[Big Jim 02] • Meet Me in Moredo

TWELVE DESPERADOES POISED TO ATTACK.

The northbound train carried a precious cargo. Wealthy Mexican ranchers and their womenfolk were headed for Moredo, and their family jewels were stored in the safe of the caboose. When the thieves attacked, there was violence and bloodshed.

Big Jim Rand was aboard the train. The leather-tough ex-sergeant of the 11th Cavalry hoped to find his quarry in Moredo. Instead, the hunter saw his brother’s murderer taking an active part in the hold-up.

And so, to reach his objective, the gun-fast manhunter had to declare war on all twelve of the raiders—and the consequences were violent.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Few writers are ever fortunate enough to number their books in the hundreds, but legendary Australian writer Leonard F Meares was one of them. When he died in 1993, Len could lay claim to more than 700 published novels -- 746, to be precise -- the overwhelming majority of which were westerns.

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. 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.

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 humor more apparent than in these action-packed and always painstakingly plotted yarns.

Len never needed more than 24 hours to devise a new plot. "Irving Berlin once said that there are so many notes on a keyboard from which to create a new melody, and it's the same with writing on a treadmill basis."

At his most prolific, he could turn out around thirty books a year. These included stand-alone westerns and western series such as Bleak Creek, Rick and Hattie and Rampart County. He also wrote a number of crime novels and romances.