Hola, amigos — It appears fall has flung itself into even hot spot Phoenix. So get out and check the color, but only after checking out this great — though at times this issue, somber — newsletter.

EULOGY

Bradley Levine is a childhood friend of mine who lives in Merrick, Long Island. He works in New York City as a sales rep for a children's clothing company and commutes an hour each way on the LIRR. One day, about six years ago, he came to visit me in my office at Berkley Books. He wanted some reading material for his commute to and from the city. I loaded him up with a dozen books, mostly best-selling authors like Tom Clancy and Dean Koontz. Two weeks later, I asked him if he needed anymore books. His response was, "Do you have more of those Westerns by that Tippette guy? His stuff is the best."

Over the next six weeks, my friend read every Giles Tippette novel we'd published at Berkley. When Giles moved over to Pocket Books under the editorship of my friend Doug Grad, I had to get those for Bradley as well. When I told him last week that Giles had passed away, his reply was one I think Mr. Tippette would have appreciated: "Shit! No more books?"

Giles Tippette died last week at the age of sixty. He may have been older; his actual age was but another mystery Giles liked to surround himself with. Either way, he was too young. I prefer to think that he crammed twice as many years into those sixty (which would have made him 120 years old). He was at times, in addition to being a first-rate novelist, a rodeo cowboy, gold hunter in Africa, mercenary, a columnist for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, a border patrol investigator, and even, in his earlier years, a movie actor. (Look for him briefly in l955's VIOLENT SATURDAY, which starred Victor Mature and Ernest Borgnine. When I asked him why he didn't pursue a career in the movies—he was brutally handsome then and most certainly star material—he replied, "The bastards wanted me to cap my teeth."

Yup—that's Tippette.

My first meeting with him, in March l990, was a lot like riding the Cyclone roller coaster in Coney Island for three straight days. I had just arrived at Berkley Books as their newly appointed Westerns editor. My predecessor, Tom Colgan, had wisely signed Giles to a two-book contract the year before. In a status report to me detailing the Western list and its authors, Tom sagely wrote, "Giles Tippette is a great, great writer but a little eccentric." I was to learn, two weeks later, just how eccentric he was. I consider myself fortunate that I'm still alive to tell the story today.

Giles's agent at the time—indeed, for his entire career—was William Morris heavyweight Owen Laster. After our first phone conversation, Giles decided he wanted to meet me in the flesh. One quick call to Laster was all it took—twelve hours later I was on a plane to Corpus Christi, where he and his lovely wife, BetsyAnne, were living at the time. I didn't take it as a bad omen that BetsyAnne met me alone at the airport. When I asked where Giles was, she responded, "Oh, he's home waiting for you." If I had known at that moment what awaited me, I would have hightailed it back to New York "faster than a fart in a tailwind" as Giles would have said.

I was greeted by a still handsome but somewhat worse-for-wear man in his early fifties. He was clad in standard Tippette attire: shorts, a T-shirt, bare feet. He was alternately chugging his fifth can of Miller Lite, chain-smoking Carlton cigarettes, and throwing snotty tissues at the family cat, Squeak, who took the attacks with a bored indifference. When I asked Giles why he was tossing Kleenex at the cat, he said, "He irritates me."

Yup. That was Tippette.

Giles handed me a copy of his new manuscript, MEXICAN JAILBREAK (which we later retitled JAILBREAK to avoid offending any ethnic groups). It was the first book of his I worked on and remains my favorite of all his novels to this day. Giles then ordered me back to my hotel and was very clear in his instructions: "Don't come back until you've read it." He loaned me his slightly broken down Nissan station wagon, which promptly ran out of gas a mile from anywhere, forcing me to walk back and forth in 98 degree heat. I think I sweated out a Coke I drank in l967 that afternoon.

I returned to my hotel. I read all day and halfway into the night. I couldn't have put that manuscript down if I'd wanted to. This Texas boy could clearly sling the words.

