THE CITY OF ROCKS

As this post publishes, my younger son and I are driving across New Mexico and Texas to visit my older son, my brothers, and sister—not to mention a host of nieces, nephews, in-laws, and probably an outlaw or two. The purpose of this introduction is to say everyone should buy a copy of my new book, The City of Rocks… as well as The Zozobra Incident and The Bisti Business. I have to finance this trip somehow, you know.

At any rate, I wanted to give the readers another glimpse of the new novel. The following is a doctored version of a post from my publisher's blog:

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Artist: Maria Fanning

Valuable Boot Heel Area Duck Kidnapped—No Ransom Demand Yet Received

At least according to Don Travis’s The City of Rocks

That was the headline in southwestern New Mexico newspapers recently... at least in Don Travis's The City of Rocks, the third in the BJ Vinson Mystery Series published by DSP Publications. The Zozobra Incident came out last November, followed by The Bisti Business in March of this year. City is due out July 18. The fourth novel The Lovely Pines is in production at DSPP with a target date of 2018. The fifth novel in the series, Abaddon’s Locusts, is growing fat on OneDrive on my desktop.

City opens “tongue-in-cheek,” but things become serious very quickly. The following is the book’s blurb”

Confidential investigator B. J. Vinson thinks it’s a bad joke when Del Dahlman asks him to look into the theft of a duck… a duck named Quacky Quack the Second and insured for $250,000. It ceases to be funny when the young thief dies in a suspicious truck wreck. The search leads BJ and his lover, Paul Barton, to the sprawling Lazy M Ranch in the Boot Heel country of southwestern New Mexico bordering the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

A deadly game unfolds when BJ and Paul are trapped in a weird rock formation known as the City of Rocks—an eerie array of frozen magma that is somehow at the center of the entire scheme. But does the theft of Quacky involve a quarter-million-dollar duck-racing bet between the ranch’s owner and a Miami real estate developer, or someone attempting to force the sale of the Lazy M because of its proximity to an unfenced portion of the Mexican border? BJ and Paul go from the City of Rocks to the neon lights of Miami and back again in pursuit of the answer… death and danger tracking their every step.

Regular readers of either my books or my weekly blog at dontravis.com know that BJ, my protagonist, is a former marine and Albuquerque PD detective turned confidential investigator after he was shot on the job while apprehending a killer. They also know that he is a gay man, neither in the “closet” nor flamboyantly advertising the fact. Actually, he considers himself a pretty regular--but very lucky—guy once he found his life mate, Paul Barton. Unlike the prior books, Paul plays a prominent role in City. He’s a grad student at UNM and intends to pursue a career in investigative journalism. What better place to start practicing than in the middle of one of BJ’s cases. But maybe he picked the wrong one to start with when people start dying.

DSPP informss me I have to tell you a little about myself. Boring! But here goes. Growing up as a tubercular child in my native Oklahoma, I eschewed physical activities and lived in the local library. It was not until I found myself in the US Army, trudging up and down the mountains of southern Germany with a light machine gun or a Browning Automatic Rifle slung over my shoulder that I discovered I could do what any other guy my age could do. But by then, the die of my life had been cast, and I was hooked on reading, and by extension on writing. I tried oil painting for a while (and did okay with it), but it did not scratch my creative itch, so I returned to a childhood habit of writing short stories. After selling around 60 of them under another name, I decided to try my hand at novels.

After eight years as a widower, I have not yet learned to cook or keep an orderly house. Passable… but not orderly. I do not own a pet, but have dog-sat a great little black and white Papillon named Gizmo for fourteen years. Yep, fourteen years. This is the best of all worlds. I get to see Gizzy often and then return him to his parents, just like a grandchild.

To give back to the community, I am active in SouthWest Writers and teach a free writing class at the North Domingo Baca Multigenerational Center in Albuquerque. I warned you it was boring.

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Feel free to render your unvarnished opinions at dontravis21@gmail.com.

The following information provides contact information and the DSP Publications links:

Don Travis Email: dontravis21@gmail.com

Blog: dontravis.com

Facebook: Don Travis

Twitter: @dontravis3

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/City-Rocks-Vinson-Mystery-Book-ebook/dp/B071Z9V7DT

DSPP: https://www.dsppublications.com/books/the-city-of-rocks-by-don-travis-393-b

Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-city-of-rocks-don-travis/1126419974

Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-city-of-rocks/id1217068245

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-city-of-rocks

As always, thank for being a reader.

