Three Forks Press | Dallas, Texas

Featured Authors

Steve Blow

STEVE BLOW has been an award-winning general interest columnist for The Dallas Morning News since 1989. In addition to numerous other awards, both the Headliners Foundation of Texas and the Associated Press have honored him as the top columnist in the state of Texas.

He is a native of Tyler, Texas, who attended Tyler Junior College and graduated in 1974 from the University of North Texas. He was a newspaper reporter for the Fort Worth Press and the Corpus Christi Caller-Times until he joined The Dallas Morning News in 1978 as a reporter.

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Margaret Moseley

MARGARET MOSELEY was born in Oklahoma and reared in Fort Worth, Texas, shere she attended public schools. She spent her early professional years with the Fort Worth Press and WBAP-TV (now KXAS-TV), and then moved to Fort Smith, Arkansas, with her husband Jack (now former husband) when he became editor of the Southwest Times Record. In Fort Smith she began working in public relations and got involved in politics, working toward the election of a young governor named Bill Clinton.

In the 1990s she decided to write a novel. The result, Bonita Faye, achieved great acclaim. Another novel, Milicent LeSueur also was published by Three Forks Press. A series of other mystery novels were published by Berkeley: The Fourth Season (1998), Grinning in His Mashed Potatoes (1999), and A Little Traveling Music, Please (2000). The mother of two daughters, Ms. Moseley now lives in Euless, Texas.

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Marshall Terry

MARSHALL TERRY is one of Texas' most distinguished novelists. He is a Fellow of the Texas Institute of Letters and a former president. In 1991 that organization presented him with the Lon Tinkle Award for lifetime achievement. In 2007 SMU awarded him an honorary doctorate of letters. He founded the creative writing program at Southern Methodist University and was the E.A. Lilly Distinguished Professor of English. After having taught at SMU since 1954, he retired in 2007 as professor emeritus.

His first novel, Old Liberty, published in 1961 by Viking Press and re-issued in 1991 by Texas Tech University Press, was hailed by the New York Herald Tribune as "vigorous, vital, original ... A fine first novel by a highly gifted writer." Terry's Tom Northway introduced a series of novels on the Northway family. Tom Northway was co-winner of the Texas Institute of Letters' award for the best novel of 1968, and his short story, "The Antichrist," won the 1972 short story award. My Father's Hands, Land of Hope and Glory, Angels Prostate Fall, and Tex Rex. His short stories have been collected in Dallas Stories and The Memorialist. Terry's historical account of Southern Methodist University, "From High on the Hilltop..." has just been reprinted, along with new essays by other authors, describing various aspects of the insitution's history as it approaches its centennial anniversary.

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Our Books

From High on the Hilltop... (Paperback Edition) - $24.95 *

Marshall Terry

A historical account of Southern Methodist University written by Marshall Terry, one of the university's most distinguished and beloved professors, with essays by other authors (including the president of the university, R. Gerald Turner) describing various aspects of the institution's history as it approaches its centennnial anniversary. SMU was founded in 1911 and classes were first offered in 1915.

2008 paperback edition. ISBN 978-1-893451-14-8

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From High on the Hilltop... (Cloth Edition) - $34.95 *

Marshall Terry

A historical account of Southern Methodist University written by Marshall Terry, one of the university's most distinguished and beloved professors, with essays by other authors (including the president of the university, R. Gerald Turner) describing various aspects of the institution's history as it approaches its centennnial anniversary. SMU was founded in 1911 and classes were first offered in 1915.

2008 cloth edition. ISBN 978-1-893451-15-5

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Dallas Citizens Council - $25 *

Darwin Payne

A history of Dallas' most powerful civic organization, founded in 1937 as an elite membership with membership limited to the chief executives of local businesses. Since its beginning the organization has touched in a significant way virtually every major development in the transformation of Dallas into one of America's leading citizens.

2008 paperback edition. ISBN 978-893451-13-1

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The Murder of Milo - $20 *

Marshall Terry

Milo is a journeyman teacher in a small East Texas college in 1969. A solitary, Milo believes that virtue is knowledge and evil is ignorance. He has faith in his students as they protest a ban on their underground newspaper and strike against an unjust war and an unjust society. Milo is murdered, beaten to death in the dark woods, by whom we are not sure. However, the author suggests that together we are all murdering Milo still.

2007. Hardcover. ISBN 1893451127.

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Blow by Blow - $20 *

Steve Blow

Steve Blow's book, Blow by Blow, contains his own personal selection of his favorite columns out of the approximately 1,500 columns he wrote from 1989 until the book's publication in 2001. His broad-ranging subjects resist classification. Maybe he is a generalist, but that all-encompassing word fails to suggest the broad nature of his work. Readers find humor, insight, pathos, controversy, commentary, and wit-all wedded closely to every-day life.

