The
Bill Travis Mystery Series
|
proposed cover Completed Novels In The Series: The Last Call
Capitol Offense Longnecks And Twisted Hearts The Devil To Pay Death On The Pedernales Caddo Cold Arrowmoon Works in Progress:
Links to Interesting Sites
and Books: Milton T. Burton's Blog
Cinco Puntos Press Spectrum Photography Texas Ranger Hall of Fame Every Town Needs A Trail by Jen Ohlson ![]() Over The Wall: The Men Behind The 1934 Death House Escape by Patrick M. McConal ![]() Warden by Jim Willett ![]() French Letters by Jack Woodville London ![]() The Bill Travis
Mysteries
by George Wier (In Order):
The
Last Call
Capitol Offense Longnecks And Twisted Hearts The Devil To Pay Death On The Pedernales Slow Falling Caddo Cold Arrowmoon After The Fire Ghost Of The Karankawa Desperate Crimes Mexico Fever The Lone Star Express Trinity Trio Buffalo Bayou Blues Reveille In Red Bexar County Line The Long Goodnight Wolf Country (prequel) Manhunt (prequel) Borderline (prequel) Books by Milton T. Burton: The Rogue's Game Read a Review The Sweet And The Dead ![]() Read a Review Most Recently Read Books: Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin (a re-read for me, and the
greatest vampire book ever written).
White Night A Novel of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher (I don't know why, but I can't put
these damn books down. That was book 9 [!] of the series.)
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (good God, what a fantastic read!
Loved it!)
Small Favor
(Jim, please stop writing so I can do some *&$%# writing of my own!)Book 10 of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher Books Currently Reading: Shadowfall
by James Clemens (Clemens wrote all those wonderful action-thrillers under the pen-name: James Rollins!) Some Art by the Author of the BT Mysteries: ![]() Recent oil painting -gw ![]() "Tree" - gw ![]() "Fall" - gw ![]() "Feedstore" -gw A Few Short Stories: A Day In The Life The Bill Travis Journal Entries Duckweed Mystery/Action Adventure Nickel Cup World War II Veteran And The Stars Came Out In Purgatory Horror Seven-eights Rainmaker Science Fiction The Gold Pot Poker Fiction The Grid Fiction Letters To The Galaxy Science Fiction The Coat Man Fiction The Devil And Mr. Tom Bean Noir Fiction & Austin Other Fiction Books (non-Bill Travis) I'm Currently Writing: The God Wars The Footprinters Invasion: Earth Crossroads Fantastic Adventures Volume One: The Byway Gate Leaving The World Nonfiction Projects: A COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY OF CRIME IN TEXAS FROM 1600—2000: The Crimes, Perpetrators, Lawmen, Judges, and Institutions of Crime and Criminal Justice In The Lone Star State Throughout History; Together with Indices of Texas Crimes, Criminals, Law Officers and Statistics ![]() |
Photograph Copyright 2009 by George Wier - All Rights Reserved ![]() Photograph Copyright by James A. Dumas - Spectrum Photography (Thanks, Jim! ) Newcomers!
Welcome!
There have been an increasing number of viewers of this site. All readers who would like to contact the author may do so by email at: texaswier@gmail.com. All comments are welcome, and I will try to respond to each. Additionally, invididual sample chapters of books are available just by asking. If you've gotten hooked into a story and desperately want to finish it, please drop me a line. And thanks for stopping by! You are welcome to view any sample completed or in-progress Bill Travis Mystery. Click a link above and left. All samples are in Adobe .pdf format. News! Update: "Duckweed", a short story, is to be published in an anthology called Lone Star Noir. Bill Travis #5, Death On The Pedernales, is complete! Caddo Cold is under re-write, and it won't look quite the same as before. I have just posted the first twenty-five pages of Slow Falling, which is proving to be a helluva lot of fun to write. The Prologue is to your right.--------> Popular Texas crime and mystery author, Milton T. Burton and I are collaborating on a Texas crime novel, currently untitled. I have posted the first two chapters here. Enjoy! Additionally, I am welcoming every visitor to check out Milton T. Burton's blog at obscuredestinies.blogspot.com for insights into literature, history, and a good chaw-bite of Texas Thanks go to the following individuals who have helped Bill Travis get along this far: Sallie Wier, Mary K. Selby, Danny Bresset, Lee Spiller, David Potter, Alex Potter, Jeff Fischer, Ray Fisher, Megan Creel, Deborah English, Milton Burton, and David A. Williams. Each of these folks are early readers, and their comments and advice has been invaluable. And a special thanks to reader and friend Rocky Molidor for your enthusiastic support. Since several of you folks have proofread them all, I suppose I'll have to learn to write much more quickly. -gw ![]() The Accounting Firm of Bierstone & Travis (possibly) The
other
Bill
Travis:
Some guys don't know when to quit! And that's a good thing for the rest of us. Imagine what the world would be like if this guy had given up. I shudder to think. This is William Barret Travis, the defender of
Alamo fame.