I guess here is as good a place as any to mention that, at the time, Giles was drinking pretty heavily. It never interfered with his writing, it's important to note, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't affect his personality. It certainly affected mine. I relate not to pass judgment on the man but only because his imbibing played a role in what followed.

I returned to the house. Giles quizzed me on the manuscript to prove that I had indeed read it. I answered his questions with flying colors. Problem was, he still wasn't convinced. Despite the fact that I could remember entire lines of dialogue from the story, Giles accused me laying on the beach all day, soaking up the sun. (If he'd known me better at the time, he never would have accused me, because I hate going to the beach.) Nothing could dissuade him otherwise. To prove his point, he pointed a finger an inch from my nose and said, "I know y'all have been on the beach, 'cause you got yourself a tan."

"Of course I have a tan," I snapped back. "I got it walking back and forth in the Texas sun when your piece of crap car ran out of gas!"

Giles was testing me, of course, as only a Texan can test a Yankee, to see what I was made of. He knew I'd read his manuscript, and I knew that HE knew, but the attack continued. Heated words were exchanged, and the next thing I knew, I flung the manuscript at him, scattering pages all over the den. This time, Squeak ran away, bond paper being heavier than Kleenex.

I'm a little hazy at the exact sequence of events that followed (I may have blocked them out) but our argument ended up with Giles pulling a very large handgun out of the closet and pointed it at my head. It wasn't loaded, but I didn't know that at the time. As a lifelong New Yorker used to gun-crazy criminals, not to mention being the victim of three armed robberies when I was driving a taxi, I was no stranger to this kind of violence. (Still, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't scared a little—hell, this was Texas and you just never knew.) He cocked the trigger, and when I still didn't cave in to his satisfaction—like crumpling into a heap and begging him for mercy—he tossed the gun on the couch, grinned from ear to ear, and said, "Fuck it. Let's eat." We ate.

Yup. That was Tippette.

To his dying day, Giles always denied the incident. Whether he was too drunk to remember it or later, in his sobriety, too embarrassed by it, I cannot say. (Giles quit drinking completely a year or so after this visit, and never touched a drop from that day on. As a remembrance, he kept the last can of Miller Lite on the mantleplace next to his books, where it doubtless remains to this day.

Giles spent the next three days trying his damnedest to get my goat. He arranged a boat trip in the choppy waters of Port Arkansas in an effort to get me seasick. I didn't. He sent me out for six pounds of Chinese food and refused to eat a bite of it. He cursed me, punched me a few times, and I think he even kicked me once or twice as well. By the time I went home, black and blue, I knew we would be friends for life. And we were. The good times, Tippette-style, didn't end there. A month or so later (he was still on the bottle at this time), he called me at home and told me to be very careful on the street. "There's an Iranian hitman who's going to kill you," he claimed. I said to him, "Tell him to get in line. I have a dozen authors who haven't been paid who'd love that privilege."

As a Western editor, I made quite a few trips to Texas over the next seven years, and I visited Giles and BetsyAnne every chance I got, first in Corpus, and later when they moved to Tyler. All told, Giles and I did almost twenty books together. After he left Berkley to write for my friend Doug Grad at Pocket, we still spoke once or twice a week and continued to do so. A typical voicemail message from Giles usually went something like "Call me back in the next fifteen minutes, you dumb bastard, or I'll rip your lungs out."

I always called him back.

It always bothered me that the WWA never saw fit to award him with a Spur, but at the same time, it's not too surprising. He did his best to alienate the organization, and even took a perverse delight in ignoring them as best he could, though secretly, he would have been thrilled to win. Nevertheless, Giles had his fans in and out of the WWA, and I know he had their respect. No less than a pro like Joe Lansdale loved Tippette's work and said to me once, "He's got a true voice." Mystery writer Ed Gorman commented, "He's the best in the business. He writes crime novels set in the West."

