March is Women’s History Month, so it seems appropriate to lead off the month with a book about Texas Women and Ranching: On the Range, at the Rodeo, and in Their Communities (Texas A&M University Press, $32 hardcover).  

Edited by Deborah M. Liles and Cecilia Gutierrez Venable, the volume includes 10 essays on Texas ranch women, some quite well known and others who haven’t received much attention in the past.

The anthology grew out of a symposium on Women Ranchers in Texas, held in 2016 at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls and is part of the Women in Texas History series sponsored by the Ruthe Winegarten Memorial Foundation for Texas Women’s History.

The biographical essays include pieces on Tejanas and ranching, featuring Maria Calvillo;  women in the early years of the cattle industry in Texas; Panhandle ranchers Cornelia Adair, Mary Jane Alexander, and Kathryn and Nancy Binford; Coleman rancher, philanthropist and librarian Mattie B. Morris Miller; two women who had prominent roles in the Texas Fence-Cutting Wars; and South Texas rancher Alice Klebert East, granddaughter of Henrietta King.

“These were women who could ride and work cattle,” said Midwestern State historian Leland Turner. “They were all living in a time and place when it was out of the ordinary to do what they did.”

Western Novel: The third and concluding novel in Bill Wittliff’s Papa Stories trilogy is The Devil’s Fork (University of Texas Press, $29.95 hardcover). They follow his two previous novels, The Devil’s Backbone and The Devil’s Sinkhole.

All three novels feature the adventures of a young boy named Papa and are told in his voice.

In The Devil’s Fork, Papa begins his tale about how “they was gonna hang my o’Amigo Calley Pearsall out there in front a’ the Alamo down in San Antoneya come Saturday Noon and if I was gonna stop it I better Light a Shuck and Get on over there…. So me and Annie and o’Fritz jumped up on Sister and I give her my heels and a’way we did go.”

Some might find the dialect difficult to follow, while others may see it as adding authenticity to the stories.

New Series: Texas fans of mystery novelist Diane Kelly might be interested to know that she has a new House-Flipper Mystery series that begins with Dead as a Door Knocker (St. Martin’s Press, $7.99 paperback).

Diane now lives in North Carolina and the new series is set in Nashville, so it doesn’t really fit this column’s definition of books about Texas or by Texas authors. But I thought I would pass along the note that she has a new series, which I’m sure is as entertaining as her previous ones set in Dallas and Fort Worth.