Forgotten Books: Saturday Night at San Ramon - Marshall Grover (Leonard F. Meares)

I’ve mentioned Leonard F. Meares many times on this blog, writing about how I went from being a big fan of his Western novels published by Bantam in the Sixties under the name Marshall McCoy, to learning more about him (Australian, wrote more than 800 novels, mostly under the name Marshall Grover, created the Larry and Stretch series and Big Jim Rand series, a couple dozen of each published by Bantam as Larry and Streak and Nevada Jim Gage), and finally becoming a good friend-by-correspondence with him in the Eighties and Nineties.

It had been a while since I read any of his books, though, so when I got a big box of Cleveland Westerns (Len’s first publisher in Australia) from a friend of mine, the first one I grabbed to read was SATURDAY NIGHT AT SAN RAMON, one of Len’s non-series yarns. Not surprisingly, it’s a good one.

The protagonist, young bronco buster Gil Draper, comes to San Ramon on a vengeance quest, seeking the man responsible for a tragedy in Gil’s past. After running afoul of the town’s lawmen, though, Gil realizes he needs to find a job if he’s going to stay in the area searching for his quarry. So he takes a job breaking wild horses on the Triangle Ranch, only to find that not only does the owner of the spread also have a beautiful daughter, but danger also threatens the ranch in the form of a gang of rustlers.

From that description, it’s obvious that SATURDAY NIGHT AT SAN RAMON is a very traditional Western, which is true of most of Len’s books. However, what makes them well worth reading, in my opinion, is the skill and enthusiasm with which he manipulates those plot elements and the vivid characters with which he populates them. SATURDAY NIGHT AT SAN RAMON races along and is great fun to read. I’d tell you not to pass it up if you come across a copy, but that’s pretty unlikely since I doubt if it was ever reprinted since the edition I read (that’s it in the scan), published in Australia as a Tumbleweed Western by Cleveland more than fifty years ago. However, if you’re a fan of traditional Westerns and find anything by Marshall Grover or Marshall McCoy, chances are you’ll like it.

Forgotten Books: Pin a Star on a Girl?--Johnny Nelson

PIN A STAR ON A GIRL? is a retitled reprint of a Western novel originally published in 1965 under the title SIX-GUN LAW. The by-line in both cases is Johnny Nelson, but the actual author was Leonard F. Meares, an Australian Western author best known as “Marshall Grover”, the creator of the long-running Larry and Stretch series, as well as the series Big Jim. Some of the books in both series were published by Bantam in the U.S., under the pseudonym Marshall McCoy, with the characters changed to Larry and Streak and Nevada Jim. Those were my introduction to Meares’ work.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve written about Len Meares and his work many times. He’s been a favorite author ever since I read those Bantam editions in the Sixties. Years later I got to know him through correspondence and considered him a good friend. It was a sad day when I heard that he had passed away.

His work remains, though, and I’ll never run out of his books to read. His stand-alone novels, including this one, are just as good as his series entries. For the most part, Meares made use of very traditional Western elements. That’s true in this book. You’ve got the brutal cattle baron with a shady past who controls the town and the surrounding area; the bought-and-paid-for local lawman who grows a spine and decides to stand up for what’s right; the fast-on-the-draw stranger who rides in with a mysterious agenda of his own; and the beautiful blonde of the title who winds up wearing a deputy’s badge.

While the plot and characters may be traditional, Meares utilizes them with such skill and enthusiasm that I couldn’t help but be drawn into the story. There’s plenty of action leading up an excellent and satisfying final showdown. Sometimes I just want to read an old-fashioned Western adventure yarn, and PIN A STAR ON A GIRL? really hit that spot for me. Recommended.

UPDATE: Reliable information has surfaced indicating that Len Meares did NOT write this book, after all. However, everything else I said above remains true. It's a very entertaining Western yarn, whoever the author was.

News From Piccadilly Publishing

Piccadilly Publishing, the Home of Great Western Fiction, celebrates Christmas 2016 by issuing no less than SIX new western series to its line-up ... all available at a special low price for the first seven days of publication! 

LARRY AND STRETCH 1: DRIFT! 
BIG JIM 1: THE NIGHT McLENNAN DIED 
DRIFTER 1: SAVAGE 
McALLISTER 1: McALLISTER ON THE COMANCHE CROSSING 
BANNERMAN THE ENFORCER 1: THE ENFORCER 
CLAY NASH 1: UNDERCOVER GUN 

These look great, and I've already pre-ordered all of them. I'd read the two Marshall Grover novels before, but I plan to read them again. Piccadilly Publishing has done a fine job of bringing out some classic Westerns, both old and new.

