Blood Will Spill

Thomas Cobb garnered some name recognition after the film “Crazy Heart” was released. Cobb wasn’t in it, but he had something to do with the book of the same name.

“I wrote it back in 1987,” he said in a phone interview from Tucson. “Hollywood sometimes moves like greased lightning. I didn’t get royalties. I took an upfront deal.”

He’s also benefited from the book sales. It went from being a novel that sold 11,000 copies to one that has sold 100,000 copies since the movie came out, Cobb said.

	“With Blood in Their Eyes” by Thomas Cobb University of Arizona Press, $24.95, 210 pp.

He’s also the author of the award-winning story collection “Acts of Contrition” and the newly released book “With Blood in Their Eyes.”

The new book opens with a shootout between miners and lawmen in southeast Arizona in 1918 and the chase for the men. But there also is a significant back story about one family’s struggles to make a living in the West.

The author described it as a “nonfiction novel.”

“The term was coined by Truman Capote for ‘In Cold Blood.’ He said he was creating a new art form in which a true story would be told with the style of a novel. That has evolved into ‘The New Journalism’ or ‘creative writing,’ ” said Cobb, who grew up in southern Arizona and retired last year as an English professor in Rhode Island.

“I don’t like the term historical fiction because it has a genre connotation that I don’t like. I am now being considered a Western writer, but I am not writing Westerns. I am trying to get as far from that tradition as I can, but (this novel) takes place in that time and place.”

The three main characters in “With Blood in Their Eyes” are the Power brothers and a hired man named Sisson, who worked for their mine-owner father who was killed in the shootout.

They were real people, and Cobb said the major events he writes about did occur. But he also created a few characters who represent a lot of other people.

“But as much as possible I stuck to the story. I did not change what happened in any way,” Cobb said.

” … Nobody knows why the lawmen went to the Galiuro Mountains to get the Power boys. Everyone has their own theory why they did it. This is my explanation of why it happened, and that involves gold and bootleg whiskey.”

Naturally, Cobb imagined the dialogue. He said he tried to keep the language neutral.

Dialect seems contrived to him, “so I concentrated on what the characters were saying, what they were worried about. Each of the characters, for me, had a different voice,” he said.

The novel, Cobb said, is an homage to “In Cold Blood.”