The twelfth year of this career found me in Stevenage, a “new town” an hour’s drive north of London, and I was beginning to feel more than a tad restless. And here, as chance would have it, I resumed close acquaintance with a former college friend, Laurence James, who, sadly, was to die all too early, in the year 2000, when not yet sixty. Laurence had been assiduously working his way up in the book trade-first as a bookseller, then as an editor, and finally as an author. He was living not far from Stevenage, close enough for me to make frequent visits, during which I complained about the nature of my present lot and observed with no little envy the comparatively pleasant life of a fulltime writer. Laurence, it seemed-I later learned the truth to be both more arduous and demanding-would rise in his own good time and, after a leisurely breakfast, make his way into his office, where he would sit behind his desk for an hour or so before pausing for the first of several coffee breaks that would occur throughout the day. And at the end of each of those days, two or three thousand words of manuscript would have been created with apparent ease. No bells sounding at forty-minute intervals to announce a new class and a change of lesson, no recalcitrant or obstreperous youths to chivvy along or bully into submission: just your own quiet room with a stereo and coffee machine close to hand and, in Laurence’s case, an intelligent and lovely wife, who, having shipped the kids off to school, was most likely working on a novel in a room of her own.
My envy must have been evident for all to see, and now, providentially, more good fortune came to my aid. Laurence had been writing a series of rollicking biker books under the name of Mick Norman, and his publishers wanted another; Laurence, however, was committed elsewhere. “You want to write something,” he said. “Here’s your chance.” Except, of course, I hadn’t really wanted to write anything at alclass="underline" what I wanted was what I saw as the writer’s life-the cottage in the country, the Volvo, the ability to organize one’s own days. Faced with actually producing anything somebody else might want to read, never mind publish, I gibbered and blanched.
But Laurence was persuasive: he gave me the Mick Norman books to read, helped me to assemble a story line and then a synopsis, and 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 fifty thousand 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 blond woman in an unbuttoned denim jacket astride a motorcycle, Avenging Angel was duly published-and I was offered a contract for a 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 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 for 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 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 pie.
Soon there was a small group of British writers-hacks, as we delighted in calling ourselves-Laurence, of course, Terry Harknett, Ken Bulmer, Fred Nolan, Angus Wells, and me-laboring away at the Western cliff face, more often than not sharing 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 part of north London. Under his influence, in my early teens I read and reread 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 also, more interesting for me, the adventures of minor Western movie stars: Rod Cameron, Allan “Rocky” Lane, and Lash La Rue.
So when it came to it, the frontier background-mythic and heavily romantic rather than realistic-was well in place for me. As an example, look at the opening chapter of Cherokee Outlet (Pan, 1980), the first of ten Hart the Regulator books, 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.