A Texas
icon, the original rabble-rouser. The kind of guy that would spit in a
tryant's eye. And did!This guy, and 182 other men, held off Santa Ana and his Mexican Army for 13 days, giving General Sam Houston enough precious time to recruit and train an army. The lives of these men were bought dearly. The Bill Travis Mysteries bear no relation to this man in any form. In an excerpt from Arrowmoon, Bill says the following: "The name’s Bill Travis. No relation. Well, maybe some relation. Who knows? I’ve been too busy to try and track it down and there are few relatives outside of my immediate family that I’m close to enough to ask about it. The other Bill Travis, defender (and loser) of the Alamo, that’s another guy entirely." The original Bill Travis does, however, deserve a great deal of our respect. Where would we be today without him? Notes From Central Texas: [Excerpt from "Author's Note" in The Devil To Pay]: "One of the chief problems any author has is with his characters: what they say and what they do. A very good friend of mine and early reader, Megan Creel--a fantastic author in her own right--once informed me as to the degree Bill Travis miffed her by what he said and did. And while she didn’t put it in those exact words (Megan is far more plain-spoken than that) I thought I clearly understood what she was saying until I realized she was looking to me for some explanation--as if I had something to do with what Bill Travis said and did! I told her: “Yes, Megan, I feel exactly the same way,” or words to that effect. All by way of saying that Bill Travis, his family, his friends, and even his antagonists, are prone to say and do just about anything, and what they say and do is, and I suppose, always will be beyond the scope of my control. And that is as it should be. When I began this series of books in about the Fall of 2004, I had every intention of writing no more and no less than what these characters told me to write. I didn’t want any pattern, any script, any formula. What I wanted was something approximating the quality and texture of fine-grained sandpaper--I wanted “reality”, with all its grit, its stains and splotches, its prevailing winds and currents, and its propensity to exceed the expected. A casual look at any great work will clearly show a disdain for formula. In a word I wanted “organic.” But even that concept falls far short of what I wanted. What I really wanted was Bill as we find him here. I wanted him as alive as I was. I wanted him to feel the same air as me and my eventual readers felt. I wanted him to taste the same weak tea, to feel the same Monday evening tiredness and the self-same Friday night expectancy we all feel. And I wanted something else--that other element that keeps us all hanging on, even in the darkest hour: I wanted him to win in the end. I wasn’t sure if he was going to (and I’m still not) but I sure as hell was pulling for him then when I typed out those first words: “All the hell started on a Monday...” REAL TEXAS
MYSTERIES
The
Marfa
Lights:
In my book Capitol
Offense, Bill has a little run-in with the Marfa Lights. What
are they? Nobody knows. It's a bonafide Texas mystery.
I've been there myself, witnessed them. They're little balls of light, bobbing up and down just after sunset, phasing through the colors of the spectrum and doing odd dances, disappearing and reappearing further on. They move faster than anything manmade (that we know of) can travel, and, according to local accounts, they've been doing it since before the invention of electricity. So, this little corner is the appropriate place to post a few little pictures: ![]() ![]() ![]() The Juniper
Springs*
Stage Coach Gold:
This one is a real
mystery
for any
of my readers who happen to like using Google Earth. There was a stage
coach robbery a very long time ago. I've triangulated where the old
accounts say the strong box was hidden in a cave with three skeletons,
as discovered by a certain Mexican sheep-herder who bugged out to New
Mexico and later to California because of his intense fear of ghosts
(and who can blame him?). And guess what I found? I had to laugh when I
saw this after hours of pouring over the old texts and working with
Google Earth. As they say, "'X' marks the spot". Anyone living near
these coordinates and wanting to investigate, get permission before
trespassing. I'm pretty sure this is where the gold and silver used to be.
