“I wanted to be a writer since I was 10 years old,” remarks Christopher Bartley, speaking from his home in Hawaii on an unusually chilly January morning. “I was a fan of the Hardy Boys as a child, wrote a novel in college [and] another while in graduate school but never showed anybody those books.” Today, Bartley is the author of a series of eight historical crime novels about Ross Duncan, a 1930s bank robber. His latest work, A Season Past, a divergence from the noir genre, is an anthology that examines the postwar lives of combat veterans from three specific moments in American military history.

“I really had to make a conscious effort to get outside the voice of Ross Duncan,” Bartley confides. The title story of the collection was written in the early 1990s and sat on the author’s computer for decades. Set in 1898, A Season Past tells of Coltrane, a former soldier and lawman who fought with the Stonewall Brigade of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. Bartley shared the novella with his agent, who loved it but felt that it was too short to publish on its own. He then shared “Those Apache Tears” with her, a 2009 short story based on a conversation he and his wife had at Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument with a Native American park ranger who had served in Vietnam. The author went on to write The Cold Ardennes, a novella about a World War II veteran’s return to his hometown in Texas, to form a bridge between the two other stories and complete the collection.

As fans of the Ross Duncan series may already be aware, Christopher Bartley happens to be a pen name for B. Christopher Frueh, a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii and clinical professor with the Trauma and Resilience Center at the University of Texas Health Science Center. He has spent his career working with veterans and active-duty military personnel, treating their PTSD, along with other psychiatric illnesses, and helping them transition to civilian life. Over the past decade, he has worked with the special operations forces community, including Navy SEALs and Army Rangers. His father was a physician who served in the Air Force in the Vietnam War, and his great-grandfather, whom he was lucky enough to meet, was a veteran of the Spanish-American War and fought in the Battle of San Juan Hill.

It requires little excavation to discover the source of Bartley’s inspiration for his latest work—the author has shared a close proximity with those he describes as being “warriors all their lives.” However, when asked whether he believes that all the main characters featured in A Season Past suffer from PTSD, he remains reticent. “We make a mistake in our thinking as a society that everyone who has trouble after going to war has PTSD,” Bartley reflects. “I’m not sure my characters all have PTSD, but they are definitely affected by their combat experiences.”

Bartley’s protagonists are carefully crafted, psychologically realistic individuals. Far from flooding the narrative with his knowledge and research, the author subtly reveals the troubles his characters are experiencing as the plot develops. Civil War veteran Coltrane, for example, is an outsider separated from his wife, Anne, on account of his inability to nurture a loving relationship. He aims to find peace after settling alone in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, but his life becomes complicated by a budding attraction to Elisabeth, a local girl who is engaged to be married, and by the unshakeable legacy of his gunslinger past.

Bartley develops Coltrane’s character gradually and meticulously, alluding to a hypervigilance that has remained with him since the war, a tendency to self-medicate with alcohol, and a restless and tormented mind even in sleep, as observed by his wife, Anne: “You grind your teeth so hard I think you must be about to shatter them.” Coltrane is also visited by the apparition of the Old West folk hero Wild Bill Hickok, who attempts to alter the course of his fate.

The Cold Ardennes focuses on similar themes but for a soldier fresh from a very different theater of war. The unnamed protagonist returns home from fighting the Nazis to find that, as Bartley notes, “He’s someone completely different. Circumstances in his hometown have changed. He has to figure out who or what he’s going to be and do.” The protagonist falls in with a gang of local criminals headed by a boss named Hackett, who just happens to have a relationship with the protagonist’s former love interest Sally.

The story examines how a soldier can become desensitized by war. As Bartley puts it, “He’s done enough killing that it doesn’t have the same weight it would for other civilians.” The absence of the thrill of combat leaves a gaping void in the protagonist’s life, which is only rekindled when he turns to criminal activity. This passage, which precedes a bank heist, showcases Bartley’s ability to capture realistic, close-quarters combat:

My blade went into the side of his neck easily as I stepped through the jab, cutting across the jugular and severing the man’s airway before he even had a chance to register his surprise. He fell over and flopped with his feet kicking for a moment. His eyes stared into mine without expression as one hand tried to grasp hold of his neck. His futile movements became successively smaller. After about fifteen seconds he stopped moving and stared with unseeing eyes up into the brightening sky above.

Bartley is a visceral writer who, at such moments, succeeds in pinpointing the cold matter-of-factness with which his protagonist has come to perceive death, along with an underlying delight. He remarks, “Some of the men I’ve talked to have been very frank—they enjoyed killing. Nothing…could [quite] match that sensation of surviving an encounter, and surviving because you killed the other guy.”

Bartley currently has a number of books in the pipeline; a new Ross Duncan novel is already with his agent. He also plans to examine how contemporary society “outsources” violence in collaboration with a friend of his from the special forces community, although he is currently uncertain whether this will be a work of fiction. When asked, besides his research, what drives him to write so prolifically, his response is satisfyingly straightforward: “I try to write books that I want to read.”

Darren Richard Carlaw is a British writer and editor and the founder of StepAway Magazine.