His health started to go about four years ago. The years of chain-smoking and boozing and carousing had taken their toll. Our conversations became shorter and shorter as time went on, as he winded quickly now. His writing never suffered, though, no matter how sick he was. He also refused to write on a computer, hammering out each new book on a battered old Royal typewriter he named Virginia. When the circulation in his fingers began to go, and it was difficult for him to bang the keys, Doug and I begged him to break down and buy a word processor. Our pleas fell on deaf ears. Instead, he began to dictate his books to a local Tyler lady, who typed them up. He was 80 pages into his new novel for Tor when the end came, and wherever he is (probably tearing St. Peter a new you-know-what for something or other; Giles liked to keep the pot simmering), I imagine he's pretty sore about it. He always liked to finish what he started.

Giles hated funerals, not even for himself. I feel a little cheated because I won't get to say farewell to him or mourn him at graveside, but I also understand. The last thing Giles would have wanted was the spectacle of people blubbering over him or a man of the cloth he never knew mumbling a lot of hogwash about him. That just wasn't his style. So I'm afraid these words will have to suffice. That, and the extraordinary body of work he leaves behind. No one wrote about Texas the way Tippette did, and no one loved the Lone Star State more.

Since there won't be any funeral for Giles Tippette, I'll just have to eulogize him here. I'll make it short and sweet, the way he would have liked it:

Lord, we give you Giles Tippette. Be smart and don't piss him off, okay?

SAD NEWS

Donald Wilson, the longtime husband of WW Chat member Betty Wilson, died Thursday night (Oct. 14) at the VA hospital in Phoenix after a long illness. He will be sorely missed by Betty, and by all who knew him. Our hearts go out to Betty at this time of loss. If anyone wants to send their personal condolences, Betty's e-mail address is BETNAZ@aol.com.

WWA NEWS

WWA's new Web site is up and going, including the new October ROUNDUP online edition. The new address is http://www.westernwriters.org

This new Web domain is an exciting step toward achieving greater publicity for our organization, and a better value for all members.

I hope you'll take the time to browse the new site and offer any feedback you may have.

Sincerely,
Steven Law

Fellow member and Webmaster

SCARY STORY

Something had disturbed his mule, so Bill Ferguson eased away from the glow of the campfire. He clutched the smooth wood stock of his rifle as he crept over the desert sand. If'n it's a wolf, Ferguson thought, I'll put a bullet clean through its skull. He didn't really care if it wa a four-legged wolf, or a two-legged one. The critter faced the same fate.

The night sky held many pinpoints of stars, but it was pitch black beyond the rock cove in which he had camped. His mule was braying and carrying on as if there was something right against it's nose.

Ferguson had been riding through the Borrego Badlands since early March of 1867. They called it the badlands because it was a hell on earth and empty as a widow's cookpot. It was in the southern part of San Diego, California, close to the Mexican border. He was hunting for ol' Peg Leg Smith's mine. The stories told of gold just lying around on the ground — big, black rocks that were rich inside, black because they turned color under the hot sun. He couldn't understand why no one could find the place. He could only surmise that people didn't have the perception with which he was gifted. He'd found Wilson's mine last spring when no one could find it. The mine was hidden behind brush off a stream bed in the High Sierra. It didn't offer much, a few flakes of color at most, but there was enough to afford him a grubstake for this trip.

The land here was barren and dry. He'd been searching for three months, always thinking the next turn in the gorge would produce the sight of the black rock, but nothing had come of it. He hated like all hell to go back to Arizona and face his cronies with the fact he couldn't find Peg Leg's gold.

The mule thrashed and brayed as if its life was being threatened. Ferguson moved out into the open desert. What he saw froze him to the spot and prickled the hairs on his neck.

It was a skeleton!

The bone caricature stumbled around on the desert floor like it was looking for something. It had legs and arms connected in a well formed skeleton figure. There was a lantern hooked to the ribcage and the light glowed from inside the chest. When the skeleton moved, the lantern clacked against the bones.

The thing was big! Ferguson figured it had to be at least eight feet tall. It clattered around like it had lost it's head, but the skull was right there where it belonged. Ferguson wondered what it could possibly be looking for. He watched as if in a trance and when the skeleton turned around, it looked as if it was staring right at him. The chill that struck through Ferguson's body rippled down his legs straight into his boots. He almost dropped his rifle.

