"While the stories are fiction, the journey is real."

Website: https://www.calebandlindapirtle.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/calebpirtle3

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CalebPirtle

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/~/e/B007HB4YNO

Caleb Pirtle III lives in the present but prefers the past. He is the author of more than eighty books, including four noir thrillers in the Ambrose Lincoln series set against the haunting backdrop of World War II. His Lonely Night to Die features three noir thrillers in one book, following the exploits of a rogue agent who has fled the CIA. He is expendable, and he knows it. His award-winning Boom Town Saga begins with the story of a con man who comes to a dying East Texas town during the Great Depression, promises to drill for oil, and falls in love with a beautiful woman who just may have killed her husband. 

Pirtle is a graduate of The University of Texas in Austin and became the first student at the university to win the National William Randolph Hearst Award for feature writing. Several of his books and his magazine writing have received national and regional awards.
Pirtle has written two teleplays: Gambler V: Playing for Keeps, a mini-series for CBS television and The Texas Rangers, a TV movie for John Milius and TNT television. He wrote two novels for Berkeley based on the Gambler series: Dead Man's Hand and Jokers Are Wild. 

Pirtle's narrative nonfiction, Gamble in the Devil's Chalk is a true-life book about the fights and feuds during the founding of the controversial Giddings oilfield. His coffee-table book, XIT: The American Cowboy, became the publishing industry's third bestselling art book of all time. 
Pirtle was a newspaper reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and served ten years as the travel editor for Southern Living Magazine. He was editorial director for a Dallas custom publisher for more than twenty-five years. 

Do you recall how your interest in writing originated? What/who inspired you to publish your first book?

From the day I read my first real chapter book, I knew I wanted to be a writer. However, I never thought about writing a book. That was a hill far too steep for a barefooted boy from Pitner’s Junction, Texas, to climb. All I wanted to do was write for a newspaper and maybe someday become a small-town editor. During my years at The University of Texas, I served as an intern each summer for the Gladewater Daily Mirror and left with a degree in journalism to become managing editor for the Mount Pleasant Times. I wrote feature stories about Texas for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, then was hired by Governor John Connally to promote Texas when he launched the Texas Tourist Development Agency. I eventually wound up as travel editor for Southern Living Magazine and was given the opportunity to write my first travel book, The Unending Season, about Callaway Gardens. That was eighty-seven books ago.

How much of your books are realistic? Are the experiences based on someone you know, or are they events in your real life?

I wrote my historical thriller series about Ambrose Lincoln because I have always been fascinated by World War II. My father worked at a bomb plant when I was three or four years old, and all the families would gather once a week to watch propaganda films about the evils of Nazi Germany. The images, the scenes were terrifying and left a lasting scar on my psyche. My mother, father, and I would crowd around the little radio each night and hear Edward R. Murrow report from the front lines of war. It was like hearing the plotlines from a novel as they actually happened.

I grew up on the cusp of the East Texas Oil Boom that broke the back of the Great Depression in the 1930s. It was a wonderful time to hear stories first hand from oilmen, roughnecks, roustabouts, and oil speculators who turned the color of money to black. I lived in the country, but we drove to Kilgore on a regular basis, and the town had 1,100 oil derricks inside its city limits. Oil begat greed. And greed begat murder, and we were surrounded by farmers who went to sleep dirt poor and woke up filthy rich. But it was a time when too much was not enough. Those oil field stories rattled around in mind for decades before I finally started pulling them out to write my Boom Town Saga series about a mythical East Texas town that strikes it rich. 

What is your current project? Will you share a little of it with us – kind of a sneak peek?

I am currently working with a group of authors who are all producing mysteries that take place in the fictional Texas town of Magnolia Bluff. We will publish once a month, beginning next April, and we will all be using each other’s characters in each volume of the series. My novel, Death Rides a Tired Horse, follows a loner, a sort of mystery man, who shows up in town, takes a job running the presses for the community newspaper and eventually becomes the editor when the publisher dies an unexpected death. The whole town fears May twenty-third. Someone always dies on May twenty-third. No one knows why. As the publisher says, “We know there will be a casket. We just don’t know who’ll be lying in it.”