Don

New blogs are posted at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

A Quick Visit to Columbus, NM via THE CITY OF ROCKS

The Village of Columbus, NM

We’ll visit my novel, THE CITY OF ROCKS, for today’s post in order to return to what I always intended with the blog: to highlight places of interest in the great State of New Mexico. And the little border town of Columbus is unique among them. As our intrepid Confidential Investigator, BJ Vinson, speeds down the highway on the way to the town, he reviews some of the history of the place. The following scene takes place in Chapter 4 of the book.

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THE CITY OF ROCKS

I sped down Highway 11 toward Columbus. It wasn’t the quickest route to the Boot Heel country, but the town had once played a dramatic part in a clash between two nations, and as a history buff, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to sop up some of that flavor. Besides, it was getting late in the day for a drive over into Hidalgo County where the M Lazy M was located. I planned on remaining overnight in the little village named for Christopher Columbus just north of the border across from Palomas, Mexico.

The Impala breezed south over a landscape reminiscent of the drive between Deming and Las Cruces: flat, high desert terrain broken by blue-shadowed mountains in the distance. Heat waves rising off the asphalt were pleasantly hypnotic.

Columbus is an official, twenty-four-hour POE—Point of Entry—between the two nations, although it sits about three miles north of the actual demarcation line. Border City is where the crossings actually occur. Its proximity to the Mexican State of Chihuahua is what gave the place its brush with history.

A Casualty of the Villistas' Raid

         The actual story is long and convoluted, as well as highly controversial. Two revolutionaries, Venustiano Carranza and Francisco Villa, better known as Pancho, tossed out a dictator named Victoriano Huerta and then turned on one another. A Columbus merchant and arms dealer by the name of Ravel supposedly sold defective ammunition to Pancho Villa. When the guerilla demanded a refund, the merchant reputedly told him the Ravels no longer dealt with Mexican bandits.

On the morning of March 9, 1916, one of Villa’s generals attacked Columbus with more than 500 men. The twenty-four-hour invasion burned down a significant portion of the town and killed fourteen American soldiers together with ten residents. Another eighty or so revolutionaries were dead or mortally wounded. The raid led let to General John J. Pershing’s Punitive Expedition deep into Mexico.

My initial glimpse of Columbus was as a disruption astraddle the flat, monotonous highway. After entering the town of mostly one-storied adobe affairs—some painted in brash colors of green or pink—I found a bed and breakfast and registered for the night.

Santa Fe New Mexican Headline

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In his brief, overnight stay there, BJ takes time to visit some of the historic relics, including Pancho Villa’s death mask, before departing for the M Lazy M Ranch.

I hope you enjoyed this abbreviated look at the border village of Columbus, New Mexico. Keep on reading, guys.

Don

New Posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

City of Rocks – On the Way to the Boot Heel Country

As a matter of historical interest, the Boot Heel part of New Mexico and a good portion of southern Arizona (including Tucson) was acquired from Mexico by the Gadsden Purchase signed by the US on December 30, 1853 and approved by Mexico (after some changes imposed by the US Senate) on June 8, 1854. The treaty settled a dispute over almost 30,000 square miles of territory following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War.

The third in the BJ Vinson mystery series takes place in the New Mexico portion of this acquisition. The as yet unpublished book is THE CITY OF ROCKS, a title suggested by a 1,280-acre New Mexico state park of the same name situated north of Deming near the small town of Faywood. Thirty million-year-old rocks create what look to be an ancient city situated in the middle of grasslands. Deming is not in New Mexico’s Boot Heel county, but the action in the book is centered on a ranch farther south and west in that part of the state. The following are some excerpts from the novel which show the reader portions of this beautiful state as BJ heads from Albuquerque to the M Lazy M Ranch. The hash tags indicate succeeding scenes from the novel.

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Las Cruces, the county seat of Doña Ana County, was a city of around 75,000 perched on the Chihuahuan desert flats of the Mesilla Valley. This flood plain of the Rio Grande boasted pecan orchards, as well as onion, chili, and other vegetable fields. The city was also a rail center and the home of the state’s only Land Grant School, New Mexico State University. The stark, striking Organ Mountains rose abruptly to the east.

