Charlie McMurty was only twenty-three years old and already the world was waiting to spread itself out at his feet He brought a herd north, got a great price, bought a beauty of a saddle, and had enough left over once he repaid his neighbors to buy a ranch so he could ask for the hand of his sweetheart. Unfortunately, on the way back to Texas he was robbed and left for dead. To make matters worse one of his attackers was his friend he'd hired to help him with the herd. All he had left was a big debt back home and a big hole in his chest. His new quest became the need to be able to return his neighbor's money. First he had to heal and learn some fancy shooting. Frank Roderus has had around 300 books published, many of them westerns. He's written under his own name but also under a variety of pseudonyms. So for the well-read fan of westerns chances are you’ve probably read and enjoyed some of his novels without realizing it.
Author
Frank Roderus wrote his first story—it was a western—when he was five. It was really awful, as might be expected, but his mother kept that typed and spell-checked short story tucked away until the day she died. Later, Frank became a newspaper reporter, thinking that books are written by authors which he most assuredly was not. He kept trying to write though, and eventually did it wrong enough to learn how to get it right. That first sale, a young adult novel published by Independence Press, was more than thirty years and a good many books ago. As a journalist, the Colorado Press Association awarded Frank Roderus their highest award, the Sweepstakes Award, for the best news story of 1980, and the Western Writers of America has twice named Frank recipient of their prestigious Spur Award. Frank passed away at age 73 in December 2015.
