Fellow Forum member Tim Champlin--a frequent fixture at Mark Twain 
conferences--was recently interviewed on WTUC, Chattanooga's NPR 
station. Tim's a prolific author of Western novels, several of which use 
Sam Clemens as a character. One of his novels, /Tom Sawyer and the 
Ghosts of Summer/, is a time-travel story that opens in 1950 and takes 
its youthful protagonists back to 1848 Hannibal, where they meet Sam 
Clemens, Tom Sawyer, and Huck Finn. Kevin Mac Donnell reviewed that book 
for the Forum in 2010 (http://www.twainweb.net/reviews/Champlin2.html). 
Incidentally, Tim is currently looking for a publisher for his novel 
about the lost voice recordings of Mark Twain.

Tim's NPR review focuses on /_Ghosts of Summer_;/ another novel titled 
/_Treasure of the Templars_, /whose Kindle edition is currently 
attracting a lot of attention on Amazon.com; and _Louis L'Amour's Wild 
West_, his recently completed nonfiction book about fellow Western 
writer Louis L'Amour. However, it's a wide-ranging interview that 
reveals a lot about how Tim got into writing and how he works. Those of 
you who know Tim or who are interested in how novelists work will find 
the interview fascinating. You can listen to it at 
http://wutc.org/post/book-news-treasure-thrilling-westerns-tim-champlin. 
<http://wutc.org/post/book-news-treasure-thrilling-westerns-tim-champlin>

Kent Rasmussen

p.s. If you'd care to sample one of Tim's novels, you can do no better 
than read _Cold Cache_, whose intrepid protagonist has described by K. 
Patrick Ober as one of the great heroic figures in modern literature And 
that man (Ober, not the protagonist) knows what he's talking about. He's 
a doctor (a real one, not one of those piled-higher-and-deeper types).