JACK MARTIN'S WEST

All Sheriff Cole Masters wants is to raise a family with the woman he loves. However, upholding the law in an era when gunfire speaks louder than words can be a risky business.
   Cole makes an arrest for the brutal murder of a saloon girl but the killer is the son of a wealthy rancher and it is clear the old man will do anything to see his son set free. Soon the peace of the small town is shattered with deadly force and Cole finds himself a lawman on the run for murder.
   The rancher wants Masters dead and the two deadly gunmen on his tail are sure they can do it. Soon blood will run as Cole Masters attempts to reclaim his tarnished star.

"I’M always chasing rainbows," says Gary Dobbs who as Jack Martin sees his debut novel, The Tarnished Star, published this June. "I guess I still am. I’ve never really been conventional and the thought of being so scares me. I was in a punk rock band, Vibrating Flesh, and I guess part of me will always be that anti-establishment, anti-norm, kid."

Born into a Welsh working-class family and raised in a community where every male over the age of sixteen seemed to be a coal miner, Gary found himself looking at his grey surroundings and dreaming of somewhere different.

"It must have been a hard life for my parents but as kids we were shielded from the hardship. My father worked and my mum kept house – it was as simple as that in those days. And although we were never financially comfortable, I look back at my early years with great affection. We didn’t have computers, video games and DVDs to keep us occupied and we’d spend most of our free time playing down the local woodland – building swings, constructing dams across the river, collecting conkers. Just the usual stuff that everyone used to do."

Imagination was always important to Gary.

"My mum taught me to read – she was horrified to discover that I couldn’t read properly when I left junior school.  She decided to put her foot down and it became a battle of wills between the two of us – she kept me in for weeks until finally I gave in and concentrated. When I went to the comprehensive school after that summer holiday I was literally the top reader in the class. Teaching me to read was the best thing anyone ever did for me. It opened doors to a colourful, imaginary world that has helped me through life's knocks and blows."
 

From then on, Gary couldn’t get enough reading material and he started exercising his imagination by writing his own stories, in longhand in old school exercise books.

"I’d read every comic I could get my hands on, often swapping with friends, and I progressed to the dog-eared paperbacks I’d scrounge from friends or buy in jumble sales. I discovered Ian Fleming and read every Bond novel several times and writers like Dennis Wheatley, George G. Gilman, Guy N. Smith, James Herbert would fuel my young imagination. I remember writing a novel when I was about thirteen. The Ultimate Spy was a cross between The Six Million Dollar Man and a character from 2000AD comic called Mach 1. It filled two school exercise books and I wish I still had that. That was my first writing. And then one year I had a W. H. Smith typewriter for Christmas and there was no holding me back."

Gary’s maternal grandfather, Jack Martin, was a tall, no-nonsense type, who could have stepped out of the pages of one of the lurid paperbacks Gary used to devour. He was a retired coal miner with chest problems due to exposure to the thick, lung-clogging coal dust, but to Gary he seemed ten feet tall and strong as an ox.

"If anyone gave me my love of the Wild West then it was this guy. I’d spend hours and hours with him, walking the dog, doing the garden and watching each and every western that played on the television. He was also a voracious reader of western novels from writers like Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour, Max Brand and too many others to remember. And he’d pass his old books down to me.

"He’d also tell me stories of his own time in the West. In truth, the furthest west he’d ever been was Tonypandy. It didn’t matter though, and as a kid I believed every word of those wild stories. The tales would often see him teamed up with John Wayne, Audie Murphy or Gregory Peck. An aunt recently told me he had told her he was a one-legged fighter pilot during the War. Of course, the fact that he had two legs seemed to pass us by as children!

"So when I started writing western fiction it was an honour to adopt the Jack Martin name as my byline. When The Tarnished Star comes out this June, you'll see it's  dedicated to my grandfather and I like to think that he’s looking down smiling from that big ranch in the sky."