A horrible thought came to Ferguson as he dashed back to the safety of the boulders. The skeleton had to be old Peg Leg himself coming back for the gold. Bill wasn't sure if the old man had died, but if he had, it was most likely him out there. He'd heard of an old Indian fable that said that when a soul returned to its natural place, he came back twice his size.

Bill moved back to the red glimmer of the campfire. He felt around for his pack and pulled it against his chest. He eased toward the mule, which had settled down. He packed his gear onto the animal's back and pulled it to the opposite side of the camp. He walked off into the darkness, letting the mule pick the way.

He would be out of the Borrego Badlands by sunup, heading toward Arizona. As Bill shivered once more, he glanced back. He'd have some story to tell them back home about the Peg Leg's mine. And if any of them wanted to deal with an eight-foot-tall, lantern-toting skeleton while looking to grab ol' Peg Leg's gold, well, Ferguson figured, they was welcome to have at it.

CHILLING TALE

The full moon was brilliant in the black sky above the vast, open desert. It was an October moon that appeared to be very close to the earth. Its white ball revealed deep crevices and pockmarks that many people believed represented a face. The light was so brilliant that a man could easily read the time on his pocket watch.

Jed Parker led his mule across the desert sands where the old Butterfield stage route ran south toward the California-Mexican border. There were no defined lines of hills, mountains or rocks against the horizon, just an empty plate that stretched immeasurable miles. Parker had come from the north, out of the mountains, where he had panned the stream beds for gold. He ended his mining attempt with an empty sack and abandoned thoughts of finding the precious metal. His luck was dead. He hadn't found anything in months. He tried to think of amusing thoughts to ease his melancholy, but nothing seemed to lighten his soul. He heaved a sigh.

With a startled jerk, he spun when he heard the thunderous pounding of several horses.

Coming hard at him were six black horses, white plumes flowing from their nostrils and spittle flew from lolling tongues. The animals were pulling a big, black Concord stage. He jumped to the side and clung to his mule's neck as tons of horseflesh thrashed the ground and spoked wheels churned against the sand. Parker looked up at the driver and his breath caught in his throat when he saw a faceless figure with skeleton hands clutching the reins. He heard the driver shout some kind of command and a booted heel stomped against the coach frame.

Parker stood in cold awe, his weight against the mule, as the end of the coach whirled to the southern horizon and disappeared. He could still see the wheel tracks in the soft sand. He trembled from the experience. He had heard stories about a ghost stage that traveled across Carrizo Pass to an unknown destination, but he had never believed them. Now, he was a witness to it.

He eased away from his mule and followed the rutted wheel tracks. A smile worked across his face. He chuckled and ran his fingers over his mustache. His luck just changed. He had a good story to tell at the next saloon. There'd be a heap of folks would buy him a drink for this weird tale.

GHOSTLY DOIN'S

Ghosts have been in evidence since the beginning of time. All past centuries have their tales of apparitions of a ghostly person, animal or strange being.

There has been no satisfactory explanation for ghosts. Where do they come from? Are they real? Ghost experts explain that they are the forms of those who do not believe they are dead and are forever looking for something or someone.

Mansions and very old houses have always been excellent places to find ghosts. One such house is the Whaley house in San Diego, California, which is at least 141 years old. It's in Old Town State Historical Park and has been recognized by the state of California as an "Official Haunted House." This identity is shared with the Winchester House in San Jose.

Before the Whaley house was built, the area was empty land near the bay. It became the site of a public execution when a sailor, Yankee Jim Robinson was sentenced to hang for stealing a boat. The county built a gallows and Robinson was placed in a flat bed wagon with a rope around his neck. When the horses were pulled away, Yankee Jim's body swung at the end of the rope. The action had been too slow and did not break Jim's neck. He twisted and jerked for almost an hour in a slow strangulation.