When Blow gave up his general assignments job at The Dallas Morning News to become a columnist he did so with an important stipulation. Rather than leaving the daily hubbub of the newsroom for the confines of a solitary office, he maintained a desk among the city-side reporters. This gave him a continuing window onto the passing parade of urban life.

We are with Steve when he decides one day to walk to work -- sixteen miles. We are with him when he drops 6,000 feet from an airplane before pulling the parachute ripcord. We are beside him when he tracks down a TV evangelist to his cloistered mansion in California, enjoying a lifestyle entirely opposite from his public vows of poverty. We go with Steve when he panics underwater as a novice scuba diver; we're there when he takes a breath-taking flight with the Blue Angels; and we experience the thrill he feels when he successfully guns a high-performance car to 150 miles an hour on an oval race track.

2001. Hardcover. 223 pages. ISBN 0-9637629-8-2.

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John Rosenfield's Dallas - $28 *

Ronald L. Davis

Ronald L. Davis' book, John Rosenfield's Dallas: How the Southwest's Leading Critic Shaped A City's Culture, 1925-1966, is an intriguing biography of the man who, as the subtitle says, shaped the culture of Dallas through his role as the commanding arbiter of the arts through his influential role as amusements editor of The Dallas Morning News. By the time Rosenfield retired after more than four decades as amusements editor he had guided the city's development in the arts and popular amusements so that it had become recognized throughout the music and theater world for its opera, symphony, and innovative stage productions. Behind every cultural achievement the support and guidance of Rosenfield could be felt.

2002. Hardcover. 337 pages. ISBN 1-893451-06-2.

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Dallas Reconsidered - $14 *

edited by Michael V. Hazel

Dallas Reconsidered: Essays in Local History, edited by Michael V. Hazel, is a collection of essays appearing originally in Heritage News and Legacies. Hazel is the author himself of nine of the thirty essays, and the others are written by local historians whose findings are putting the city's past in a new light. The essays are divided into five sections: Establishing a Community, Building a City, Ethnic Groups in Dallas, Women in Dallas, and Special Events in Dallas. The essays, well-researched and readable, have such titles as "Navigating the Trinity," "Early Italian Settlers in Dallas," "Dallas Women's Clubs," and "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines." The back cover of the book notes "Some Surprising Facts About Dallas." These include the story of a steamboat that came up the Trinity to Dallas from the Gulf of Mexico in 1867, a German beer garden that in 1886 made first use in town of outdoor electric lights, a thriving Italian community that supported an Italian language newspaper for many years, a cotton mill owned and operated by African Americans just after 1900, and the election of two activist women in 1908 to the school board at a time when women could not vote.

1995. Paper. 325 pages. ISBN 0-9637629-9-0.

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Bonita Faye - $20 *

Margaret Moseley

Bonita Faye was inspired by a visit with her first husband to a small restaurant in Heavener, Oklahoma, where they began talking about plots and stories. "Then I looked over at a woman with blue-gray silver hair who was sitting in the corner," Margaret recalls. "She had on a powder-blue polyester pantsuit. I said, 'For instance, this woman has a life; it would make a story. Imagine she's a murderer; she just killed somebody.' We talked about that, and I came home and sat down at the computer and wrote three pages of it. Four months later, I had the book." Bonita Faye was the first novel published by Three Forks Press. It was named a finalist in the 1996 Edgar Awards competition. This very popular novel about an unassuming, matronly woman who through unusual circumstances murdered not just one but two individuals without being caught was translated and published in Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian, and Danish. Harper/Collins produced a mass market paperback edition for American readers. First-edition copies of Bonita Faye, of which initial printing was only 1,000, have been bringing a premium as a collectible.

1996. Hardcover, 2nd printing. 180 pages. ISBN 0-9637629-4-X.

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Milicent LeSueur - $20 *

Margaret Moseley

Milicent LeSueur is a neurotic, offbeat bag lady, the only one in her small town. She is loved by all -- well, almost all. She likes her life on the street. Milicent's convoluted logic puts her way ahead of the police force after she discovers the body of a high school girl not far from where she maintains her "home."

2001. Hardcover. 167 pages. ISBN 1-893451-05-4.

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As Old As Dallas Itself - $35 *

Darwin Payne

In 1841 Dallas was founded on the banks of the Trinity River by a lawyer, John Neely Bryan, and since then the legal profession has played an important role in the development of Dallas. From the beginning there was always a high proportion of lawyers in the city, and before the turn of the century many more attorneys were coming to Dallas because they rightly perceived that it would be one of the leading cities in the state. This history ties together the lawyers, law firms, developments in the practice of law, the role of lawyers in Dallas after the assassination of President Kennedy, and the ways in which the legal profession meshed with the city over the years.