31
degrees, 55 minutes 01.59 seconds North
(I previously miss-marked
this location as 104
degrees, 48 minutes West, an
error of one
mile too far to the west. Please take a second look!)104 degrees, 47 minutes 37.60 seconds West And while you're mountain climbing (or hill climbing--take your pick) you might as well get the panoramic view from atop El Capitan, just a stone's throw away. * page 181 if you click on this link ![]() A
Short
Story
In Full:
THE
GRID
Todd
and Janine Weathersby were a couple of kooks who lived over the hill
and down the dirt lane from me and the missus. When I say kooks, I
really mean it. You might know the kinda folks I’m talking about. Used
to be this
guy who picked up cans on the side of the road all the time going
into town, day-in, day-out. Had him a little four-wheeler with a big
basket on back for the thirty gallon sacks he’d fill up and a
little pole sticking out the side for those spools of plastic trash
bags they sell for a buck-fifty at the value-mart. A real
goony-bird, that one. Never waved, never did nothing excepting pick
up those cans with a long stick with a bent nail on the end of it. The
Weathersbys were like that can-guy. Only the Weathersby’s were
mad about the grid. Getting off of it, that is. -gw |
[Excerpt from Slow Falling] PROLOGUE The song goes: “She wants what she wants when she wants it. . .” sung in a slow drawl. The steel guitar comes in right on time between this line and the next, which is essentially the same line repeated many times, and then fades into the background where it belongs. You can hear the music outside the old country tavern next to the row of Harley-Davidson motorcycles which are all outfitted in chrome and leather and wearing a thin veil of dust. An orange-pink glow hop-scotches along silvery, polished mufflers like distant slow lightning, the reflection of a rapidly dwindling sun. Engines tick away road heat like old clocks winding inevitably downward, and for a moment the bikes become the mechanical counterparts of flesh and blood riding-beasts of old, though these hot-blooded animals drink in high octane and spit fire and their masters are the riders of dragons, if in no other place than their own minds. For now the masters are inside tanking up and telling tall tales out of school while their mounts outside bide the time. Inside, they are, to a man, doctors, lawyers, and sundry account executives, the starched white collar usually worn on week days now hanging in dark closets, having been placed there by paid maid services or dutiful wives who dream of the men they could or should have married instead. The wide boards beneath their boot-shod feet are oak planks with even cracks between that could swallow a silver dollar, but only ever swallow grime and spilt beer. “I’m telling you, they went over that cliff,” a high-pitched, sand-papery voice intones. The speaker is white-haired, close-cropped, and he hasn’t shaved since Friday morning. He thumps the table. “Boom.” “More like tumble-tumble-tumble-tumble- –OOF!” another voice states, and laughs out loud. “It’s not funny,” White-hair says. “Those are some hair-pin turns up there, and the bottom is five... hundred feet down.” “You almost said ‘five-thousand.’” There is no reply to this quip. Instead White-hair tastes his beer with a thin, quick tongue. Winces. “Besides,” the other voice says, “I think it’s someone’s practical joke.” His voice is deep, commanding, yet bored. Also he is younger than White-hair by twenty-five years. “You go out and put up a cross at a particularly bad hair-pin turn way up in the hills, you tack a board to it and paint ‘Lee and Grace--Rest In Peace’ on it, and what do you get? I’ll tell you. Every guy on a bike heading into that turn slows way the hell down just to read it. It conjures an image, you know. I can almost see them myself. Grace has got her arms around Lee. She reaches down and gives his junk a good squeeze, he turns his head to smile back at her, then all of a sudden she’s screaming in his ear. He looks up but it’s too late. Through the guard-rail and down in slow motion like Thelma and Louise while Grace is screaming and flailing her arms about and Lee’s yelling ‘Mommmmaaaa’. It’s bullshit. That’s what I say.” “I think there’s a story there,” White-hair says. “It could make a good book, maybe.” “The sad story of Lee and Grace,” the other man says. “I thought you were a bankruptcy lawyer.” “I am,” White-hair says. There are a dozen peacockish men and a few rough-looking women in the long, undulating room, and toward the back brood a pair of coin-operated pool tables with tell-tale wear spots crying out for new felt. Blurry, color-faded balls click into one another while clouds of blue cigarette and cigar smoke slowly tumble about eight feet overhead like indoor weather. In essence, the place is it’s own time zone wrapped up in a time warp and shielded from the remainder of Earth by an IQ-dampening field of blaring, introverting, badly-written and badly-sung country music. You could call the place Honky-tonk Heaven or Nowheresville or Shit-kick Inn, take your pick, except for the fact that a long, hand-painted sign on the tin roof