In 1857, the property was sold to a new arrival from New York, Thomas Whaley. Of course, no one told Whaley about the execution. He had builders construct a lovely two-story house for himself and his new bride, Anna, on the exact spot where Yankee Jim was hanged. Whaley rented a room in the downstairs area to the San Diego county for a courtroom and a place to store county records. For many years the courtroom saw a considerable number of unsavory characters brought in to be sentenced.

San Diego began to grow, and with it came a new section of buildings south of the old townsite. It soon became known as "new town," and a rift soon arose between the two. The "new town" faction wanted the courthouse to be relocated to its section, along with all the records, but the "old town" faction refused. An order was issued to surrender the county records and all the courtroom furniture, but the people of "old town" declared martial law. They sandbagged the house and surrounded it with armed men. A cannon was posted in the front yard.

For days, tension was high, with watchful eyes scanning the horizon for the first attempt of seizure. Nothing developed. There was a deadlock, as each side kept within its unseen border lines. It was with this lapse that Whaley made a trip to San Francisco. He left without telling anyone except his wife, but the word somehow leaked out that he was gone. It didn't take long for "new towners" to move into action. They greased their wagon wheels for silence and covered their horses' hooves and slipped through the dark to Whaley's house. The "old town" guards were taken unawares, and at gunpoint their enemies stormed the house. They held Anna Whaley and her young child hostage while they stripped the house of the courtroom furniture and county records.

When Whaley returned to find the courtroom gone and his family hysterical, he flew into a rage and sat down to write a letter to "new town" administration. He demanded rent and payment for damage caused by the raiders. He reprimanded them for the terrible fright they given his family. Whaley wrote many letters with the same angry demands for nineteen years, but none of his demands was ever met.

Thomas Whaley died in 1887, his letters never answered. His wife, Anna, lived in the house until her death in 1913. Their only child, Lillian, resided in the home for another 40 years. When she died in 1953, the property was sold to San Diego County. The county restored the house and when workers began their projects, windows began to open and close by themselves. Footsteps were heard in the hallways and along the stairs. When they installed a burglar alarm, it mysteriously kept going off at odd hours. Workers felt harassed by an unseen presence.

Sybil Leek, an English spiritual medium, was brought in. She arrived at the Whaley house without knowing anything about the owner. She immediately met an angry spirit who communicated with her. It was he who opened the windows and set off the alarm. When asked why, he said it was because he wanted to show he was still the master of the house. This spirit was Thomas Whaley, furious yet at the injustices that had been done to him.

Other mediums visited the house and one claimed to have seen a man hanging in the archway between the parlor and the music room which would be the exact location that Yankee Jim was hanged. Some of the spiritual hunters saw prostitutes, thieves and murderers standing in a courtroom. Visitors taking photographs were amazed to see captured on film the shadowy figure of a human that wasn't there when they took the shot.

There was also the clinging odor of a cigar. No one was allowed to smoke in the house and it was thought to be none other than Thomas Whaley, who loved Havana cigars. A woman seen walking the hallways in her nightgown is believed to be Anna Whaley.

Visitors have also claimed to have seen a spotted dog and a baby. The dog belonged to Whaley and the baby would have been young Thomas who died in the house. There were reported sightings of many other ghosts who no one seemed to know, except possibly those who were sentenced in the courtroom in the house so many years ago. There was a young child who was accidentally killed in the back yard who wandered around the rooms asking the women visitors, "Are you my mommy?"

The State Park volunteers who keep the property in order are unfazed by all the stories they have heard. They are shrugged off as other oddities in the Whaley residence. Workers accept it and ignore the events. One volunteer who was dusting was asked by a spirit ghost, "What are you doing?" and she simply answered, "Dusting." The answer satisfied the ghost and it disappeared.

The Whaley house is available for sightseeing in the Old Town section of San Diego — if one is undaunted by the prospect of a run-in with "real" ghosts.

(Source: MYSTERIOUS CALIFORNIA by Mike Marinacci)

WESTERN HISTORY In keeping with the Halloween theme, we bring you this Associated Press report for your edification:

VIRGINIA CITY, Nev. — The folklore of the Old West is often a mishmash of myth and reality, so an archivist knew he was onto something when he discovered a newspaper account of one of the state's first public hangings.

