James Carlos Blake

J Blake

The offspring of a whore mother and a homicidal father, Edward and John Little are driven from their home in the Florida swamplands by a sching parent's treacheries, and by a shameful, horrific act that will haunt their dreams for the rest of their days. Joining the swelling ranks of the rootless--wandering across an almost surreal bloodland populated by the sorrowfully lost and defiantly damned--two brothers are separated by death and circumstance in the lawless "Dixie City" of New Orelans, and dispatched by destiny to opposing sides in a fierce and desperate territorial struggled between Mexico and the United States. And a family bond tempered in hot blood is tested in the cruel, all-consuming fires of war and conscience.With soaring and masterful prose, James Carlos Blake brings to life an enthralling historical time and place--and a cast of memorable characters--in a stunning tale of dark instinct, blood reckoning, and fates forged in the zeal of America's "Manifest Destiny."

In the Rogue Blood

A Novel

Handsome Harry

Twee broers proberen zich in het midden van de 19e eeuw staande te houden in het Amerikaanse Wilde Westen.

Schurkenbloed / druk 1

"Eddie Gato Wolfe is a young, impetuous member of the Wolfe family of Texas gun-runners that goes back generations. Increasingly unfulfilled by his minor role in family operations and eager to set out on his own, Eddie crosses the border to work security for a major Mexican drug cartel led by the ruthless La Navaja.  Eddie falls for a mysterious woman named Miranda, whom he learns too late is the property of an intimate member of La Navaja's organization. When they're discovered, the violent upshot forces Eddie and Miranda to run for their lives, fleeing into the deadly Sonora Desert in hope of crossing the border to safety.  But La Navaja's reach is far and his lust for revenge insatiable. He sends a horde of operatives and the notorious bounty hunter El Martillo after the pair.  If La Navaja's men don't kill Eddie and Miranda, the brutal desert just may. Their only hope: help from the family that Eddie abandoned.  [This novel is] at once a riveting thriller and an inside look at the blood-drenched Mexican drug trade ..."--

a border noir

The rules of Wolfe

A recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize presents the story of the Wolfe family--a saga that spans three generations, centers on two sets of identical twins and the women they love and ranges from New England to the heart of Mexico before concluding in South Texas. Original.

Country of the Bad Wolfes

Kidnapped by a small-time gangster with big-time aspirations in Mexico City, Jessie Wolfe knows that her own family of notorious outlaws will come to her rescue by the author of The Rules of Wolfe.

A Border Noir

The House of Wolfe

"A master of historical and crime fiction, James Carlos Blake, in The Ways of Wolfe, delves back into the dark realms of the Wolfe family, a clan whose roots run deep on both sides of the United States-Mexico border, and whose prevailing interests straddle both sides of the law. Although the heir apparent to govern his Texas family's esteemed law firm--and its "shade trade" criminal enterprises--college student Axel Prince Wolfe joins his best friend, Billy, and a Mexican stranger in a high-end robbery that goes wrong. Abandoned by his partners, he is captured and imprisoned, his family disgraced, his wife absconded, his infant daughter Jessie left an orphan. Two decades later, with eleven years still to serve, Axel has long since exhausted his desire for revenge against the partners who deserted him. All he wants now is to see the woman his daughter has become, despite her lifelong refusal to acknowledge him. When the chance comes to escape in the company of Cacho, a young Mexican inmate with ties to a major cartel, Axel takes it, barely surviving a massive manhunt down the rapids of the Rio Grande and into a desert inferno. But with his chance to see Jessie now within reach, a startling discovery re-ignites an old passion and sends him headlong toward reckonings many years in the making. Racing across desolate landscapes from West Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, The Ways of Wolfe is a novel of one man's fateful struggle with his own abiding love and reckless spirit"--

The Ways of Wolfe

Some called him a Texas hero. Some called him the Devil himself. But on one point they all agreed. While he was alive, John Wesley Hardin was the deadliest man in Texas. A novel of uncompromising depth and power from western master James Carlos Blake, called “one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life” by Entertainment Weekly, The Pistoleer narrates the life of John Wesley Hardin, exposing the many different sides of a man who became a legend. For his forty-two years on this earth, Hardin’s name was synonymous with outlaw. A killer at fifteen, in the next few years he became skilled enough with his pistols to back down Wild Bill Hickock in the street. By the time the law caught up with Hardin when he was twenty-five, he had killed as many as forty men and been shot so many times that, it was said, he carried a pound of lead in his flesh. In jail he became a scholar, studying law books until he won himself freedom, and afterwards he tried to lead an upright life. It was not to be. By the time he was killed in 1895, Hardin was an anachronism—the last true gunfighter of the Old West. With each chapter told from a different character’s perspective, The Pistoleer is a reading experience not to be missed.