Forgotten Books: Kincaid's Last Ride - Marshall Grover (Leonard F. Meares)

I've written before on here about how much I've enjoyed the Westerns by Australian author Leonard F. Meares, who wrote more than 800 novels under a variety of pseudonyms, the most famous being Marshall Grover. I started reading his work when I was a kid, in the Bantam editions published under the name Marshall McCoy, never dreaming at the time that years later I'd become friends with the author by correspondence.

I don't read as many of his books as I used to, but I recently picked up some used large print ex-library copies of a few of them, and KINCAID'S LAST RIDE is the first one of this batch I've read. It's a very entertaining yarn, as always. Larry Valentine and Stretch Emerson, the two drifters from Texas who were Meares' most popular characters, find themselves helping out an old-timer who was just released from prison and is on his way back to his old hometown. The old-timer has a gang of killers after him because it's rumored that his cellmate told him the location of a lost gold mine that's supposed to be fabulously valuable. In a nice plot twist (Meares always packed quite a bit of plot into these short books), a beautiful young actress and her husband become involved in the affair, too, and before it's all settled there are plenty of fisticuffs and gunplay.

The Larry and Stretch books, and Meares' other novels, as well, were never ground-breaking, but they're amazingly consistent in their entertainment value. I've read close to a hundred of them over the years and didn't care for maybe two of them. KINCAID'S LAST RIDE is fast-paced,well written, and a lot of fun.

The scan is of the copy I read, complete with library stickers.

Ten More Western Authors I Like

Here are ten more Western authors whose work I really enjoy, although, as usual, some of them can be inconsistent.

Peter Dawson – In real life Peter Dawson was Jonathan Glidden, brother of Frederick Glidden, who wrote as Luke Short. I believe Jon began writing after Fred did, but both were prolific contributors to the pulps during the Thirties. If I recall correctly (and someone please correct me if I don't), Jon Glidden won some sort of contest with his novel THE CRIMSON HORSESHOE, which was serialized in WESTERN STORY and then published in hardback by Dodd, Mead, starting him on a very successful career as a novelist. He continued to write for the pulps through the Forties but concentrated on novels after that. The paperback reprints from Bantam Books were so popular that after Glidden's death Bantam hired another author to write paperback originals under the Dawson name. I've never read any of them, but I've been told they're not nearly as good as the ones Glidden wrote. I first discovered Peter Dawson's work by reading the novel TRAIL BOSS when I was in the seventh grade, and I've read many of his books since then. Several volumes of his pulp work were published in paperback by Leisure in recent years.

Peter Field – This is a bit of a cheat, since "Peter Field" is a house-name and a number of different authors used it. But when I was a kid checking out books from the bookmobile every week, I went through every Peter Field western they had, which was quite a few. The books were published in hardback, first by William Morrow (more on that in a minute) and then by Jefferson House. All the ones I read back then were in the Powder Valley series and featured the adventures of Pat Stevens, a horse rancher in Colorado, and his sidekicks: short, roly-poly Sam and tall, gaunt, eyepatch-wearing Ezra. I had no clue then that Peter Field wasn't the author's real name, but I know now that all of the novels from the Fifties and Sixties were written by Lucien W. Emerson. Later on I discovered the earlier books in the series, written at first by William Thayer Hobson, the president of William Morrow and the husband of bestselling novelist Laura Z. Hobson, and then later by various hands, most notably Davis Dresser, a.k.a. Brett Halliday his own self. Dresser was the primary author of the series during the Forties, when his Mike Shayne series was also going strong. In these earlier books, Pat Stevens was still a rancher, but he was also the sheriff, and he had a wife, too, who had disappeared by the time I started reading the books in the early Sixties. In addition to all this, the Peter Field name was also used on several stand-alone Western novels, all of which were written, I believe, by Harry Sinclair Drago.

Peter Germano – Best known under his pseudonym Barry Cord, Germano wrote under that name and several others. His stories began appearing in the Western pulps in the mid-Thirties, and by the late Forties he was writing novels under the Barry Cord name. During the Fifties he was one of the main authors of Jim Hatfield novels for the pulp TEXAS RANGERS under the house-name Jackson Cole, and some of his entries are among the best in the entire series. Later on he became a prolific author of paperbacks, turning out many novels for the Ace Double line as well as other publishers. Some of these novels were rewritten and expanded version of stories he originally wrote as Jim Hatfield novels. As is the case with most of the Western authors I like, his style was terse and hardboiled, and his stories are well-plotted with plenty of action.

William Hopson – Another author who started in the pulps and then became a prolific paperbacker, Hopson has an odd style that takes a little getting used to, but once a reader is accustomed to it, his prose is very effective. His work is inconsistent. His Masked Rider "Guns of the Clan" is almost unreadable, while his later stand-alone novel GUNFIGHTER'S PAY is an excellent yarn with one of the best action climaxes I've found in a Western. If you try something by him and don't like it, it's probably worthwhile to try something else.

