Caleb Pirtle III – författare

"Other Voices, Other Towns" has, in reality, taken Caleb Pirtle III a lifetime to write. During the thirty years he has been writing about travel across this great land, he spent much of his time listening to those whose paths he crossed. Pirtle collects people. He collects their stories. He is firmly convinced that everyone who has ever walked across the street has a great story to tell if only someone will take the time to listen.Pirtle has recorded many of them in "Other Voices, Other Towns." The sketches, the anecdotes, the tales they tell, the memories they have stored, their lessons of life make you feel better or make you want to cry. Their stories are filled with disappointments and with inspiration: The blind man who tends his beehives in the Smoky Mountains and knows that someday "I'm going to where the mountains are higher and prettier and you don't get bee stung." The rancher who bought a whole town because it had a beer joint, and he could get a drink any time he was thirsty. The woman who built a major university on the strength of a dime. The grieving father searching for "the best little girl in the world." The vagabond who became a great writer because he flunked grammar and could not enroll in college. The last man on the mountain, the last survivor on an island, the last woman strong enough to tame though not civilize the Okefenokee Swamp. The teacher who taught history in school by singing the lessons he had written as songs. The men who created "Lum and Abner." The scientist digging for clues to prove a space ship had crashed in the backyard of Aurora, Texas. The performer who rescued the abandoned remains of a crumbling theater. The actor who figured out that a theater ticket was worth a mess of greens or a gallon milk during the Great Depression. The old con artist and wildcatter who defied the odds and discovered a great oilfield. The politician who had one cause, passed it in the legislature, and went home because there were no other bills that concerned him. The fishermen who stumbled across pearls in a landlocked lake. The girl singer who rode in a small RV behind the star until she became the star. The sad journey down the trail of broken promises. And the greatest worm fiddler of them all.For Pirtle, other voices in other towns, have all been joined together to form the traveler's story.

It may have been the greatest injustice of all.A nation was uprooted.A nation was ripped apart from its ancestral lands with its peoples' feet pointed west. So many died along the way.The Five Civilized Tribes – the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole – rose to power on the land of their fathers, atop great smoky mountains, deep within vast timbered forests, lost among the mangroves, palmettos, and rivers of grass.They were strong and proud – hunters who had become farmers. Many fine plantations were firmly planted on the land they called home, and slaves picked their cotton in the fields. They had achieved self-government and prospered. But civilization rolled selfishly into their nation.Treaties were passed, signed, and ignored.Promises were made and broken, sometimes just forgotten.The removal of the tribes from their homeland in the Southeast to Indian Territory takes on a new dimension as author Caleb Pirtle relates to a culture that existed before the Europeans set foot on American soil.The people suffered greatly from this exodus – driven like cattle herds across frozen ground and icy rivers, families separated, children and the old ones dying – as they struggled down a path that would forever be known as "The Trail Where They Cried."They were victimized by America's "Indian Policy."It was a grave mistake.Trail of Broken Promises was written for the casual historian searching for an emotional overview of a dark era in America's past. Developed for the traveler, the book contains numerous photographs depicting the heritage and culture of the Five Civilized Tribes, as well as historical traces – homes, council houses, prisons, and forts – of their early days in Oklahoma.

Death Stalks a Small Town.Magnolia Bluff waits.With apprehension.With dread.With terror.May twenty-third is coming.Somebody always dies on May twenty-third.Why?No one knows.A killer walks in the shadows.The killer is ready to strike again.

It was the race for the bomb. America was at war a long way from home. Hitler's war machine was storming across Europe. Russia feared the German threat and secretly wanted to become a world power, more feared than it already was. All three nations knew that whoever split the atom and developed the Atomic Bomb first would rule the world.A stealth operation within the U. S. Government dispatched their man with no memory to Los Alamos where physicists, chemists, and scholars were frantically trying to build the bomb. Ambrose Lincoln was himself a human experiment, a man whose mind had been erased by electronic shock treatments because the rogue operation believed he could be more effective if he wasn't shackled by fears and memories of the past. It would be his duty to uncover and silence those who were stealing America's most vital secrets and selling them to Russia and Germany.If he fails the United States might well lose the war, and Lincoln finds himself embedded in a conspiracy of lies where nothing is as it seems to be.