What do you or did you do in the ‘real world’ when you’re weren’t writing?

I seldom live in the real world. I like the characters in my fictional worlds so much better. I know the good guys from the bad guys. In the real world, I don’t. However, we moved to North Fort Worth to be close enough to watch my ten-year-old grandson play baseball and soccer, and my nine-year-old granddaughter play soccer. So my real world is attending most practices and all of the games. Between seasons, Linda and I travel. We wander around and talk to strangers, collect stories, and figure out how to squeeze them into the books we are writing. It’s not difficult. Truth is  indeed stranger than fiction. But truth works better as fiction.

What are the challenges in writing your books? (Ex: logistical, research, literary, psychological, etc)

Most of my early books were either travel or historical books. They required a lot of research. What surprised me was learning that well-written novels require just as much research. The books may be fiction. But they must read as though you can find their stories in newspapers or scholarly historical works. For example, when I wrote Night Side of Dark, I had a scene where a German train pulls into a Palawy, Poland, and is loaded with Jewish people who have no idea where they are headed. I searched for days until I found the number of the actual train who carried the Jewish families away from Palawy. I’m sure no one notices or cares about the authenticity. But I do. And I feel better about it. 

I am a firm believer that any genre – romance, mystery, thriller, science fiction, fantasy – should be written with the deft touch of literary fiction. It’s not enough to simply tell a story. We must work as hard as we can to tell it well with the emotion and imagery that leaves a lasting impression when the last page is read.

Are there any quotes or verses you find inspiring? What are they and why?

My life is controlled by a Hemingway quote. When asked how to become a writer, he said, “Apply the seat of your pants to the seat of a chair and write.” That’s what I do. You can’t simply think about a story. You can’t sit around and dream about a story. You can’t look ahead and wander how it will turn out. You have to write it. And if you don’t like what you’ve written, take a deep breath and write it again.

Tell us a little about yourself. Perhaps something that a lot of people do not know?

Back in another lifetime, on the farm where I grew up, our nearest neighbors were African American. I learned to play baseball with the family’s three sons when I was seven or eight years old, and one summer, their father hired me to pick cotton for a penny a pound. It was hard work but, with any luck, I would go home at sundown with a new dime in my pocket. I was rich. A whole dime would buy two packs of baseball cards.

Are you a planner or a pantser when it comes to writing? (Planner – outline; Pantser – sit down and write)

I’m a Pantser. I write the way we take vacations. I know the beginning. And I know where I’m going. But I have no idea how to get there. I’m simply looking forward to the side roads, back roads, and crossroads I’ll run across along the way. I write my opening sentence and ending sentence at the same time. However, when I reach the end of the story, I always have to re-write the last sentence, and that means I have to tie the story together by going back and re-writing the first sentence. I write as though I am the reader. If I knew what would happen in advance, I wouldn’t go to the trouble to writing the novel. I may know who’ll die, but I have no idea who the killer is until my character flushes him out.

If there was anything you could change regarding your publishing experience, what would it be and why? Also, do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

I have been blessed. I wanted to be a writer. And writing is all I’ve ever done. I gathered hometown news for small-town newspapers. I served as police reporter and covered crime stories for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. I wrote speeches for Governor Connally. I was Southern Living’s first travel editor. I worked for twenty-five years, writing books for a custom Dallas publisher. And now I write historical mysteries and historical thrillers because I prefer the past to the present. The forties and fifties were a grand, glorious, and mysterious time. 

For aspiring writers, I have this advice. Don’t try to write like other writers. Don’t even try to write like you think another author might write. Simply sit down and tell your story with the emotion you feel when you tell it. The magic of writing is telling your story from one heart to another. The worst mistake we can make is to believe we are an author. What’s an author? He or she just fills up pages with words. What you want to be, and what I want to be, is nothing more than a storyteller who cries when the character cries, who feels pain when the character hurts, who laughs when the character laughs,  and who can fall in love with a single kiss on about page forty-six. 

Is there anything you would like to say to your readers and fans?

We writers aren’t important. Our readers are. If it wasn’t for them, we would have no reason to write. And if I couldn’t write, what else would I do? As Maya Angelou said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”