Soon there was a small group of British writers—hacks, as we delighted in calling ourselves—Laurence, of course, Terry Harknett, Ken Bulmer and Fred Nolan, Angus Wells and myself—laboring away at the western cliff face, more often than not sharing joint pen names. Between us, while the boom lasted, our titles must have gone well into the hundreds; before shifting tastes and the changing economic climate caused me to hang up my spurs, I had myself written between forty and fifty books in different series.

That I was suited to this was to no small extent due to my father, who had been a great western fan [Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage was one of the three books forever at his bedside] and while I was growing up he had taken me to see every western movie that played in our particular part of north London. Under his influence, in my early teens I read and re-read many of the Hopalong Cassidy novels of Clarence E. Mulford—what is it about western authors and that middle initial?—and the Buffalo Bill Annual was virtually my bible. With considerable regularity—how did I get away with it so often?—I would skip school and take the Tube into the center of London, the lunch money I had saved bulking out my pockets, and alight at Marble Arch, where, immediately outside the station, a news vendor sold imported American comics—Superman, of course, and Captain Marvel, but, more interesting for me, the adventures of minor western movie stars—Rod Cameron, Alan ‘Rocky’ Lane and Lash LaRue.

So, when it came to it, the frontier background—mythic, and heavily romantic rather than realistic—was well in place. As an example, look at the opening chapter of Cherokee Outlet [Pan, 1980], the first of ten Hart the Regulator books and the only westerns to have my own name, plus the near-obligatory middle initial, on the cover—John B. Harvey, no less.

He was a tall, dark shape coming out of the sun. Shrouded in his own shadow. A man who rode alone.

Like an orange medallion, the sun hung behind him in the afternoon sky. Its light caught the surfaces of misshapen rock scattered on the hill to the north, making them glow red and silver; it shone on the creek water where a whitetail doe drank nervously; it spread the shadow, long and deep, as horse and rider moved slowly to the east.

Wes Hart rode easily, reins resting across the palm of the left hand, the thumb of the right hooked round the pommel of his saddle. The fingers of his hand were spread wide, touching the leather, never far from the pistol that sat snug in its cutaway holster. A Colt Peacemaker .45, the mother-of-pearl grip carved with the Mexican emblem of an eagle holding a snake it its mouth and between its claws.