I parked in front of the East University Avenue headquarters of State Police District Four around 8:00 a.m. I wanted to follow protocol and have Dispatch let the officers on the scene know I was on the way.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled in behind a swarm of activity. Emergency flares blocked the westbound lanes of the highway. I pulled up to the uniformed patrolman diverting traffic to the eastbound lanes and identified myself. He used his shoulder unit to announce my arrival and then waved me over onto the verge. It looked as if the crime unit had about finished with their work. In the distance, I could see a banged up black Dodge Ram pickup upside down snug against the corridor fence. A man in civilian attire detached himself from a small group and started for me as soon as I got out of the car.

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I headed for Deming, hoping to locate some of the dead man’s family or familiars who might be able to give me a lead before driving to the M Lazy M Ranch. The sixty-mile stretch between Las Cruces and Deming was relatively flat and dominated by creosote, honey mesquite, and yucca. An ungodly amount of cacti and spiked plants of every size and description lived among these anchors. Except, of course, the tall, stately saguaros the entire world associated with the American Southwest. To the best of my knowledge, those grew only in Arizona.

Road kill revealed the makeup of the local fauna: jackrabbits, desert terrapins, kangaroo rats, and the occasional rattlesnake. I even saw the desiccated carcass of a coyote hanging over the fence bordering the Interstate. Of course, in the Cooke’s Range to the north, there would be cougar and black bear and mule deer. The nearby Florida Mountains boasted ibex and mountain sheep with occasional unconfirmed sightings of the Mexican jaguar. I know this because I’m a confirmed history buff, especially the history of my native state.

The day was hot beneath a blue-flame sky, probably around a hundred degrees. But like we’re fond of saying down here, it’s a dry heat, so it doesn’t hurt much, especially at an altitude of three-quarters of a mile above sea level. Dark, menacing thunderheads hovered to the south over Mexico, but the monsoon hadn’t yet taken hold.

Deming, with a population of around 15,000, was the county seat and principal town of Luna County. It is also located in rockhound country. A good part of southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona is a paradise for rock and mineral collecting. Most of the old mines are closed now, but on public land, it’s legal to collect bits and pieces of once-treasured rocks. Geodes. Fire agate. Jasper. Quartz. Azurite. Even turquoise chips can often be found in old dumps.

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I sped down Highway 11 toward Columbus. It wasn’t the quickest route to the Boot Heel country, but the town had once played a dramatic part in a clash between two nations, and as a history buff, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to sop up some of that flavor. Besides, it was getting late in the day for a drive over into Hidalgo County where the M Lazy M was located. I planned on remaining overnight in the little village named for Christopher Columbus just north of the border across from Palomas, Mexico.

The Impala breezed south over a landscape reminiscent of the drive between Deming and Las Cruces: flat, high desert terrain broken by blue-shadowed mountains in the distance. Heat waves rising off the asphalt were pleasantly hypnotic.

Columbus is an official, twenty-four-hour POE—Point of Entry—between the two nations, although it sits about three miles north of the actual demarcation line. Border City is where the crossings actually occur. Its proximity to the Mexican State of Chihuahua is what gave the place its brush with history.

The actual story is long and convoluted, as well as highly controversial. Two Mexican revolutionaries, Venustiano Carranza and Francisco Villa, better known as Pancho, tossed out a dictator named Victoriano Huerta and then turned on one another. A Columbus merchant and arms dealer by the name of Ravel supposedly sold defective ammunition to Pancho Villa. When the guerrilla demanded a refund, the merchant reputedly told him the Ravels no longer dealt with Mexican bandits.

On the morning of March 9, 1916, one of Villa’s generals attacked Columbus with more than 500 men. The twenty-four-hour invasion burned down a significant portion of the town and killed fourteen American soldiers and ten residents. Another eighty or so revolutionaries were dead or mortally wounded. The raid led let to General John J. Pershing’s Punitive Expedition deep into Mexico.

My initial glimpse of Columbus was as a disruption astraddle the flat, monotonous highway. After entering the town of mostly one-storied adobe affairs—some painted in brash colors of green or pink—I found a bed and breakfast and registered for the night.

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These scenes touch on just a bit of the rich history of our great state. Hope you enjoyed them as much as I did.

Thanks for reading,

Don

Next week: The Boot Heel.

New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.