Keller on Horseback

“He rode a thousand miles to kill a man he never met.”

That line, which so engages Keller when he reads it on the cover of a paperback Western, did in fact leap out many years ago from the cover of just such a book. Or so I was told by Knox Burger, then my agent; earlier, when he'd been an editor at Dell Books, an employee of his had written it as a book's blurb. (That subeditor was in fact Donald I. Fine, who went on to establish Arbor House, where he would publish many deserving books, several of them mine.)

Never mind. Several years after Keller's debut in "Answers to Soldier," I thought further of him and followed that first story with "Keller's Therapy." And then I was invited to contribute a story to an anthology of hired-killer stories, and of course Keller came to mind, and I wondered how he'd fare in a modern version of the Old West.

The result, "Keller on Horseback," first appeared in the 1994 anthology, Murder is My Business. And of course it becameone of the early chapters in the first episodic Keller novel, Hit Man.


Genre: Mystery