INTERVIEW: Scott McCrea talks Cry Flint!, Western Genre, and more!

I recently had the great pleasure of catching up with Western author extraordinaire Scott McCrea after his novel U.S. Marshal Ezra Flint: Cry Flint! was nominated for the Best Western Novel for the Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Awards. We talked about the honor of being nominated, what is coming next from McCrea, and even got his thoughts on the Western genre today.

Check out the interview below and don't forget to pick up your copy of the hit Western novel published by Dusty Saddle Publishing right HERE if you haven't already!

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Congratulations on Cry Flint! being named a finalist for Best Western Novel in the

recently announced Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Awards! What does this

kind of recognition mean to you as an author?

Thank you for asking me! I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I’m thrilled, ecstatic, overjoyed and over-the-moon about being a Peacemaker Finalist. It means the world to me.

I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I was in second grade. (Back when we chiseled our homework assignment into rocks.) It’s all I ever wanted. I spent years in corporate public relations, but every time I wrote about urge urinary incontinence for my pharmaceutical clients, my mind was in the Wild West or impenetrable jungles, on the running board of Duesenbergs or crossing swords with cavaliers. The great crime writer Lawrence Block joked that writing was a “solitary vice.” If you’re a writer, particularly a prolific one, you’re often too buried in your own work to know to know how your books are being seen.

I get some great comments and feedback on X, Facebook and Instagram that has been very valuable to me. Being a Peacemaker Finalist adds another kind of value—one that comes from fellow-writers in the same field. Every writer, no matter how many books they have written, deep down feels fraudulent. Now, not so much.

From your perspective, what makes Cry Flint! a special tale in the U.S. Marshal

Ezra Flint series? Was there a particular scene or theme that felt especially

meaningful or challenging for you to write?

That’s a great question. I wrote several Flint novels during the submission period, but Cry Flint! seemed something special. Of course, a writer loves all his own books to one degree or another, and can’t play favorites, but Cry Flint! resonated with so many childhood terrors and memories that it just poured out of me and cried out for submission.

In it, Flint and his deputy P.J. Dunn find a young Indian boy in the desert who had been brutalized. They take him to the town of Paradise, which has been overrun by a crazed preacher and his blood-simple sons. Needless to say, their situation does not improve…

Cry Flint! contains a little of the ‘uncanny’ that separates it from other books in the series. I grew up on spooky movies; Hammer films the old ABC Movie of the Week melodramas, like The Devil and Miss Sarah. Cry Flint! was great fun to write because I have an associative mind; I kept thinking of great spooky moments from books and films I devoured as a kid and put echoes of them in the book. My better half says that my imagination is “fetid and overripe,” and I just let it have free-reign here.

Is there anything you can tell us about your upcoming projects or what readers

can look forward to next?  

More Ezra Flint, I hope! My new Flint book, Gunfighter’s Grave, just came out. It was great fun to write because of the interaction between Flint and Marshal Shorty Thompson. Together they try to rescue a young woman who may have married Billy the Kid. And I’m working on another Flint adventure, Double Flint, where Flint, in the territories hunting a celebrated badman, is mistaken for that desperado and must match guns with a homicidal sheriff.

I’m also working on the second Lucas Wheeler novel, Prosecution League. It’s a

contemporary thriller, like Targets West, the first book in the series, about a Wyoming rancher who gets involved in international plots. Targets West got great reviews and press from the thriller community, but the publisher closed shop. So, Lucas Wheeler is now looking for a home. Thriller publishers – pop me an email!

How do you view the Western as a genre today? Especially with regard to its

appeal to modern readers and how it’s continuing to evolve?

People have pronounced the Western as “dead” for something like five decades now, but it seems like there’s always plenty of life left in the genre. I don’t think the Western will ever go away… there is something too primal, too elemental about it. Of all the literary genres, it’s the most honest. Frontier life strips away artifice and reveals people as they actually are; the Western is both mythic and all-too-human at the same time.

And for a genre that is continually “reinvented,” it’s remarkably consistent. While

something like Owen Wister’s The Virginian is very different from Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, both share the same core DNA. You can’t get away from it, and if you do, it’s no longer a Western.

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