The author takes you on a frightening journey to the coast of Ukraine where, as one reviewer says, "e; I can't say enough about Pirtle's brilliant style of writing and his ability to give readers a no holds barred action thriller!"e; A man on the run never knows what will happen next. He lives and survives on his instincts, and he can't always trust them.Roland Sand's missions for intelligence agencies are those no one else wants to tackle. The reason is simple. Sand is expendable. If he doesn't return, he won't be missed. His name is erased. It's as though he never existed.Sand is sent to Ukraine to smuggle out a beautiful lounge jazz singer who, for years, has been smuggling Russian secrets back to MI-6's home office in Great Britain. Her contact in London has been compromised. He is found floating in the Thames River. Sand must extricate Pauline Bellerose before the Russians trace the stolen secrets back to her and place a noose around her neck.He has twenty-four hours to find the singer and remove her to safety. If she is caught, he dies.A ship is waiting in the fog off the coast of Odessa. Time is running out. He must reach the ship at the appointed hour, or it will leave without them. In the secret world of espionage, the window of escape is narrow and closing all the time. The midnight storm is the only place to hide.The Russians are waiting on the road to the sea. Sand can't outrun them. He can't outfight them. He must outwit them. Otherwise, he's trapped, and it's a rainy night to die.

When everything goes bad, as it sometimes does, we are left with too many roads to take, and it's hard to know which one will lead us to safety. Such are the choices faced with the man on the run. It can be a frightening road to travel. As one reviewer said, "e;Pirtle's taut, punchy prose takes the reader on an eventful journey against apparently unsurmountable odds and choices that have no good outcome until he comes face to face with the hardest choice he has ever had to make.Why should she fall in love with a man she defended in court/ Does she know he's a CIA assassin? Does she know he has orders to kill the President? Does she know she will die if he fails? What else doesn't she know?Roland Sand has killed two government operatives sent to execute him. He is arrested and represented in court by a beautiful young public defender, Eleanor Trent. Their eyes connect. So do their hearts, but both keep their feeling buried deep inside them.Eleanor does not know that Sand is an assassin for a rogue intelligence agency that sells its deadly services to foreign nations as well as to its own country. He has angered his chief, the one-eyed Bohemian, by refusing to kill an accountant who accidentally saw the details of a top-secret mission. Sand sees no reason why an innocent man should die.The Bohemian's agents kidnap Sand and take him from the Durango, Colorado, jail. He is given one chance to redeem himself. He must carry out the assignment to assassinate the President of the United States. It is a mission sanctioned from inside the United States government.Eleanor is furious, and she is frightened. She has lost cases before. But never has she lost a client. In desperation, he calls Navy SEAL Commander John Nickols to help her track down the missing Roland Sand. She handled a case for one of Nickols's friends years earlier, and he said she could count on him if she ever needed him.At Midway Airport, Sand awaits the arrival of Air Force One. The President comes down the steps, and Sand sees Eleanor in the greeting committee. He is told, "e;Kill the President or we kill the lady."e; He has only a second to make up his mind. And Nickols knows, if necessary, he must kill Sand to save the President.

A man with no known past and no name as been dispatched to the deserts, ghost towns, and underbelly of drug-infested Mexico to uncover a secret that could forever change the scope and teachings of Christianity.A DEA agent has written that he possesses the unmistakable and undeniable proof that Christ did indeed return to earth again and walk the land of the Aztecs almost fifteen hundred years after his crucifixion on the cross. But has the agent found a relic? An artifact? A long lost manuscript of the written Word? No one knows, and the agent dies before he can smuggle the secret out of an empty grave.Ambrose Lincoln can't dig past the charred fragments of his memory, but he must unravel the legend of Quetzalcoatl, the white-skinned, blue-eyed, god figure whose sixteenth century ministry, death, resurrection, and mystical promise to return someday to gather up his people closely parallels the Biblical story of the man called Christ. Is Quetzalcoatl merely a myth, or was he Christ himself?Lincoln's quest to find the answers, he becomes involved in a rogue CIA plot to invade Mexico and wage an unholy war on drugs, financed by operatives working for Hitler's Germany. He finds himself pursued by the same mysterious assassin who struck down the DEA agent.Does the artifact actually exist? Who possesses it now? Lincoln battles an unseen and unknown enemy in an effort to survive long enough to discover the truth. If he doesn't, he knows that death awaits him on the desert sands of a land held sacred for centuries by the mysterious and holy ones.