A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

The Pistoleer

With his debut novel on legendary Texas outlaw John Wesley Hardin, The Pistoleer, James Carlos Blake demonstrated a rare talent for western and historical fiction. His second book, The Friends of Pancho Villa, now back in print, further proved his mastery in the genre, taking on an even mightier figure of North American legend—the most memorable leader of the Mexican Revolution. Violently waged from 1910 to 1920, the revolution profoundly transformed Mexican government and culture. And Pancho Villa was its “incarnation and its eagle of a soul”—so says Rodolfo Fierro, the novel’s narrator, an ex-con, train robber, and Villa’s loyal friend. Killers of men and lovers of life, the revolutionaries fought for freedom, for a new Mexico, for Villa. And in return, they shared victory and death with their country’s most powerful hero. The Friends of Pancho Villa is a masterpiece of ferocious loyalty, bloody revolution, and legends that live forever.

The Friends of Pancho Villa

From CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger Award finalist James Carlos Blake, a gripping new installment follows the Wolfe clan on a search for a long-lost relative that inadvertently becomes tangled with increasingly dangerous characters

The Bones of Wolfe

The offspring of a whore mother and a homicidal father, Edward and John Little are driven from their home in the Florida swamplands by a sching parent's treacheries, and by a shameful, horrific act that will haunt their dreams for the rest of their days. Joining the swelling ranks of the rootless—wandering across an almost surreal bloodland populated by the sorrowfully lost and defiantly damned—two brothers are separated by death and circumstance in the lawless "Dixie City" of New Orelans, and dispatched by destiny to opposing sides in a fierce and desperate territorial struggled between Mexico and the United States. And a family bond tempered in hot blood is tested in the cruel, all-consuming fires of war and conscience.With soaring and masterful prose, James Carlos Blake brings to life an enthralling historical time and place—and a cast of memorable characters—in a stunning tale of dark instinct, blood reckoning, and fates forged in the zeal of America's "Manifest Destiny."

Pistolero

Eight short fictions that explore issues of love, violence, and vengeance in the stories of a colorful cast of characters who make their home amid the harsh world of the borderlands

Borderlands

James Carlos Blake is a masterful chronicler of the restless, outcast, the lawless, and the lonelyheart. His previous novel, In the Rogue Blood, was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Now he has written a powerful and rousing historical saga of family loyalties, blood feuds, and betrayed friendships; of bank robberies and bootlegging; and of a passionate love as wild at heart as the Everglades. It is the story of sworn enemies: John Ashley, a criminal and folk hero, the brightest star in a family destined to become the most notorious in south Florida; and Bobby Baker, a lawman born of lawmen, a violent, hard-hearted man driven by the searing memory of past affronts and the enduring hatreds the engendered. Ashley and Maker will clash many times over many decades. And as the twentieth century encroaches on their world—and the wildlands give grudging way to the rising boomtown of Miami—a feral, sensual mating will place one man in gravest peril...while his adversary contrives a dark, personal vengeance that could leave countless lives—his own included—in ruin.

A Legend

Red Grass River

In 1928 New Orleans, eighteen-year-old Sonny LaSalle is a top prep student and champion amateur boxer -- and he venerates his fraternal twin uncles, Buck and Russell, armed robbers who love their profession. Sonny secretly believes that he, too, is a natural outlaw and persuades his uncles to take him on as a partner. But when a bank job goes bad, Sonny is sent to jail, where he unintentionally kills a policeman who is the son of the most feared lawman in Louisiana, widely known as "John Bones." After nine months in the infamous Angola penitentiary, Sonny makes a harrowing escape and manages to reunite with Buck and Russell. The carefree trio head out for the boomtowns of west Texas, where the money flows as freely as the oil, unaware that vengeance follows close behind, as the cool, calculating John Bones begins a relentless campaign to hunt down Sonny ... no matter what.

