Skye Revisited

In February, Forge will release a mass market double of two of my early Skye's West novels, Rendezvous and Dark Passage. Since the late eighties I've been writing a series called Skye's West, about a pressed British seaman named Barnaby Skye, who escapes the Royal Navy at Fort Vancouver in the 1820s, and makes his way into the North American interior, eventually entering the fur trade and marrying two Indian women. Over the years the series found a readership and has been the mainstay of my royalty income.

Back in the eighties I wanted to escape the sort of mindless frontier gunslinger western I had come to dislike, so I proposed this series about a Brit who survives in the western wilderness and eventually becomes a noted man. Skye and his two wives, Victoria of the Crows, and Mary of the Shoshones, along with the evil and ugly horse, Jawbone, become a nation unto themselves. The series extends through nineteen titles, and ends with the birth of the third generation of Skyes in the New World. I succeeded: I wrote a saga of the American west that had nothing to do with frontier gunmen shooting it out.

Forge, a division of Macmillan, has kept the series going all these years, putting out various hardcover, mass market, audio, large print, and electronic editions. At least one of the novels has gotten a starred review. So I am pleased to see this edition, which I believe is the first double one reaching the market.