Peter McCurtin – One of the great mysteries in Western publishing, Peter McCurtin was long thought to be a house-name, but it appears there really was a writer and editor by that name who worked primarily for Belmont/Tower/Leisure. His best work is probably the Carmody series, published under his own name. These are tough, gritty action Westerns and very well-written. All of them except the first book in the series are in first person, something of a rarity in Westerns. Later, McCurtin wrote another series under the name Gene Curry about a character named Saddler, who is basically Carmody again. He also wrote some of the Lassiter novels under the house-name Jack Slade, including THE MAN FROM DEL RIO, the first Adult Western I ever read and a real eye-opener at the time. McCurtin continued the Sundance series after Ben Haas's death, and while I don't like his entries as much as the earlier books, they're solid Westerns. He also wrote men's adventure novels and a couple of hardboiled private eye novels that are well-regarded by some fans of the genre. I haven't gotten around to reading them yet, but I will one of these days.

Leonard F. Meares – I first encountered the work of Len Meares in the Bantam paperbacks published under the name Marshall McCoy. These were thin Westerns in two series: Larry and Streak, and Nevada Jim. I enjoyed these books and read them all. Checking the copyright pages, as I did even then, I figured out that these were reprints of books originally published in Australia. I never dreamed, though, that many years later I would be good friends by correspondence with the author, whose name was really Marshall McCoy but rather Leonard F. Meares. Beginning in the mid-Fifties, he wrote more than 800 novels, most of them Westerns and primarily under the pseudonym Marshall Grover, although he used other pen-names as well. I read dozens of them and always enjoyed them. Fast-moving, well-plotted, with very appealing characters. About half of his output consisted of the Larry and Stretch series (the characters' names were changed slightly in the American editions, for some reason), a couple of drifting Texans with a habit of getting into trouble. Toward the end of his life, Len's Australian publishers cancelled the series, but since they had a contract for foreign rights in the Scandinavian countries, they insisted that he continue writing the books so that they could be translated. I know it bothered him to write these books knowing they would never appear in English. But still he carried on, still with as much enthusiasm as he could muster for the work. He was a great friend, and to this day I miss hearing from him.

D.B. Newton – Another veteran of the pulps, D.B. Newton wrote some of the Jim Hatfield novels in TEXAS RANGERS, as well as entries in the Rio Kid and Masked Rider series. Branching out into paperback novels, he wrote RANGE BOSS, the book regarded as the first modern-day mass-market paperback original. For Berkley he wrote a series about Jim Bannister, unjustly accused of being an outlaw and forced to go on the dodge. As Dwight Bennett, he wrote a number of excellent stand-alone Western novels for Doubleday's Double D line. Finally, he created and wrote several novels in the Stagecoach Station series for Lyle Kenyon Engel's Book Creations Inc. These were published by Bantam under the house-name Hank Mitchum. Engel intended for Newton to write all the books in the series, but with them coming out every two months, he couldn't keep up that pace and BCI enlisted other authors to contribute novels as Hank Mitchum, eventually including me. I've always taken great pleasure in the fact that I wrote shared a house-name with someone who wrote Jim Hatfield novels, since TEXAS RANGERS is one of my all-time favorite pulps. Newton's novels are good solid Westerns, nothing flashy about them. Maybe not quite as hardboiled as some of my other favorites, but still excellent reading.

Dudley Dean McGaughey – Best known for his books under the names Dean Owen and Dudley Dean, McGaughey also wrote under house-names and other pseudonyms, including, you guessed it, some Jim Hatfield novels. His Hatfield novel "White Gold of Texas", one of the stories reprinted in paperback by Popular Library, is one of the best in the series. McGaughey also wrote mysteries and soft-core erotic novels and movie novelizations and TV tie-in novels. Tough prose and good plots are to be found in all his work. He was the sort of versatile, top-notch paperback author I've always enjoyed and admired.

Walker A. Tompkins – Another veteran of TEXAS RANGERS and the Jim Hatfield series, Tompkins wrote many of those novels as Jackson Cole throughout the Forties and Fifties, and they're all good. He wrote lead novels for the other three Western hero pulps published by Ned Pines, RIO KID WESTERN, MASKED RIDER WESTERN, and RANGE RIDERS WESTERN, along with scores of stand-alone stories for nearly every Western pulp in existence. He was a stalwart in WILD WEST WEEKLY during the Thirties, writing under several different names, and some of that work comes in for some criticism in Bill Pronzini's SIX-GUN IN CHEEK. Admittedly, a lot of Tompkins' early stories and novels are pretty over-the-top. But by the late Forties he had matured into the author of a number of fine stand-alone Western novels, some of them expanded from stories that originally appeared in the pulps.

