But Laurence was persuasive: he gave me the Mick Norman books to read, helped me to assemble a story line and then a synopsis, sat patiently—well, mostly patiently—alongside me while I rewrote my sample first chapter more than a dozen times. The whole package went to his editor with a strong letter of recommendation and a month or so later [things moved speedily in those far-off days] I was in possession of a contract. All I had to do was provide a manuscript of 50,000 words and the grand sum of two hundred fifty pounds would be mine in return.

Back in Stevenage, still teaching, I worked at the kitchen table of my small flat—holidays, evenings, weekends—and somehow my deadline was met and the finished manuscript shipped off.

Glancing back, it was a strange book, as much about the iniquities of the education system as the roar of marauding Harley Davidsons, but, to my delight and no little surprise, it was accepted and, graced with the near-obligatory jacket photograph of a young blonde woman in an unbuttoned denim jacket astride a motor cycle, Avenging Angel was duly published—along with a contract for second book at fifty pounds more. I was on my way.

One thing that aided my swift elevation to the ranks of published writers was the happy fact that the mid-’70s were a boom time for British publishing, new paperback imprints springing up seemingly overnight and all greedy for product. And because I had entered the world of writing in the way that I had—because to me it was first and foremost an alternative way of earning a living, rather than a sign of any higher literary ambition—I was only too happy to oblige. War books, movie tie-ins, apocalyptic adventure stories, teen romances—during the years of my apprenticeship, all was grist to my mill.

Then there was the day an editor from Transworld phoned me and said, “We’re looking for someone to write a western series. I wondered if you’d be interested?”

One of the publishing phenomena of the period was the success of a western series called Edge, written by Terry Harknett under the pen name of George G. Gilman. In his role as commissioning editor at New English Library, Laurence James—yes, him again—had suggested that Harknett, up to that point the author of middlingly-successful thrillers, try his hand at a new kind of pulp western, violent and sexy, based to a large degree on the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood spaghetti shoot-’em-ups such as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and For a Few Dollars More. A brilliant idea which Harknett fleshed out in spades. After a cautious start, sales of each new book in the series were nudging the 100,000 mark, and, not surprisingly, other publishers wanted a piece of that particular pie.