OF TRUTH AND LEGEND BY EARL STAGGS

Earl Staggs

Please welcome a long time friend, Earl Staggs. He and his lovely wife, Carol, are transplants to North Central Texas from the Baltimore area. Earl and I belong to a small mystery writers group. His stories are always well written and often humorous. Earl is a spare bones writer who hates excessive adjectives and adverbs, so I feel it's my duty as a friend to throw in very and really to taunt him if he's going to read my work. What are friends for, after all?

His official bio reads: Derringer Award winning author Earl Staggs has seen many of his short stories published in magazines and anthologies. He served as Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Magazine and as President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. His novel MEMORY OF A MURDER earned thirteen Five Star reviews online at Amazon and BN. His column "Write Tight" appears in the online magazine Apollo’s Lyre. He is also a contributing blog member of Murderous Musings and Make Mine Mystery. He hosts workshops for the Muse Online Writers Conference and the Catholic Writers Conference Online and is a frequent speaker at conferences and writers groups. Email: earlstaggs@sbcglobal.net Website: http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com

Here's Earl:

OF TRUTH AND LEGEND

I love history, particularly about people, how they lived, loved, and died and what they did to earn a place in the archives of life. I learn about people from the past by reading books and watching movies and TV. The facts and truths are there, documented by stories handed down through generations or recorded by historians and writers.

But sometimes facts and truths foster legends and once born, legends develop an enduring life of their own. We may call them alternate truths, other possibilities, or myths. Was there really a King Arthur, or was he only a compilation of various myths and legends? Did George Washington really chop down that cherry tree, or is that only a legend forever linked to the truth?

How do we separate legends from truths? Fortunately, as a writer, I don’t have to. The truth is, I don’t want to. My job as a writer is to write an interesting and entertaining story, and it doesn’t matter if it is based on the truth, a legend, or a combination of both.

Available at Amazon

Not too long ago, I came across a legend that fascinated me, and I used it as the basis for a short story I called “Where Billy Died.” It could be my best story ever. It’s also one I talk about when people ask the question all writers are asked:

“Where do you get your ideas?”

Here’s what I tell them.

My wife and I took a day trip with friends to the small town of Hico, Texas, a couple years ago. There I learned a local legend. They contend and have convincing evidence that one of the most famous outlaws of the old west did not die at the wrong end of a gun as history books claim. History claims Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Old Fort Sumner, New Mexico, when Billy was only twenty-one years old.

Not true, according to the Hico legend. They claim Billy lived out his final years there and died in 1950, a month after his ninetieth birthday. I visited the museum devoted to him and stood on the exact spot where they say he dropped dead of a heart attack. The museum has pictures of him when he lived there under the name “Brushy Bill” Roberts. There are newspaper articles and write-ups covering his attempts to obtain the pardon from the state of New Mexico which had been promised him many years before. There are also stories there about how he eluded death that night in Old Fort Sumner and wound up in Hico some sixty years later.

 It didn’t matter to me whether Billy died in New Mexico at age twenty-one, or in Texas at age ninety.


I was fascinated by the legend and knew I had to use it in a story someday.

“But,” I reminded myself, “you don’t write westerns.”

That’s true. I don’t. Not that I won’t someday, but for now, I write contemporary mystery stories. That meant I had to come up with a contemporary story incorporating the Hico legend.

It took a while, but I eventually came up with a story about a modern day skip tracer named Jack who travels from Philadephia to Hico to bring back a young bail jumper named Billy Joe Raynor. Piece of cake, thinks Jack, until he discovers he has a tail. The chief bonebreaker for a New Jersey mobster has followed Jack to Hico. Is it because Jack beat up the mobster’s brother, or because of something young Billy Joe did before he skipped town? Jack only knows he’s tangled with the hulking bruiser before and will have to again. Jack doesn’t know he’ll also get tangled up in Hico’s legend about another young outlaw named Billy and that the past and present will merge in a surprising conclusion. Three different legends surrounding Billy’s life and death are mentioned. One of them saves Jack from his predicament in Texas and fixes his marriage problems back in Philadelphia.

If you have an opportunity to read “Where Billy Died,” I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

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and at Smashwords

Legends abound, forever intermingled with truth in history, and they’re often more provocative and interesting than what may really have happened. One legend, for example offers that Butch Cassidy may have escaped his storied death in Bolivia and lived to a ripe old age back in the US. Another one proposes that John Wilkes Booth lived in Texas many years after that night at Ford’s Theater.

Are these legends true or merely fanciful variations of the truth born and nurtured over the years? I don’t know and, as a writer, I don’t care. To me, they are more of the tempting nuggets in the gold mine of history begging to be written. I hope I live long enough to write more of them.

Earl Staggs

“Where Billy Died” available for $1.99 at http://untreedreads.com/

Read two stories for free at: http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com/


“The Day I Almost Became A Great Writer” – Loaded with laughs and a message to writers.


“White Hats and Happy Trails” – About the day I spent with a boyhood idol, Roy Rogers.