If This Were a Book: The Harder They Fall

Title: Black Powder, Red Ink

Tagline: Every outlaw needs a story worth bleeding for.

Excerpt: If this film rode into bookstores, it would arrive leather-bound, embossed with a scarlet star. The language would be sharp as gunmetal, the dialogue like bullets fired in rhythm. Each chapter would smell of whiskey, dust, and revenge—and be soundtracked by Nina Simone and Nipsey Hussle. A Western reimagined as epic Black literature.

“Justice was just another name for the story the winner told. And she was done losing.”

I couldn’t help but wonder… what happens when we take the Western out of the white man’s holster and load it with something bolder?

If The Harder They Fall were a book, it wouldn’t live in the Western section. It would shatter the shelf entirely. It would swagger through the saloon of literary fiction, drop its duffel of bullets and buried grief, and demand a seat at the table—in a black Stetson and blood-red leather gloves.

It would be a novel with a soundtrack. A story you’d have to read to a beat. Not a gallop, but a stomp. It would open not with “Once upon a time,” but with a gunshot, a gold tooth glinting in the sun, and a name you weren’t supposed to forget.

Because in this book, names matter.

Every character would enter like a chapter unto themselves. Nat Love: the boy who became vengeance in a vest. Stagecoach Mary: the woman who wore her rage like rouge. And Trudy Smith? Well, she’d be the footnote you dare not skip—the beautiful kind of danger most men mistake for a comma when she’s really the period.

If The Harder They Fall were a book, it wouldn’t be a Western. It would be a reckoning. A reclamation. A reminder that the Old West was never just white. It was Black, and bad-ass, and bleeding, and brilliant.

And this book would be laced in revenge. Not cold—cinematic.

It would smell like dust and whiskey, and feel like braiding your ancestors into every page. The kind of story you read out loud to yourself at midnight just to feel the rhythm in your chest. The kind of story where justice doesn't come with a badge—it rides in on a Black horse and leaves behind an echo.

But for all the shootouts and standoffs, the real gunpowder would be in the silence—the unspoken pain between the lines, the longing buried under bravado, the hurt behind the holsters.

Because every outlaw in this book was once a child. And every villain? Once a lover.

In the end, the hardest thing to fall isn’t a man—it’s the myth of who history said we were.

And maybe that’s what this story is really about.

Not the bullets.

Not the blood. But the rewriting.

Because sometimes the wildest West… is the one we write ourselves into.