outside proclaims it as Sonny’s Place, whoever the hell Sonny is or was. The bartender’s name is Pud. “Hey Pud! Another pitcher here!” Pud slaps his meaty arm across the counter and flexes his fingers. “Ten bucks,” he says. “Come on, man. You know I’m good for it,” the voice says. “Ten bucks,” Pud repeats. Pud sweats. He sweats constantly. He sweats as much behind the bar as he does at home in the middle of the night while wondering if there exists a woman that is thin-waisted, thin-wristed, and as pretty enough for his tastes as she is--and of necessity must be--unmindful of his smell, the last of which he is too well aware. His doctor has labeled his malady as adrenal-fatigue, which sounds too much to him like an old-woman’s disease. He knows it will kill him one day, suddenly and without warning. Alexander Hamilton crosses Pud’s palm and cool, salving medicine is administered from a rusted spigot. The front door opens with nary a rustle. In walks a thin man. Not just thin, though, but gaunt. The word that comes to mind is 'emaciated.’ His clothes are nearly falling off of his bony frame and are apparently held up by their heavy dirt content alone. The man is covered in dirt from head to foot. He could be a grave-robber, but upon closer inspection--if one can look for more than a fleeting glance at such a specimen without wincing away--the bets shift over toward the grave-robbee column. And, as is traditional when confronted by the supernatural, the weird, the fantastic, or the downright ugly, conversation in the room comes to a grinding, gear-stripping halt. “Falling,” the man croaks into the room. The music blares on. The incident of the appearance of the gaunt man is palpable, and the passage of time has no power over it. Pud takes three steps to his right and unplugs the juke box, whereupon a species of silence ensues. The silence is made even more thick by the distant, oscillating rattle of the deep freeze somewhere to the rear of the kitchen and by big trucks moving along the Interstate a mile away over the fields. Every head turns. Not a few faces register disgust. “Falling.” “Say, old-timer,” White-hair speaks up, his voice little more than a thin whistle. “You look like you could use a drink.” “Or a sandwich,” Pud says. “Or two,” the man who thinks road-side crosses are the first relative to a bad joke intones, then adds: “Or a bath.” White-hair titters and very nearly speaks, but the bulging eyes of the dirty man track toward him, fall upon him, devour the words before he can form them in his mind. “The Falling,” the man says, and then, heeding his own words, tumbles forward onto the oak floor. “Shit,” Pud says, and comes around the bar as chair legs scrape backwards around the room. They gather around him in a circle, the formerly mildly-inebriated now stone-sober. Pud begins to reach downward but his thick slab-of-lard hand pauses in mid-air. The figure stirs, coughs, and flecks of blood spray the floor. “Shit,” Pud intones again. It is his anchor-word. It is a word that ends all words. “Faw-ling,” the man says. A trickle of blood runs from his mouth, followed by a syrupy flood of it. It pools there on the board and runs into the wide crack. “That man,” a busty woman wearing a skin-tight tank top says, “is dead.” “What the hell do we do?” White-hair asks. “Good God,” Pud says. “I think maybe I better call Sonny.” ------- To read more, click here. Austin Austin, Texas, is the perfect place to begin an adventure. Austin is home. Once you've visited here, you'll never forget it, and you'll want to return again and again. Known around the world as the undisputed Live Music Capitol (especially during South-By- Southwest), it is so much more. The best food, the best plays, the most interesting--and colorful-- people, Austin has more to offer than any other city on Earth. Here's how it all began: ![]() This is Austin, Circa 1840. Notice the old Capitol Building on the hill above the town. And here is Austin today! ![]() Needless to say, the place has grown! Down the hill (south) of the Capitol is the Colorado River, which snakes up through the rugged hills west of Austin, as shown here: ![]() Austin is this author's home. And you might find Bill Travis around here somewhere too. AN ASIDE: Consequently, you can grow things tropical in Austin. These grapefruit are courtesty of friend and fan Lorraine Nishiguchi: ![]() I'm happy to show them to the world, Lorraine. -gw A COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY OF CRIME IN TEXAS FROM 1600—2000: INTRODUCTION No undertaking is worth one’s time and effort unless there is challenge involved. A game requires a playing field. In this instance the playing field is great in scope. If one adds to the staggering figure of her 266,807 square miles the dimension of time traversing backwards across four hundred years to the limit of human memory, the playing field takes on still greater breadth. One must, therefore, narrow the scope of a history to a limited subject, be it an event, a group, an area, an institution, or even a family or a single man or woman. The biography of a person is therefore finite, but only to the extent of the length