L. P. Holmes was the author of a number of outstanding Western novels. Born in a snowed-in log cabin in the heart of the Rockies near Breckenridge, Colorado, Holmes moved with his family when very young to northern California and it was there that his father and older brothers built the ranch house where Holmes grew up and where, in later life, he would live again. He published his first story—“The Passing of the Ghost”—in Action Stories (1925). He was paid a ½¢ a word and received a check for $40. “Yeah … forty bucks,” he said later. “Don’t laugh. In those far-off days … a pair of young parents with a three-year-old son could buy a lot of groceries on forty bucks.” He went on to contribute nearly six hundred stories of varying lengths to the magazine market as well as to write numerous Western novels. For many years of his life, Holmes would write in the mornings and spend his afternoons calling on a group of friends in town, among them the blind Western author, Charles H. Snow, who Lew Holmes always called Judge Snow (because he was Napa’s Justice of the Peace from 1920–1924) and who frequently makes an appearance in later novels as a local justice in Holmes’ imaginary Western communities. Holmes produced such notable novels as Somewhere They Die (1955) for which he received the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. In his novels one finds those themes so basic to his Western fiction: the loyalty that unites one man to another, the pride one must take in his work and a job well done, the innate generosity of most of the people who live in Holmes’ ambient Western communities, and the vital relationship between a man and a woman in making a better life together.