Autor/-in: Neil Hunter

Neil Hunter is the pseudonym used by bestselling author Mike Linaker. The bulk of Mike Linaker's fiction has appeared in the action-adventure genre, where he regularly chronicles the adventures of Gold Eagle's Mack Bolan, he remains one of Britain's most accomplished and collectible western writers. Mike's main interest in adolescence was science fiction. "The western influence came from film and television," he later explained. "I read SF books by the dozen, but few if any westerns because that Max Brand/Zane Grey stuff just didn't do anything for me. "Then one day I happened across a Fawcett Gold Medal western called Tough Hombre by Dudley Dean. Something about the cover just hooked me, and after I finished reading it I'd become a western fan in no uncertain terms. Western paperbacks were being imported in great quantities at that time, so I was spoilt for choice. "Mike very quickly came to admire the western in its traditional form. "Not that I don't like the current output, which is now coyly called Frontier Fiction," he's quick to add. "But I feel there's still an audience for the westerns of the past. When I talk of 'traditional' westerns, it brings to mind the writers who influenced me when I read their stories. Frank Castle, Lewis B. Patten, Gordon Shirreffs, Richard Jessup and many others. And of course Louis L'Amour. They wrote about tough, honest, self-sufficient heroes, gunfights in dusty streets and conflicts played out against the spectacular terrain of the old Southwest. It was the stuff of high adventure, a time when America was still creating its own history and its heroes. In the West we're dealing with, though the stories painted vivid images of tough men in a harsh land, the prose perhaps strayed from the absolute truth, but in the hands of those craftsmen who wrote the stories, there was an allowance for a little artistic bending of the rules. No different, in truth, of any fictional genre, where too much reality could not only tarnish the storyline, but might easily detract from the reason for the piece - to entertain the reader. "