of the subject’s life and their impact on history. The annal of an event must needs be limited to the characters, the spectators, and the time involved from beginning to end, and possibly to the effect of the event on the larger future. A family might affect the course of history (and many families have had far-reaching, almost unquantifiable effects). But a state? A state which was once a sovereign nation (though poor economically) among sovereign nations? Such a history must sketch over the lives and events as mere cardboard cut-outs, shadows of who and what they really were, for space and interest are both limited quantities, both on the page and in the mind of men and women. Narrowing the history to one subject, however, grants to the writer a canvas of greater dimension, and the portraits there carefully fashioned, each one, one by one, may then vie for attention, and may, to some extent, come to perhaps breathe once more, which is all any storyteller would ask. In such an instance the portraits so rendered need not be mere thumbnails--individuals personalities could be accorded greater depth, the artist’s stroke may be more broad. This author became interested in crime history when asked sometime around 1998 by fellow writer Patrick M. McConal, to go on a quest to unearth the history of a single crime and the subsequent trial as part of his graduate thesis at Sam Houston State University. The crime was the robbery of a certain jewelry store in Bryan, Texas in the early 1930s. The perpetrators were confederates of the infamous Bonnie and Clyde of Texas outlaw legend. This author took the bait. The search went from interviews with witnesses of those long-ago events (several of whom died within days and months of their interviews) to digging through courthouse records, treks across the state, until a crime spree of an extent not before imagined began to come into focus. What emerged was a picture, which was very ably summated in McConal’s “Over The Wall: The Men Behind the 1934 Deathhouse Escape”, published by Eakin Press in 2000. It is well worth the reader’s perusal. This author was fortunate in knowing Patrick. On the day the book was printed, the two of us went for a ride into the country where I showed him a very old secret: a road that no longer appears on any map--a road grown over and cut by run-off. A road with no beginning and no end (much like this current volume). A mile down that old, disused road there is a bridge over a wide creek, the self-same bridge over which Patrick’s desperadoes fled wailing sirens all of seventy-five years before. We shared an ancient flash of cognac that day on the bridge under the shadows of over-arching elms, swatted mosquitos, and communed with the past. Patrick passed away in August of 2004 at too young an age, and Texas and America lost a national treasure. But aside from his humor, which was fine-honed, and his research and writing--both deadly accurate--he also passed along something else. It is that something else which you are now holding in your hands. From a long-developed friendship with McConal, I was allowed the opportunity to meet many Texas lawmen, each of whom deserve their own chapter here: Texas Ranger (and now Judge) Raymond Martinez, Deathhouse Warden Jim Willett, retired Ranger Curator and Historian Tom Burke, Texas Lawman George Gavito. And the list goes on from there. I consider each of these my personal friends. These are the good guys, each and every one. What emerged from these encounters in the years since a flask of shared cognac, was a keen interest in the history of crime and law in Texas. What is it like now? What was it like when my father was a prison guard at Ferguson Farm in the early 1960s? What was it like a hundred years ago? Two hundred? Or for that matter, four-hundred, when the Spanish and French claimed this soil for their Sovereigns? It is to be hoped that these questions are answered with the present volume. Voltaire once referred to history as “that Mississippi of lies”. He was not far afield. Voltaire knew human nature. He was well aware of our penchant--or rather, ability--to take a stale and lifeless “fact” and embellish it into a something worthy of interest. However, when one is fortunate to have to hand a subject that by and of itself draws its own interest, there is no such need. Hence, while it cannot be safely said that the present volume is devoid of “lies”, as Voltaire so aptly put it, the data and portraits offered here have in no wise been seasoned. Where a witness or a biographer of old has put forth an “opinion”, such has been ever-so-carefully excised, leaving only the report. Further, conspiracy theory need not apply here. The emphasis here is accuracy and interest. It is to be hoped that this volume will seek out its readers. One can only imagine where it will be of greatest utility, or, in the vernacular “where it will end up.” Texas lawmen and judges have not, heretofore, had a single reference volume or set of volumes. Neither has the statistician, the legislator, or the Police Chief. It is my desire that this Comprehensive History fills the need of each. George Wier December 2008 ![]() |