Collection: Luke Short's Western Stories

Luke Short was the pen name American writer Frederick Dilley Glidden. After reading Western pulp magazines and trying to escape unemployment, he began to write Western fiction. He sold his first short story and novel in 1935 under the pen name of Luke Short (which was also the name of a famous gunslinger in the Old West, although it's unclear if he was aware of that when he assumed the pen name.) His apprenticeship in the pulps was comparatively brief. In 1938 he sold a short story, The Warning, to Collier's Magazine and in 1941 he sold his novel Blood on the Moon, aka Gunman's Chance, to The Saturday Evening Post.

After publishing over a dozen novels in the 1930s, he started writing for films in the 1940s.