A World of Thieves

Everglades, début du XXe siècle. John Ashley, âme du gang familial et héros populaire, mène une vie flamboyante de bandit de grand chemin, trafiquant d'alcool et braqueur de banques. Le shérif Bobby Baker, homme dur et amer qui a perdu une jambe et dont John a ravi la fiancée, a juré sa perte. Leur affrontement prend alors des proportions grandioses.

Hailed as "one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life" (Entertainment Weekly), James Carlos Blake turns to the blazing story of Stanley Ketchel, the legendary ragtime-era middleweight boxing champion and daring rakehell, whose brief and meteoric life burned with violence and tragedy in and out of the ring. The Killings of Stanley Ketchel is a sweeping and powerful literary adventure by one of our most daring novelists.

The Killings of Stanley Ketchel

From the raw clay of historical fact, James Carlos Blake has sculpted a powerful novel of both a man and an America at war with themselves. Here is the brutally honest story of free-spirit William Anderson, who is pulled into a savage conflict of state against state in the years leading up to the Civil War. When Bill suffers a catastrophic loss, a fury is unleashed in his anguished soul. He becomes the most fearsome guerrilla captain and earns a name that becomes whispered with reverence and terror: "Bloody Bill."

Wildwood Boys

The scrublands of South Texas, the warm coastland of the Gulf of Mexico, a cinderblock flophouse near the produce fields of South Florida: all are borderlands of mixed blood and spilled blood, of generations forged in fight, failure, and hope. In this extraordinary collection of short works, the masterful James Carlos Blake, author of In the Rogue Blood and the Wolfe family series of border noirs, journeys from the nineteenth-century Mexican frontier to the borderlands of today. Borderlands begins with an introductory piece of memoir, called “The Outsider,” about Blake’s own straddling of worlds and identities. In the following eight haunting stories, we meet Don Sebastián Cabrillo Mayor Cortés y Mendoza, a powerful landowner reduced to howling at the moon from behind the bars of a mental institution; an illegal immigrant in Florida who must reckon with his emotional turmoil after being robbed by a fellow Mexican; a Texas woman orphaned by disease and desertion, making her way into a violent world of men; and many more who pass through the shadows of the borderlands. Bold, honest, and humane, these pieces represent some of the best writing from one of the most original and authentic voices in contemporary fiction.

Short Fictions

Im Herbst 1842 bricht das Unglück über die Brüder Edward und John Little herein. In Georgia ersticht der Vater der beiden Jungen einen Mann, der so unvorsichtig war, ihre Mutter zum Tanz aufzufordern. Die Familie flieht vor dem Gesetz in die Sümpfe Floridas, wo es zur Katastrophe kommt. Nach einer Bluttat, die von nun an ihre Träume beherrschen wird, brechen die Brüder nach Westen auf, um dort ihr Glück zu finden. Aber das Grenzland zwischen den Vereinigten Staaten und Mexiko entpuppt sich als Vorhof zur Hölle, wo Mörderbanden und blutrünstige Indianer Angst und Schrecken verbreiten. Getrieben von ihren inneren Dämonen verstricken sich Edward und John Little in ein Leben voll roher Gewalt. Doch dann werden die beiden in den Wirren des Amerikanisch-Mexikanischen Krieges getrennt und stehen sich plötzlich auf feindlichen Seiten gegenüber ... Die Abenteuer von Edward und John Little sind eine grandiose Abrechnung mit dem Mythos des Wilden Westens. James Carlos Blake erweckt eine Epoche zum Leben, ohne sie zu verklären, und führt uns so vor Augen, dass Amerika auf Hass, Gewalt und Habgier gebaut ist. Auf das Böse im Blut. James Carlos Blake, 1947 in Mexiko geboren, verbrachte seine Kindheit in Texas. Nach der Highschool ging er zur Armee und schrieb sich dann an der Universität von Florida ein. Er machte seinen Abschluss und unterrichtete fast zwanzig Jahre lang am College, bevor er Mitte der neunziger Jahre als freier Schriftsteller nach Texas zurückkehrte. Seit 1995 hat er elf Romane veröffentlicht, für die er mit zahlreichen Preisen ausgezeichnet wurde, u.a. mit dem Los Angeles Times Book Prize für "Das Böse im Blut". James Carlos Blake lebt heute in Arizona.

James Carlos Blake

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