1999. Hardcover. 325 pages. ISBN 1-893451-01-1.

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Reporting the Kennedy Assassination - $10 *

edited by Laura Hlavach and Darwin Payne

Reporting the Kennedy Assassination relates the word-by-word proceedings of the thirtieth reunion of journalists who covered the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas on that fateful weekend of Nov. 22-24, 1963. These fascinating stories give first-person accounts of the journalists' experiences at Dealey Plaza, inside the Schoolbook Depository, at Parkland Hospital, at the Texas Theater where Oswald was captured, and at the Dallas police station. This is an essential document for students of the assassination as well as casual readers who want to know more about what happened behind the scenes. With photographs.

1996. Paper. 174 pages. ISBN 0-9637629-2-3.

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Big D

Darwin Payne

Here is a book that explores not only the many triumphs of Dallas but the underlying problems that so often were hidden from view. Many of the episodes and individuals described are surprising: all are important for an understanding of Dallas. They include:

- the much-delayed decision by the city’s ministers to shut down an officially sanctioned “reservation” for prostitutes;
- the rise of a local Ku Klux Klan chapter that was the biggest in the nation and whose members for a while dominated both city and county governments;
- the adoption of a council-manager plan of municipal government that continues today;
- the taming of the Trinity River by building levees;
- the winning of the Texas Centennial Exposition against overwhelming odds;
- the post-World War II years in which the businessmen’s grip on the city became tighter than ever;
- the city’s political climate on the eve of the Kennedy assassination and the ramifications of this tragic event;
- the climb to power by minorities in the city and changes in the way in which city council members are elected;
- and much more.

ISBN 1893451046. rev. ed., 2000. $35. 579 pages. Hardcover. (Now out of print but undergoing revision for a third edition.)

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Indomitable Sarah - $35 *

Darwin Payne

This book won the Texas State Historical Association's Liz Carpenter Award for the best scholarly book on the history of women and Texas for the year 2004. It was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters' Carr P. Collins Award for the Best Book of Non-Fiction for 2004.

2004. Hardcover. 467 pages. ISBN 0870744879.

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Owen Wister

Darwin Payne

This book won the Texas Institute of Letters' award for the best scholarly book about the state or by a Texas author. Wister was the writer from Philadelphia who wrote The Virginian and other western novels as well as some non-fiction. The Virginian popularized the cowboy hero as the strong, silent type who was tender with women.

1985. Hardcover. 377 pages. ISBN 0870742051.

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Tex Rex - $20 *

Marshall Terry

Tex Rex explores -- "in ragtime rhythm" -- the old myths of Texas in a modern, fast-paced setting through the adventures of an administrator/professor who takes leave from his duties at a new, second-rate university in North Dallas. The academician claims to be a descendant of Moses Rose (the man who fled the Alamo), and, true to his distant ancestor's predicament in San Antonio, he gets tangled up in a situation that is far more than he bargained for. A brief, frightening encounter with Osama bin Laden is, actually, not the least of those troubles. They are prompted mostly by an intriguing collection of characters in Texas.

2003. Hardcover. 187 pages. ISBN 1-893451-07-0.

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The Memorialist - $10.95 *

Marshall Terry

The Memorialist is the fourth volume of Terry's "Northway" family series. In this novella and collection of stories Terry brings sometimes painful but always positive perspective to the basic human problems of mortality, identity and the creative acts of living and of forming life through language. In the novella "The Memorialist," an aging professor, Mark Northway, keeps doing memorial services as friends, family and colleagues pass on, all the while facing his own mortality and, as a "memorialist," visiting the lives of those dear to him who have departed but whose spirits remain alive to him. The four stories accompanying the novella embrace identity as Mark receives his grandfather Tom Northway's gift to him of storytelling; witnesses his great-grandfather's experience of civil war and prison; tracks his father's choice to be true to himself; and finally and happily realizes his own true place and identity. These are stories of love, faith and caring, stories which understand at root the complexities of living and dying, of being human.

2006. Hardcover. 152 pages. ISBN 1-893451010-0.

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From Prairie to Planes - $28 *

Darwin Payne and Kathy Fitzpatrick

DFW International Airport is the creation of two cities, Dallas and Fort Worth, located thirty miles apart, who for decades had feuded bitterly over aviation supremacy. In 1964 they were ordered by the Federal Aviation Administration to settle their differences and come together in a combined mid-cities airport. This they did, and despite their long history of rivalry, they were able to build what was then the largest airport in the world.

From Prairie to Planes is also the separate histories of aviation in these two cities from early 20th century to the opening of the new airport in 1974. It describes in colorful detail the inevitable forces that seemed to dictate a powerful airport midway between the two Texas cities.

1999. Hardcover. 317 pages. ISBN 1893451003.

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