Michael Moorcock's first vivid encounter with the West was watching Gary Cooper, a dandified Plainsman, featured on a program with an equally dashing Joel McCrea. Buffalo Bill had been shot in old-fashioned Technicolor and captured exactly the quality of the Western annuals, with titles like Scouts in Buckskin and Heroes of the Prairie, that he inherited from his father and grandfather. That early exposure along with Tom Mix and Hopalong Cassidy creator Clarence E. Mulford led Michael Moorcock on a life long love affair with the American West. This influence would help Moorcock to create some of the most popular characters in imaginative fiction. Tales of the Texas Woods has the famed Masked Buckaroo challenge the Apaches and their enigmatic leader El Lobo Blanco, the White Wolf! This original novella allows a glimpse of Elric in a Multiverse adventure. Then you learn how Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of the Texan's honor and an adventure of the Eternal Champion in Sir Milk and Blood. Thrill to the adventures of Johnny Lonesome! Plus seven more startling stories from the mind of England and Texas' greatest author of fantasy and science fiction. In this book of never-before-collected tales experience the many worlds of the man that the London Times called "a myth-maker" through a uniquely western slant. Complete with essays on western film and fiction, this unique collection is a book that only a master craftsman like Michael Moorcock could write. So mosey on up and take a seat, pardner and read a collection of Western tales from Texas with a little sidetrip to London thrown in.
Author
Michael John Moorcock is an English writer primarily of science fiction and fantasy who has also published a number of literary novels. Moorcock has mentioned The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw and The Constable of St. Nicholas by Edward Lester Arnold as the first three books which captured his imagination. He became editor of Tarzan Adventures in 1956, at the age of sixteen, and later moved on to edit Sexton Blake Library. As editor of the controversial British science fiction magazine New Worlds, from May 1964 until March 1971 and then again from 1976 to 1996, Moorcock fostered the development of the science fiction "New Wave" in the UK and indirectly in the United States. His serialization of Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron was notorious for causing British MPs to condemn in Parliament the Arts Council's funding of the magazine. During this time, he occasionally wrote under the pseudonym of "James Colvin," a "house pseudonym" used by other critics on New Worlds. A spoof obituary of Colvin appeared in New Worlds #197 (January 1970), written by "William Barclay" (another Moorcock pseudonym). Moorcock, indeed, makes much use of the initials "JC", and not entirely coincidentally these are also the initials of Jesus Christ, the subject of his 1967 Nebula award-winning novella Behold the Man, which tells the story of Karl Glogauer, a time-traveller who takes on the role of Christ. They are also the initials of various "Eternal Champion" Moorcock characters such as Jerry Cornelius, Jerry Cornell and Jherek Carnelian. In more recent years, Moorcock has taken to using "Warwick Colvin, Jr." as yet another pseudonym, particularly in his Second Ether fiction.
