Saddle Up: Bronx Native Terrence McCauley Writes Westerns In Dutchess County
How did a city guy come to write Westerns (and thrillers, and crime novels) in Amenia, New York?
Terrence McCauley, author of 15 novels across the genres of thriller, crime, and Western, is Bronx-made. He spent his whole life in the neighborhood, going to college at Fordham University and working in Manhattan upon graduation. A city slicker born and bred –– except for the fact that he lives in Amenia, New York full time. And he’s probably the most award-winningest — and certainly, one of the most prolific — writers you may not have heard about. But more on that later.
Urbanite McCauley discovered the Hudson Valley through his wife of 20 years, who grew up in Millbrook. “It just wound up becoming home to me,” McCauley says, who is one of many creatives in the area. He draws inspiration from people watching, the Wassaic Project, and “the various other arts endeavors going on throughout the Hudson Valley.” The rural environment helps him put pen to paper while he sits down on his porch to write, which he prefers to “being squirreled away someplace, typing away. It became less of a question of ‘why move up there full time’ as ‘why not?’”
Though being immersed in nature inspires McCauley’s writing, particularly in the Western genre, he doesn’t require any help. He comes from a long line of storytellers. Two of his uncles were archdiocesan priests assigned to inner city parishes, and a third was the chaplain of Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, all of whom came back with a myriad of yarns to spin on the holidays. He grew up listening to his grandmother talk about her lived experience — Prohibition, the Great Depression, raising a family through two world wars. McCauley fell in love with the rich New York history that his grandmother would relay to him. Watching classic films on Channel 13 Saturday nights and historical documentaries also inspired him to do his own digging, and eventually his own writing.
The Billy Sunday series
At Fordham University, he took a creative writing class and also started reading for pleasure rather than just what was assigned in class. He found himself drawn to adventure stories, which jumpstarted his foray into the crime, Westerns and thriller genres. He worked for about eight years on his first book, Prohibition. When he learned that truTV, a crime-themed channel, was holding the “Search for the Next Great Crime Writer Contest,” he submitted Prohibition, which is set in the Irish gangs of 1930s New York City and features a hit man who has to use his brains instead of his brawn to find out who’s trying to undermine his boss’s criminal empire. McCauley beat out over 200 candidates to win the contest. “The die was cast at that point,” he reflects.
Once Prohibition sold, he tried something else –– a spy thriller with his own personal spin –– and the University series was born. Its first installment, Sympathy for the Devil, was complete world-building by McCauley, an expansion of the research that he had done on the Edward Snowden documents released to the public. After publishing Sympathy for the Devil, McCauley’s agent asked him whether he had any work sitting around that he wanted to put out into the world. McCauley mentioned the Western he’d been working on, and his impression that nobody would want it. He was wrong. The agent wanted it immediately. Boom — McCauley had expanded into his third genre.
McCauley stays inside the lines of the Western with the style of his novels. That said, he believes in a diverse cast –– in fact, an all-white cast isn’t historically accurate.
“Readers liked that there was an African-American lawman because there were African-American lawmen back then,” McCauley says of the audience’s reception of his initial Western series which centers around Aaron Mackey, a sheriff in Montana. Where the Bullets Fly, the first installment in the Aaron Mackey series, received the Western Fictioneers Award for Best Novel in 2018.
And about those awards: While his Westerns get a large chunk of them, he’s also won the silver medal for historical fiction from the Military Writers Society of America; Best Thriller Novel from Authors of the Air; and multiple awards for his pulp novels and short stories.
“I always have something cooking in the back of my head,” McCauley says. “By the time I get down to actually writing, it’s already been fermenting in my mind. I tell the story for as long as it takes.” All of his stories, no matter the genre, are about “human beings trying to accomplish something and the challenges they face along the way. That’s just life, and being in the Hudson Valley and writing out on the porch, adds to that emphasis of life.”
