is dead right from page one and remains so to the bitter sweet end - confused? All will become clear when the book hits the stores.
I'm truly excited about Slim McCord and I think that it follows the pattern set by my previous two westerns, Delta Rose and Wild Bill Williams in experimenting with the genre. I also think that Slim McCord is quite unique in that the lead character spends most of the book as a mummified corpse, a very active mummified corpse.
It's kind of the story of the end of the frontier as seen through the
eyes of two aged outlaws and one dead one. I was thinking along those
lines, or at least the lines of aging outlaws when I stumbled across the
real life story of Elmer McCurdy, a badman who was indeed mummified and
then shown as part of a traveling carny show.
The blurb (rough draft) reads:
“True friendship continues long after living is gone!”
Aging not so bad men Blackman and Tanner thought they had
seen it all, but nothing could have prepared them for what they would find in
the town of Possum Creek.
Once they had ridden with the notorious outlaw Slim McCord
and when they come upon his mummified remains in a traveling carny show, they
find themselves thrown into an unlikely and dangerous series of events as they,
together with their dead leader, head towards a destiny that seems preordained.
Slim McCord, long after his death, is now involved in the
most lucrative bank robbery of his outlaw career, as the three men, together
again, face all manner of danger and find that, as the bullets fly, it’s just
like old times.
And here's a snippet from the author's note that will accompany, The Afterlife of Slim McCord
In 1911 McCurdy
was shot during a failed robbery and as no one claimed his body the undertaker
embalmed the outlaw with arsenic based preservatives and put the corpse on show.
From there the corpse ended up in various traveling shows before disappearing
sometime in the 1930s. Incredibly in 1976 a prop man on the set of the TV
series, The Six Million Dollar Man, rediscovered it. It had been thought to be
a wax model, and used in a fun house set before a finger broke off, revealing
it to be actual human remains. Elmer
McCurdy was eventually buried in 1977 in the Boot Hill section of Summit View
Cemetery, Oklahoma with most of the cast and crew from The Six Million Dollar
Man in attendance.
Truth is indeed stranger than fiction - and there was something fine and
dandy about that old corpse causing such a commotion in 1976,all those
years after death - the police were called in and production on The Six Million Dollar man frozen until they identified the body.
And that's how Slim McCord developed in my mind. I liked the idea of
the old outlaw kicking up a storm long after death - My story is set in
the Old West and our mummified outlaw finds himself playing an active
part in a bank robbery long after his own account has been closed. I like the
concept - nothing's truly new and there have been many western novels
that have used a parallel between aging characters and the end of the
frontier to tone their story, but as far as I know there's never been
one with a mummified outlaw at the heart of the story.
Slim McCord - it's a larger than life story, with action,
adventure, comedy and a dash of sentiment. Above all I think Slim
McCord's got a lot of heart.
Those days were gone though and Blackman knew
it. It was written in his face and he had a wrinkle for every fence that had
been thrown up around previously open range. He could dream though, and in his
dreams there were no fences, and enough pretty ladies to warm the coldest of
nights.
