Boom Town Bravados

Leonard Frank Meares was best known to western fans the world over as "Marshall Grover", creator of Texas trouble-shooters Larry and Stretch. He was born in Sydney, Australia, on 13 February 1921, and started reading the westerns of Zane Grey, Clarence E Mulford and William Colt MacDonald when he was still a child. A lifelong movie buff with a particular fondness for shoot-'em-ups, he later recalled, "At that early age I got a kick out of the humorous patches often seen in Buck Jones films, and realised that humour should always be an integral part of any western." Len worked at a variety of jobs after leaving school, including shoe salesman, and during the Second World War he served with the Royal Australian Air Force. When he returned to civilian life in 1946, he went to work at Australia's Department of Immigration. The aspiring author bought his first typewriter in the mid-1950s with the intention of writing for radio and the cinema, but when this proved to be easier said than done, he decided to try his hand at popular fiction instead. Since a great many paperback westerns were being published locally, he set about writing one of his own. The result, Trouble Town, was published by the Cleveland Publishing Company in 1955. Although Len had devised the pseudonym "Marshall Grover" for his first book, however, Cleveland decided to issue it under the name Johnny Nelson. "I'm still chagrined about that," he told me years later. Undaunted, he quickly developed a facility for writing westerns, and Cleveland eventually put him under contract. His tenth yarn, Drift!, (1956), introduced his fiddle-footed knights-errant, Larry Valentine and Stretch Emerson, the characters for which he would eventually become so beloved. And nowhere was the author's quirky sense of humour more apparent than in these action-packed and always painstakingly plotted yarns.