Colonel Rutherford's Colt

Dust jacket by J.K. Potter.

Jimmy Roy Guy and Rita Whitelaw are itinerant gun dealers, traveling the gun show circuit in the Pacific Northwest, buying and selling weapons with significan -- sometimes notorious -- histories. Jimmy is also a storyteller of a most unusual kind. Drawing his inspiration from the guns that pass through his hands, he creates elaborate, amazingly detailed fictions, and offers those fictions to an audience of one: Rita.

In an otherwise unremarkable gun show in Issaquah, Washington, Jimmy acquires a vintage Colt .45 Model 1911 from the recently widowed Loretta Snow. The Colt once belonged to a racist “freedom fighter” named Bob Champion, who has since become the patron saint of a demented cadre of right-wing militiamen. Once in Jimmy's hands, the gun begins projecting an entirely new history, providing him with the outline of an exotic narrative of love, murder, and ungovernable passion set in the vividly evoked Cuba of nearly a century ago. As the narrative develops, it quickly takes on a life of its own, drawing Jimmy, Rita, and a number of unsuspecting bystanders into its bizarre, ultimately lethal, depths.

Colonel Rutherford's Colt is a short, powerful novel featuring one of the most unique protagonists in modern fiction. Its interlocking narratives, which are alternately funny, sexy, horrifying, and perverse, create a wholly believable universe in which the boundaries separating the fictional from the real become increasingly difficult to discern. Writing with passion, humor, and absolute authority, Shepard has given us a remarkable story about stories themselves: the mysterious places they come from, and the equally mysterious effects they can have when they find their way into the world.

Limited to 750 signed numbered hardcover copies