ACCLAIM: Wolves At Our Door These books we call Westerns are mostly crap--dull, formulaic, cliche-ridden things. This is odd, since the whole concept of the Western has birthed some excellent films. Ride on over to Casa Video, and check out Lonely Are The Brave, The Wild Bunch, The Shootist, Junior Bonner, the Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns and (more recently) All The Pretty Horses, just to name a few. But the books? Yech.

Now, finally, there's a Western writer to match the movies. J.P.S. Brown...has been hammering away at his craft for almost 40 years. He's hit some serious home runs. ...What sets Joe Brown apart from his peers is that he's the real thing, an honest-to-gawd cowboy in a world of pathetic wannabes, fakers and pretenders. ...Novels are designed to stretch the mind not to answer literary questions,"notes Jim Harrison in his new intro to James Welch's The death of Jim Loney, and J.P.S. Brown's Wolves At Out Door does just this. ...This is a book about getting old, about loss, about love, about having fun. It's about animals, friendship and loyalty, and is set in a place of amazing natural beauty: The Sierra Madre, a place that is changing and will never be the same again. It is full of the life of the West, but not the fake Old West we were raised with. This novel, and J.P.S. Brown, are the real thing.

ACCLAIM: Of Wolves At Our Door Not all wolves walk on four legs...Jim Kane's 7X ranch is one of those that people creeping over the border use for passage. And not all the aliens are Mexicans. Nor are the Mexicans themselves safe from those who prowl the borders.

The borderland has regular drug runners, and those who live on one side of the border or the other and grow marijuana or poppies for the drug trade and their own personal enrichment. Most of the ranchers try to ignore those who ply that trade--providing they don't bother them.

The author is a rancher who has lived in Arizona all his life, and this story, while fiction, is not that unfactual. These problems do exist along the borderland. If you have any doubt, read about what is happening in Columbus, New Mexico, and the Mexican border town of Palomas; or El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico. The problems are even worse in Arizona.

ACCLAIM: Of Wolves At Our Door "Cormac McCarthy surely hit the jackpot with his recent novel and its acclaimed movie adaptation. But his choice of a title, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, offends my sensibilities both as an old man and as a native son of the Southwest. I would have called the book NO COUNTRY FOR SOME OLD MEN. In fairness to McCarthy, it probably has something to do with the fact that he is not OF the country he writes about. He just lives there now, like a visiting anthropologist observing and postulating on the quaint aspects of the aborigines. It’s probably not his fault that he hasn’t yet met any of those VIEJOS CON COJONES like Jim Kane, Juan Vogel, Adan Martinillo, and Andres Canez, who are quite capable of killing their own snakes.

Jim Kane and the others are characters in J.P.S. Brown’s new novel, WOLVES AT OUR DOOR, published by the University of New Mexico Press. Brown’s book, like McCarthy’s is set in the contemporary Southwest, along and both sides of the Mexican border. This is the region with a long history of violence and corruption. The stakes are even higher in the post 9-11 world with the threat of trans-border terrorism and the escalating brutality of Mexican drug cartels and human traffickers.

Brown and McCarthy come at the moral morass of the modern borderlands from distinctly different directions. There are no good guys and there is no hope in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. McCarthy’s shadowy assassin Anton Chigurh is an allegorical adversary as formidable and unfeeling as Melville’s white whale. McCarthy’s message is hopelessness and despair.

Brown, on the other hand, has resurrected Jim Kane who is a protagonist in the heroic western mold…an aging cowpuncher determined to make a stand for what he believes in and to hold on to what is his. WOLVES AT OUR DOOR is a reaffirmation of traditional western concepts of honor, family, friendship, self-reliance, and an irrevocable covenant with the country where you know you belong. Brown’s message is that nothing can stand against a man who is in the right and keeps a-comin’.

WOLVES AT OUR DOOR left me feeling more hopeful for the future of the Southwest borderlands. In books as in life, I will choose hope over hopelessness every time.

