Growing up in suburban Little Rock, Arkansas, Benjamin J. Kirby dreamed of being a novelist. As a teenager he virtually inhaled all the classic Stephen King books, one after the other.

“And I thought, this is what I’m going to do,” Kirby remembers. “I want to be Stephen King.”

That’s not exactly how it all went down. Kirby carved a career for himself in politics, working for the Clinton administration’s two terms in Washington, D.C. in various capacities, and then for St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman. He was the Kriseman administration’s Communications Director for eight years.

And he was always, at the same time, a writer. “I first went to college to be a radio DJ,” he laughs, “but I was terrible at it.”

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Kirby’s second novel, available through Amazon, was recently issued by Two Gun Publishing. Rip Crowley in Fox Osage is indeed a Western, set in rural Northwest Arkansas in the mid 1800s.

“If you pick up a Western, right now, It’s going to be set in Texas, New Mexico or Arizona,” Kirby notes. “Maybe Oklahoma. And I thought, not a lot of Westerns are set in Arkansas.”

Rip Crowley is a widower and war veteran, scratching out a living for himself and his two children just outside the tiny town of Fox Osage.

He is tough and taciturn, and his battlefield experiences, along with his time in a brutal Confederate prison, are told in flashbacks.

Bad guys, as they tend to do in Western fiction, arrive in town. And they want something. They want it bad. And reluctantly, Crowley becomes the one man who’ll stand in their way.

With vividly drawn characters, and a plot that steers clear of predictability, Rip Crowley in Fox Osage is what the English used to call “a ripping good yarn.” There’s a little Louis L’Amour in there, and a bit of Larry McMurtry … and a lot of Benjamin J. Kirby’s singlar voice.

Kirby honed his after-hours storytelling skills over years of backstage political work (he has a BIS in Political Communication from Washington’s George Mason University).

In the early ‘90s, he volunteered for, then was hired by, the Bill Clinton For President campaign office in Little Rock. He was asked to join the transition team after the election and relocated to D.C. Over the next eight years, Kirby worked in the personnel office, for the Drug Czar, for First Lady Hillary Clinton and for the Department of Justice.

He had absorbed the workings of the political machinery in the same way he’d done the Stephen King books.

After his man Al Gore lost to George W. Bush, Kirby worked in New York post 9-11 for a year, then went back to Arkansas, then to Florida. There were other political back-and-forth moves in between, but in 2006 Kirby and his wife landed in St. Pete.

He spent a few years handling communications for the Juvenile Welfare Board of Pinellas County, and joined the Kriseman team in 2013.

Having zero political aspirations of his own, mind you. “One of the things that’s good to learn early about yourself is not just what you’re good at, but learning what you don’t like to do,” Kirby says. “And what you’re not good at. I managed a Congressional campaign in 2002, and I realized I hated it. I hated managing the budget, I hated managing people.

“I like the idea of being of service, I like government service. And I learned early on that I’m good as some aspects of it. I’m good at writing. I’m good at political advice, at building policy and things like that. Helping interpret where we are politically.”

His first novel, the Florida-based thriller Canebrake, began life as a 1,500-word piece published in Creative Loafing in 2010.

“And I just thought, well, let’s just see where the story goes. What does he do next?”

The unpublished book received an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Black Spring Press Crime Fiction Prize.

Kirby, who’s also a published poet, currently serves as Local Government Relations Manager for HCA Healthcare. He’s been with the company since 2023.

Rip Crowley and his teenage son Jeremiah appeared in several short stories he’d written; as with the original Canebrake story, he decided to expand their world. This involved lots of thinking, re-thinking, writing, re-writing, head-scratching and second-guessing.

“Rip Crowley is a pretty close approximation of my father, and Jeremiah is a pretty close approximation of myself,” Kirby relates. “I don’t know that things come out of the blue. You go to coffee shops, you see people, you meet people, you go to work … and that person’s a character. It kind of opens a tab in your brain, and the next thing you know you have a scene.

“And who knows, after that, you might have 100,000 words.”

Historical research, in the name of accuracy, was an important part of the process. He dived into the pre- and post-Civil War history of that area of his home state. “When you’re a guy like me writing about indigenous people, you want to be as clear and accurate as possible. I wanted to be as true to that, as respectful to that, as I could.”

Kirby’s latest project, in the first draft stage, is a Florida-based crime thriller.

Will Rip and his crew return to fight another day? “Another western is kind of churning in my mind,” the writer says, offering a wry smile. “I’m trying to get the characters just right.”