Not too many years ago, we were walking down the book aisle at Costco, and a woman had picked up one of our Jan Coffey books off the pile and was reading the back. In our excitement, we made an unforgivable mistake. We approached and told her we’re the authors and if she decided to buy the book, we could autograph it for her. She put the book down and ran all the way out of the store.
We’re often asked, “Why so many names?” and “Why can’t you write under one name…or your own names?” Well, this is a good time to share where Nik James came from and why we’re also writing Westerns.
Here’s a slice of our past:
In a fading photograph taken on an old Kodak Brownie, a little boy glares at the camera with same swagger and disdain that Clint Eastwood would direct at movie audiences over a decade later. The six-year-old, dressed in his battered cowboy hat and vest, has six-guns strapped to his hips and a cigarette between his fingers.
Halfway across the world, a little girl waits on the stoop for her father to return home. It was a tradition that they’d spend their Saturday afternoon watching John Wayne stride across the screen on the ‘American station’ that had recently joined the other two TV channels available. Later that day, while she was running through the neighboring woods with her friends, fighting off outlaws with cap guns and air rifles, her cousin would shoot her in the arm with his new .22-caliber rifle. This half of the Nik James duo still bears the scar proudly.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the two storytellers grew up watching Bonanza, Rawhide, Have Gun Will Travel, Wyatt Earp, Wagon Train, Roy Rogers, Maverick, and Sky King. It was the Wild West that captured their imaginations, as it captured imaginations everywhere.
Fast forward to a different world, a new frontier that Nikoo would face alone, far from her childhood home, training to support herself as an engineer, but never leaving behind the ‘switchblades and code of honor’ of her youth. Jim would take on the challenges of shipyard life and the classroom. But they both itched to tell the stories that prodded at them.
So here we are, twenty-five years into our publishing career, finally writing Westerns together.
Now, as Nik James sits at the keyboard, Nikoo is again that girl running through the woods with her rifle. And Jim is that boy, donning hat and vest and strapping on his twin Colts.