Literature has always been a part of David Pyke's life.
Born in Denton, Texas, David is the son of teachers who encouraged their children to read. He quickly moved from Andy Buckram's Tin Men and the Hardy Boys to Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Bram Stoker's Dracula while still in grammar school. He even tackled Beowulf before he was ten. "A hero tearing the arm off monsters," David said. "What wasn't to like?" Summer vacations were spent with sports, traveling, and books - science fiction, horror, westerns, action-adventure, and mystery.
David began writing professionally at age fifteen, taking every assignment he could find and, quite literally, beginning at the bottom of the journalistic ladder. "When I was a junior in high school, I covered little kids' basketball games on Saturday mornings for the Denton Shopper, a free all-advertisement newspaper that wound up in the gutters all over the neighborhood."
While in college, David was sports editor of a bi-weekly paper and a part-time staff writer for a local mid-size daily, a job he parlayed into a fulltime position after graduating from the University of North Texas. David spent several years as staff writer for midsize and metropolitan newspapers, interviewing future superstar athletes like golfer Justin Leonard and cyclist Lance Armstrong when they were still in high school, and covering more than a thousand events, including the Daytona 500 and Indianapolis 500.
In 1991, David found another literary spirit when he met Suzanne Grant, an English teacher. They were married in 1992.
Like every writer, David dreamed of novels. His first attempts never reached conclusion. "If you can't finish it, that's a good sign that it shouldn't be finished," he said. "I hadn't found the right characters or place yet."
He found his inspiration in his Texas heritage. Not only is he a native Texan, David is related to one of the defenders of the Alamo.
"His name was Isaac Millsaps," David said. "He was a member of the Gonzales Ranging Company of Mounted Volunteers, who responded to Travis's call for reinforcements."
That, along with his love of action-adventure and westerns, led to the concept for a series of action-adventure books set in Texas in the 1800s. He fleshed out characters and plot, researched the history and cultures, purchased a laptop computer, and began writing.
David was a voracious reader from an early age. Herman Melville, William Golding, H.G. Wells, Ernest Hemingway, William Kotzwinkle, and Phillip Roth shaped David, but another set of authors had - and continue to have - a direct impact on Pyke's novel writing. Here are some of his influences, with his comments on each:
Leon Uris - "One of the first books to make a major impact upon me was Battle Cry. I've never cared more about characters than in this epic of the war in the Pacific, and I still tear up during the desperate climatic battle as one after another of the men of the radio squad fall. To this day, I'm a fan of Georgia Tech football because of Battle Cry. Just try to keep your pulse from quickening through the battle scenes."
Frederick Forsyth - "Forsyth's first three novels are classics of the action-adventure genre. The Dogs of War, The Odessa File, and The Day of the Jackal set the standard for modern action-adventure, and The Day of the Jackal still stands as one of the greatest thrillers of all time. No one knows every detail of his subject like Forsyth."
Bernard Cornwell - "This British author is simply the best action-adventure writer going today. He is able to simultaneously tell the story of a single soldier and the larger battle taking place around him. Richard Sharpe is one of the more memorable characters in the genre. But nothing approaches Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles (The Winter King, Enemy of God, and Excalibur), his version of the Arthurian legend. It is absolutely brilliant. I just hope to someday approach its level in my work."
Steven Pressfield - "In Gates of Fire, Pressfield puts a human face on the participants in the Battle of Thermopylae and communicates the emotion, pain, and desperation of the Spartans. It doesn't matter if you know how the battle turned out. It's a wonderful novel."
Larry McMurtry - "His is the best western ever written. Lonesome Dove is the measuring stick for all westerns, and until somebody else wins a Pulitzer Prize for a western, it remains the king."
Stephen King - "King has an amazing vocabulary, a remarkable skill with the music of language, and he possesses that rare ability to create a whole other place in his stories. The Dark Tower series is one of the most captivating I've ever encountered."
Clive Cussler - "Cussler is a great storyteller who helped establish the blueprint for action-adventure: start fast with lively action; introduce an element early that will come back to the story late; and weave multiple story lines together into an explosive climax."
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle - "Two of science fiction's best, they teamed to create such works as Lucifer's Hammer and Footfall, books that are full of wonderful observations on humanity. I found myself drawn completely into the world of Lucifer's Hammer, and had to re-orient myself to my own surroundings each time I closed the book."
Forrest Carter - "Gone To Texas may be the second-best western ever written. Large portions of the book's dialogue were used in Clint Eastwood's film version, The Outlaw Josey Wales."
James Carlos Blake - "Intense. He is a great writer who shows us outlaw worlds most of people never experience. Wildwood Boys is a great western and a magnificent telling of one of the most savage stories of the Civil War."