Milton Burton’s excellent adventure
Texas has produced a long line of top crime novelists — James Lee Burke, Jim Thompson and Joe Lansdale, to name a few. But as Jerome Weeks reports for the Dallas Morning News, add Milton Burton’s name to the list, now that his debut A ROGUE’S GAME is just out:
A lifelong Texas resident, Mr. Burton, 58, retired from teaching American history in 1995. The following year, he started writing a “satire of everything I loathe.” When it reached 800 pages, “I was acquiring new loathings faster than I could include them.”
So he ditched that and started a crime novel. And another. He wrote The Rogues’ Game in 23 days, he says – “blazed it off.”
And The Sweet and the Dead in 28. The Rogues’ Game was released last week, and The Sweet and the Dead is scheduled to be published next year.
He has finished four books, sold the two stand-alone novels, and his agent, Ron Goldfarb, is currently peddling the other two novels –
Mortal Remains and Night of the Red Moon – as the start of a series based on Bonaparte Foley, an 81-year-old retired Texas Ranger.
"One day," Mr. Burton recalls of his burst of good fortune, "I was late on the electric bill and, as usual, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Then I got Ron’s call. It was like going from a little yellow school bus to a 747 overnight."
But the funny thing about Burton is that he’d always known he wanted to be a writer, but something held him back:
At 25, Mr. Burton already knew he wanted to write a novel someday – but didn’t start writing until he was given an old Packard Bell computer in 1996.
"I’m a poor typist," he explains. "My writing career had to wait for the coming of word processing."
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Oh, there is so, so much to be said for that delete key…I daresay it’s made or broken careers, too.
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