It's winter.It's cold.Roland Sand boards a train to Chicago.He awakens on a park bench in town he's never seen before.It's hot.It's sultry.How did he get there?He doesn't know.Who is the beautiful girl on the bench beside him?He doesn't know.But she's quite dead, and he has no idea who killed her.Or why?But he'll find out if it's the last thing he ever does.It might well be.For Roland Sand, it's a journey to a dark, mysterious place from which there is no escape.It's a noir thriller.It's a Short Read.It hits you with the impact of a pistol shot.***"e;The episodic nature of the story keeps the tale taut and dripping with suspense. Mr. Pirtle is a master storyteller."e; – CW Hawes"e;If you want a feeling for Pirtle's writing style, imagine a combination of Lee Child and Raymond Chandler – imagine mean streets, tough guys, and lives sold cheaply. The author's prose is sparse, almost poetic."e; – Diogenes

American operative Ambrose Lincoln has no idea where he is or has been or where he's going. He believes he has been to the night side of dark, a place of the first death, from which no one can return. So why does he find himself on the bomb-ruined landscape of Poland, or has he been exiled to the second death?Lincoln only realizes, if the man in the shadows has not lied to him, that he must find an ancient religious painting that has been missing for centuries. The German Gestapo will pay a fortune to buy it, or take a man's life to get it. The painting, if legend holds true, is the German hierarchy's final and only chance to escape the onslaught of the war that is crumbling around their feet.

Ambrose Lincoln is one of the government's prized operatives, a trained assassin, a man whose past is continually erased by mind control tactic and shock treatments. His days have no meaning. He no longer fears death. As far as he is concerned, a man without a memory is a man who's already dead.From Germany come rumors of a mad man threatening to rule Europe and maybe the world. On the Night of Broken Glass, his browns shirts and storm troopers move into Baden-Baden and begin their methodical termination of the Jews.In America, so far away, the violence is nothing more than a protest over a Jewish boy who murdered a German diplomat because the Third Reich had removed and maybe killed his family. It was simply a case of vandalism that got out of hand. No one is concerned, and the American government wants to keep it that way. No one in Washington wants to go to war with Hitler, and President Roosevelt continues to preach neutrality.But word is leaked that one Jewish photographer took pictures of the rampage of brutality and murder that night. He was killed, but his daughter is in hiding with the film. Ambrose Lincoln is dispatched to Baden-Baden with one charge. Find the film and bring it back. It will tell the truth. It will uncover the lies. The photographs will reveal to the world the sadistic threat that exists for everyone if Hitler's mad march isn't stopped. His mission is to uncover the deadly secrets that his own government doesn't want him to find, secrets that can change history.

In the mid 1970s, a band of men with little expertise in the oilfield defied the hard ground of Giddings, Texas, to search for oil in a barren, poverty-stricken land that was littered with dry holes, shattered hopes, and empty pockets. Max Williams, the former hot-shot basketball player at SMU, and Irv Deal had been in high-dollar real estate until the real estate market collapsed. Both were facing the wrath of hard times. Pat Holloway was a lawyer who operated drilling funds but had never tested the ill-fated Austin Chalk. He drilled the most and earned the most but lost it all in the shady confines of a Dallas courtroom. Jimmy Luecke was a highway patrolman who stopped Holloway for speeding one night and promised not to take him to jail if the lawyer/oilman would agree to drill on his family's land. Bill Shuford was right out of college and more interested in finding the next beer joint than his next job. Jim Dobos was a constable who used his badge to lease land, struck it rich, and was found with a gunshot in his head. Was it murder or suicide? Clayton Williams was the only big-time oilman in the bunch, but in the beginning, he made the mistake of employing the wrong geologist. Only those who used the geologic genius of Ray Holifield found oil. Holifield had cracked the code of the chalk. Gamble in the Devil's Chalk is the true story of their fights, their feuds, their trials, their tribulations, and their triumphs as they discovered the second largest oilfield in the United States during the past half century. Once they came, Giddings would never be the same again.