"I can see that stiff straight corpse hanging there yet," the reporter wrote, "with its black pillow-cased head turned rigidly to one side, and the purple streaks creeping through the hands and driving the fleshy hue of life before them. Ugh!''

The reporter? Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.

Guy Rocha found the 1868 article after learning that a number of newspapers had approached Twain about writing for them upon his return from a tour of Europe and the Holy Land that year.

A request to the Library of Congress and the University of California turned up all six stories Twain wrote for the Chicago Republican — long before The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

"Bingo, there it was," Rocha said. "Nobody had ever looked at them closely. The big one was the eyewitness account of the hanging of John Millian, which I believe had not seen the light in 131 years."

The long-forgotten dispatch reveals details about two personalities who would become larger than life: a slain prostitute-turned-heroine and an itinerant newspaperman who became one of America's best known writers.

It sheds new light on a little-publicized period of Twain's life: after he got his start as a newspaperman and before he went on to write his greatest works and speak out against capital punishment.

"Most the time he is a humorist," said Rocha, who published the account in the September-October edition of Nevada Magazine. "This one didn't have much humor."

Twain scholars were aware that the author-to-be was in Virginia City at the time of the hanging, "but virtually no one knew he wrote an eyewitness account," Rocha said.

The tale of Julia Bulette — called "the prostitute with the heart of gold" — and her killer has become folklore in an offbeat state famed for casino gambling, the Burning Man counterculture festival and, of course, legal prostitution.

In its heyday, Virginia City was home to 40,000 people, four banks, five newspapers, six schools, seven churches and about two-thirds of the state's population. Its Comstock Lode of silver and gold made instant millionaires out of grubby miners, though Twain wasn't among them.

As for Bulette, historian Susan James describes her as the "Queen of the Red Lights." Her portrait still hangs in many of the saloons in Virginia City's National Historic District.

James has argued that impassioned newspaper stories, dime novels and popular imagination transformed Bulette's image from that of a simple frontier prostitute into the darling of the Comstock.

The Territorial Enterprise, where Twain started as a reporter, once cited her "kindhearted, liberal, benevolent and charitable disposition." Virginia City's Engine Company No. 1 named her as an honorary member.

Bulette was murdered on Jan. 20, 1867, at the age of 35, by a man who fled with furs and jewels. Millian was arrested with some of the jewelry but said two men had framed him.

Folklore has it he was strung up by vigilantes — an oft-repeated story that reinforced tales of frontier justice among the rugged cowboys, miners and women who sought their fortunes in the Silver State.

But in reality, Millian was convicted by a district court jury and appealed all the way to the Nevada Supreme Court before he finally went to the gallows April 23, 1868, Rocha said.

"I never had witnessed an execution before and did not believe I could be present at this one without turning away my head at the last moment," Twain wrote under his adopted byline.

He went on to say that if any anyone deserved to be hanged, it was Millian — a "heartless assassin" who "knocked her senseless with a billet of wood as she slept and then strangled her with his fingers."

"This is the man I wanted to see hung. . . . He strode firmly away and skipped gaily up the steps of the gallows like a happy girl," he wrote. "I watched him at that sickening moment when the sheriff was fitting the noose about his neck, and pushing the knot this way and that to get it nicely adjusted to the hollow under his ear," he wrote.

"Down through the hole in the scaffold the strap-bound figure shot like a dart! - A dreadful shiver started at the shoulders, violently convulsed the whole body all the way down and died away with a tense drawing of the toes downward, like a doubled fist — and all was over," he wrote.

"I saw it all. I took exact note of every detail, even to his considerately helping to fix the leather strap that bound his legs together and his quiet removal of his slippers — and I never wish to see it again."

That's it for this issue, folks. We hope you enjoyed it. Remember, we'd like some Christmas/holiday stories for the December issue.

We'll even take Thanksgiving stories for next month, if any of you has something you'd like to contribute.

Until next month, then, be well.

Jack and Marge