ACCLAIM: Of Jim Kane "Hemingway's 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' immortalized the mountain people of Spain...J.P.S. Brown's may assure the same type of immortality for the cowboys of today."

ACCLAIM: Jim Kane This book is far and away the best ethnography of border cowboy culture ever written or ever likely to be written. It includes almost every aspect of border cowboy culture: economics, foodways, social structure and social organization, clothing, recreation, and every aspect of what it takes to raise cattle from birth to beef steak -- and all viewed through the eyes of an insider, someone who knows from experience what the hell it's all about. Fantastic job! Helluvva book.

ACCLAIM: "The World in Pancho's Eye is a wonderful coming-of-age story set in the Depression-era southwest. The tale of Mikey Summers' struggles to win love from his quick-tempered mother and his reckless, feckless, hard-drinking cowboy father is tender, sometimes humorous, sometimes heart-breaking, but never sentimental. His baptism into the cowboy's way of life on cattle drives from Mexico to Arizona is the stuff of grand American myth, as good as anything Larry McMurtry ever wrote. J.P.S. Brown writes with grace, wit and an understanding of the heart that make his novel transcend its time and place."

ACCLAIM: His October, 2007 novel The World In Pancho's Eye "Joe Brown writes about the growing up years of Mikey, a boy fathered by a hard-living, often irresponsible and absent cowboy who swings his rope on the great borderland ranches of Mexico and southern Arizona. This book tells a gritty and sometimes sad story in language that is seldom found outside the realm of fine literature. Joe Brown is more than an author. He is a world-class writer of the first order."

ACCLAIM: The Arizona Saga "None of this western's characters is complex or even three-dimensional, but together they present a lively, panoramic picture of cowmen's existence in 1880s Arizona as they socialize, fight one another, tangle with the law or their own consciences, and protect their homes. A. B. Cowden and his family raise horses and cattle and deal honestly with their neighbors, but when Duncan Vincent arrives with herds of purebred stock and substantial funding from Eastern investors, the Cowdens and the other cattle-ranchers find their way of life threatened. Vincent schemes to take over available grazing land with barbed wire fences and 'legal-paper frauds.' When the Cowdens openly oppose him, they are singled out for harassment from Vincent's henchmen and powerful government contacts alike. Meanwhile the area braces for a confrontation with an Apache tribe, whose warriors have been pillaging settlements--a situation Vincent's men use to mask their own exploits. As the cowmen and their families meet these twin threats, they form the foundation for a young, vital society."

ACCLAIM: "JOE BROWN is one of America's most under-appreciated writers. Even though he's authored such remarkable Western classics as Jim Kane, The Outfit, and Steeldust, he seldom gets the respect such outstanding work deserves. Joe Brown is more than an author. He is a world-class writer of the first order. It is hoped that someday, preferably before he is dead, the world of arts and letters will recognize the awe-inspiring talent of J.P.S. Brown."

ACCLAIM: "...a frank and heartbreaking memoir."--"J.P.S. Brown's books are keeping the romance and reality of the cowboy alive. His work stands tall and true as the man himself, a testament to the real American cowboy."

ACCLAIM:"[The World in Pancho's Eye] is a masterpiece of good writing, as solid and ringing as the walk of a horseman".

ACCLAIM: "J. P. S. Brown is a cattleman and fiction writer who lives and works on a ranch near Patagonia, Arizona. In 1999 he was the recipient of the Will James Society's Big Enough Award for his contribution to the cowboy tradition. In 2002 he received the Lawrence Clark Powell Award for his contribution to Southwestern letters."

ACCLAIM: "Just the proper blend of men, cattle and country, the kind of a cowboy novel that makes cow people nod their heads in approval, and makes cowboy "fans" shake their heads in wonder and say, 'Gee, Zane Grey sure missed a lot."

The Fiction of J.P.S. Brown -- The library of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City keeps a collection of J.P.S. Brown's books.