[1][2] Flynn's early fame came with the novel, North to Yesterday, which was a national bestseller.It mocked the legend of the cowboy in Western novels while paying homage to it at the same time.. Later works focused on more modern themes: rural life, going to war, religion in modern times and conflicts between "small town morality" and mass media/pop culture.

Wanderer Springs adopted the gently satirical tone of his earlier works while also examining the interconnectedness between people and families in a small Texas town.

(In his latest novel Tie-Fast Country, Flynn returns to earlier themes, depicting a grandmother rancher with a checkered past who is out of sync with contemporary life.

Of this ebook, San Antonio Express News book reviewer Ed Conroy writes:[3] "Flynn brilliantly employs a directly simple, subtle and at times sardonic narrative voice to tell this tale.

It is alternately tough and tender, succinct and sweet, cadenced to the clip-clop of a horse trotting down Main Street, the hullabaloo of a steam locomotive triumphantly making its way into town amid a jubilant crowd's hoopla, and, of course, to the shots of guns of many kinds fired in self-defense, anger, treachery and haste....Through chronicling Jade's struggles to bring some ordinary order into what eventually becomes Jade Town, Flynn makes clear that the cost of many of our male ancestors' genocidal policies toward Indians, systematic abuse of women and fears of the "mongrelization" of the "white race" was massive social trauma of immensely tragic proportions."