WRITERS also read! This will be shock news only to the uninitiated, although many fiction writers wonder themselves how they find the time for reading these days. Reading must be fitted in amidst the struggles to find surviving markets, to learn the tricks of the new digital world, and to run personal promotion campaigns – sometimes with daily diary entries made not so much public as publicly available on the Net's ubiquitous blogs.

The Extra roped in three of Black Horse Westerns' liveliest new entrants of recent times for another in its occasional series of panel discussions – or round-the-campfire pow-wows if you prefer less formality. The topic of this debate: writers' choices in reading.

Later in this edition, you will also find the wisdom of one of our genre's stalwarts, an author of hundreds of westerns under his five BHW pen-names and even more as a contributor to Australian pulp fiction for longer than half a century. But first, our welcome and special thanks to Nik (aka Ross) Morton, Matthew P. Mayo and Gary Dobbs aka Jack Martin.

BHE: Nik, perhaps you would like to set the match to our campfire, please.    

Nik: Before I was a writer, I was a reader. The ability to read is a gift that we take for granted. Those who are illiterate and cannot read – or, worse, those who can read but choose not to – miss out on so much. As I learned how to write, painstakingly and through a correspondence course, I continued to read. I studied other authors and how they evoked emotions and created visual scenes. But in the main I read for pleasure.

BHE: And your opening thoughts, please, Matt and Gary.

Matt: Thanks for the invite to participate. . . . As I suspect is the case with most BHW authors and readers, I love reading. I read lots of books, both non-fiction and fiction, both for pleasure and for edification and work.

Gary: I read constantly, have always got something on the go, and not only westerns. I like a lot of crime writing and at the moment I’m finding Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) is colouring my own style. He was an excellent writer. But I think that to some extent I am influenced by everything I read.

Nik: Way back in the 1970s, The Writer magazine featured a section entitled "Writers Should Read". This contained book reviews, fiction and non-fiction. It held true then and it’s relevant now. No matter what genre you prefer to write in, as a writer you need to read outside that genre.

I’ve made allusions to a couple of books of the period in my westerns, thanks to Snodgrass’s Encyclopedia of Frontier Literature. And Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi is a little treasure trove, too, especially on stagecoach travel.

I continually refer to the books in the Time Life series of The Old West: I used The Townsmen as a guide for my BHW, Blind Justice at Wedlock, due out in 2011; and I’m currently accessing The Miners and The Railroaders for my half-completed BHW. The contemporary photographs in these books also provide insight and perspective.

The hard part in research has to be knowing when to stop – all these books are interesting and demand re-reading, but there’s never enough time to be so pleasurably diverted. Indeed, the problem is finding time to read when I’m not writing. The other day I read that on average, the British take two to three weeks to read a book. If you believe in averages… Last year I managed to read only a book a week, this year I’m four or five behind that.

Over the years I’ve amassed quite a large private library, buying books because I intended to read them "one day". Aware of the short shelf-life of most new books, this seemed like a good ploy, though now with Internet shopping it’s likely that somewhere most books I hanker after reading could be found via inquiries through the ether.

Matt: I'm ploughing through a ton and a half of books as research for my next non-fiction book, Sourdoughs, Claim Jumpers & Drygulchers: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of Frontier Prospecting (2011, TwoDot/Globe Pequot Press).

My most recent book, released in October, is Bootleggers, Lobstermen & Lumberjacks: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of Hardscrabble New England (Globe Pequot Press).

BHE: The word "influences" often comes up when writers discuss their work. It was mentioned a moment or two ago by Gary. What influences are recognized here?

Gary:  For plotting I like the crime masters like Raymond Chandler, for characterization I think Elmer Kelton is hard to beat, and for pace and excitement Ian Fleming is the top banana.

Nik: As I read widely, I’m not aware of any author influences in my writing. I certainly believe that J. G. Ballard, John Le Carré, Anthony Burgess, D. H. Lawrence and Graham Greene are not only superb craftsmen but also writers’ writers, because you can savour their use of language while being immersed in their creations. Somerset Maugham’s writing seems effortless, but it isn’t. I’m in awe of Joseph Conrad. Charles Dickens is so adept at characterization and description. For me, first-person narrative comes alive with John D. MacDonald and Hammond Innes. I was strongly affected by the scope and power of storytelling by Gladys Mitchell in her Gone With the Wind. And if I want to know how to work a twist or two in my novel, I couldn’t do better than be shown how by Jeffery Deaver. Chandler lets us know that the past has an uncanny knack of biting back, and I’ve used this in a number of my westerns. And for sheer verve in the description of action, Bernard Cornwell is hard to beat.

Matt: In addition to reading for pleasure, I read lots of books for review in the publications I write for. For example, most recently I read and reviewed Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America by Eric Jay Dolin; Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains by Ruth McLaughlin; Blindsided: Surviving a Grizzly Attack and Still Loving the Great Bear by Jim Cole; Junkyard Dogs (A Walt Longmire Mystery) by Craig Johnson; The Pony Express: An Illustrated History by C. W. Guthrie; and Charlie Russell and Friends by the Denver Art Museum.

BHE:  Ah yes, Matt, it's not hard to see how some of these would tie in with your "grittiest moments" books. What else do you have coming up for the readers?

Matt: I also have a western short story out in November, in the DAW Books anthology called Steampunk'd, and I'm writing a few shorts for other anthologies. There's other western fiction news that I'll be able to talk about in a couple of months, and I have three different non-western projects on editors' desks. Fingers crossed! Best way to see what I'm up to is to visit my website.

BHE: And Gary and Nik both have new BHWs on the way – Gary's Delta Rose has already been described,  and in May there will be the new Ross Morton novel, Blind Justice at Wedlock. For other news, as it breaks, readers can't  do better than Matt suggests and visit your websites or blogs: www.matthewmayo.com, http://nik-writealot.blogspot.com, and http://tainted-archive.blogspot.com.

One last, quick observation, anybody, on an area we haven't covered?

Nik: In my westerns I also like to insert the occasional meal detail, courtesy of a number of books. Taste – in all its guises – shouldn’t be neglected, I feel. Which seems a good closing comment for a campfire chat.