"How I Came To Write This Book" Jack Martin

"How I came to write this book", The Ballad of Delta Rose, Jack Martin

I’d been reading a lot of hardboiled writers and I was conscious that my own writing style was going in that direction. I like the minimalist style of writing, because when it’s done well it’s tremendously effective at creating mood. And the question of whether a western, my genre of choice, can be noir is an interesting one. I think the answer is a resounding, “YES”. The western is a genre flexible enough to be anything you want it to be.

So thinking along those lines I wanted a protagonist who was living on borrowed time, and knew this. He knows his life will soon end and he wants to redeem himself for a past ill-lived. At the time I’d been re-reading a lot of comic books that I used to read as a kid and I recalled a World War II character called D Day Dawson. The thing about Dawson was that he was carrying a bullet inside him that will eventually kill him, and he vows to fight on until that day. It was not a great stretch of the imagination to place a similar scenario in a western setting. And so Delta Rose was born.

“Take a sad song and make it better.” Hey Jude, The Beatles

And that’s how I think of the novel – a sad song, almost a narrative poem and so I came up with the title, The Ballad of Delta Rose. A ballad, to my mind, is a sad song and I just love that name, Delta Rose and so The Ballad of Delta Rose it is.

One of the thing about conventional publishing, as opposed to the almost instantaneous quality of ePublishing, is that books can often have a long lead time, and by the time Delta Rose sees print this July it will be over a year since I typed the last words. I re-read the book in proof form only the other day and I really am pleased with it. I think I’ve turned out my most complex, assured work, and I feel there is a haunting quality to the ballad.

That, however, is up to the reader to decide.

Jack Martin is a pen name for Gary Dobbs. Born in South Wales 1965, Gary as a bit part actor has appeared in Doctor Who, Torchwood, Moonmonkeys, Casino Royale, Larkrise and the Big I am. Gary has been published extensively under his real name and as Jack Martin he was responsible for The Tarnished Star which was the fastest selling Black Horse Western of all time. His second western novel, Arkansas Smith was also published by Robert Hale LTD and in July 2011 his third western from Robert Hale LTD is The Ballad of Delta Rose.