Publisher's Note Ed Gorman’s western stories are anything but traditional. They often take place in lonely, tragic, mythical landscapes. Gorman likes to quote the legendary director Ruben Mamoulian, who, while he was giving life to a new musical called Oklahoma, was told that some of the facts of the play weren’t accurate. Mamoulian replied: "What survives best is myth. Realism dies." Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg have selected nine of Ed Gorman’s best short stories as they appeared in a variety of magazines. Gorman can truly be called "the renaissance writer of western stories."