Harry Whittington – Justly famous for his hardboiled mystery and suspense novels, Harry Whittington's Westerns are just as dark and lean as his crime yarns. His novel TROUBLE RIDES TALL was adapted into the TV series LAWMAN starring John Russell and Peter Brown. SADDLE THE STORM, the story of a frontier town celebrating the Fourth of July, is probably his best Western, as the festivities bring one dark secret after another into the open. Any of Whittington's Westerns, whether from Gold Medal, Ace, or Ballantine, is well worth reading.

I see this installment is even more long-winded than the previous one. The usual caveats apply. If you try books by all these authors, there'll be some you don't like. But I'll bet there'll be some you will.

Forgotten Books: Big Lobo - Marshall McCoy (Leonard F. Meares)

First, a little history. Many of you know this stuff already, but bear with me. In the mid-Fifties, an Australian author named Leonard F. Meares began writing American Westerns under various pseudonyms for the Australian publisher Cleveland. These were short novels (30–35,000 words) published as digest-sized paperbacks. Meares’ best-known pseudonym was Marshall Grover, and his most popular series, which began in 1956, was about a couple of drifting Texans named Larry Valentine and Stretch Emerson, who always seemed to wind up in some sort of trouble they had to fight their way out of. The Larry and Stretch books also had a considerable amount of humor in them. The series ran for more than thirty years and eventually would number more than 400 books.

In 1960, Meares launched another series under the Marshall Grover name, this one concerning a small town called Bleak Creak. It lasted a couple of years and ran for eleven books. Then in 1964, he started the series that would be his most successful other than Larry and Stretch, about a former cavalry sergeant named Jim Rand, who left the army to search for the tinhorn gambler who shot and killed his brother Chris. This series began at Cleveland, but a couple of years later, Meares moved it, as well as Larry and Stretch, over to the Australian paperback publisher Horwitz, where the Marshall Grover books were so successful that they attracted the attention of American publishers. In 1968, Bantam began reprinting some of Meares’ books, but some changes were made. Marshall Grover became Marshall McCoy (I suppose someone at the publisher thought that sounded more Western). Larry Valentine became Larry Vance, Stretch Emerson became Streak Everett, and Big Jim Rand, as he had come to be known in the Australian editions, was changed to Nevada Jim Gage for the American reprints.

Which brings us to BIG LOBO, the first book in the Nevada Jim series as published by Bantam. I found this and GUN GLORY FOR TEXANS, the first Larry and Streak book from Bantam, at the same time in early 1968, bought them and read them, loved them, and bought and read the rest of the Marshall McCoy books, knowing nothing at the time about their history, only that I liked them. I never dreamed then that many years later I would go on to read dozens of the Australian originals and would also correspond with the author, Len Meares, for several years before his untimely death in the Nineties.

BIG LOBO is actually the thirtieth book in the original Big Jim series. By this time, Jim has spent several years searching for his brother’s killer and having numerous adventures along the way. He rides in to the town of Halesburg in Arizona Territory just in time to witness a raid on the town by the notorious outlaw Big Lobo, who leads a gang of several dozen vicious owlhoots. Big Lobo and his men don’t try to wipe out the town, though. They just steal some supplies and retreat, leaving the citizens of Halesburg to wait in fear for the next attack, which comes a day or so later. This time the outlaws just steal some horses and liquor before pulling back to their hideout on top of a nearby mesa. Jim realizes that something else is going on here, something odd.

And of course it is, because nobody could pack more plot twists and back-story into 35,000 words than Len Meares. Almost nothing is what it seems, because Meares was a master at taking standard Western situations and turning them upside-down. He didn’t do this in all his books, of course. He wrote more than 800 books, and some of them are pretty traditional Westerns. Many of them, though, have intriguing characters who turn out to be not at all what you expect when you start reading the novels, and that’s true of BIG LOBO. Rereading it now forty years later, I found it to be an excellent hardboiled action Western with some noirish elements. When I was reading these books back in the Sixties, I always preferred the more humorous Larry and Streak books, but when I began reading the Australian editions I discovered just how good the Big Jim/Nevada Jim books really are.

The American editions are still fairly easy to find. I think Bantam published seventeen in each series, all of them coming out in 1968 and ’69. In the Australian editions, the Big Jim series lasted twenty years, from ’64 to ’84, and numbered about sixty books. Halfway through, Jim finally catches up to his brother’s murderer, and after that he settles down to become a horse rancher near the town of Cornerstone, Nevada. I don't think these later books are quite as good as the earlier ones, but they're still worth reading, as are all the books I've ever read by Len Meares. (The Nevada Jim books also have excellent covers by James Bama.)