Fri 5 Mar 2021
A PI Western Review: LEONARD MEARES – Feud at Greco Canyon.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western Fiction[4] Comments
LEONARD MEARES – Feud at Greco Canyon. The Braddock Detective Agency #4. Robert Hale/Black Horse Western, UK, hardcover, 1994. No other edition known.
The Braddock Detective Agency consists of a well-matched husband-and-wife pair, Rick and Hattie Braddock. He’s a jack of all trades, having grown up moving all over the west with a travelling repertory group and carnival show. He’s a master of disguise and an actor very much adept at improvised dialogue, a card sharp and a piano player. She’s beautiful and has a past that includes stints as a chorus girl who is skilled at both make-up and characterization, a magician’s assistant, and as a knifethrower’s target. Or in other words, what better pair can you imagine to tackle outlaws, owlhoots and other miscreants of the Old West?
Well, they do at times have to take cases the Pinkertons would probably pass up, In Feud at Greco Canyon, for example, they’re hired by the well-to-do daughter of the sheriff there who is getting up in years and is doing his best trying to stop a huge feud between the two major landowners in the area. One is a rancher, the other a farmer.
The Braddocks go in undercover, he as a card sharp, she as a saloon singer. (See above.) The key to stopping the feud turns out to be finding the man who shot and killed one of the riders for one of the two sides, with one on the other accused of the deed and awaiting trial.
Meares does not take the case all that seriously, however. A light tone prevails. There is a lot more talk than action, and by that I mean a lot. The one shootout at the end takes less a page or two, and what is happening during it is not clearly defined. On the other hand, a subplot consisting of a incipient love affair between a deputy sheriff and the new schoolmarm takes up a couple of full chapters in comparison, which may (or may not) tell you all you need to know before you decide to seek this one out (or maybe not).
In its own way, though, this one is fun to read, somewhat on the level of a Durango Kid B-western from the 40s. (I mean no disrespect here. The Durango Kid was my favorite cowboy in the movies when I was a kid.) Meares was an Australian writer of mostly westerns, with a few mysteries thrown in, but close to 750 books in all. Some of his westerns were published in the US by Bantam as by Marshall McCoy. These include books in both his “Larry & Stretch†and “Nevada Jim Gage†series, both of which became collectors’ items here for a while, perhaps more for their James Bama covers.
The Rick & Hattie Braddock series —
Colorado Runaround, 1991.
The Major and the Miners, 1992.
Five Deadly Shadows, 1993.
Feud at Greco Canyon, 1994.
March 5th, 2021 at 4:47 pm
I get the distinct feeling there is more action on the front cover than between the front and back cover.
That said I favorably recall a couple of Nevada Jim and Larry and Stretch titles.
March 5th, 2021 at 6:44 pm
That particular scene is actually in the book, very early on. It gave me the idea that the feud was going to turn more violent that did. Mostly it consisted of a lot of glaring and hoorawing at each other, but little else. From a little more reading about Meares, I gather the low keyed approach was usually the way most of his stories went.
March 5th, 2021 at 7:00 pm
I was friends by correspondence with Len Meares for a number of years, long after I read and loved those Larry & Streak and Nevada Jim books in the Bantam editions when I was a kid. The characters had different names in the original Australian editions (Larry Vance and Streak Everett started out as Larry Valentine and Stretch Emerson, and Nevada Jim Gage was Big Jim Rand.) The original editions had a little more hardboiled tone, too, especially the Big Jim series. But yes, nearly all of Len’s books had a certain lighthearted feel to them. The Rick and Hattie books came very late in his career, and I recall him being quite excited about the chance to write for the Black Horse Western line. A few years earlier, his Australian publisher Horwitz had decided not to publish the Larry and Stretch series anymore. But the series was also very popular in the Scandinavian countries (where Larry and Stretch became Bill and Ben in translation), and Horwitz still had a contract with whoever was publishing them there, so they insisted that Len continue writing the books so they could be translated, even though they would never appear in English. This was pretty disheartening to him, but he was a pro, so he kept turning out the books. Selling to Black Horse gave him a chance to be published in English again, and under his own name after writing hundreds of books under pseudonyms. Unfortunately, he passed away (from pneumonia, as I recall) and didn’t get the chance to write many of them. I love his work and still read two or three of his books every year.
March 5th, 2021 at 7:58 pm
Len died in 1993, so unless he had some still in the pipeline, this one that I just read would have been among the last he wrote. With well over 700 books to his credit, James, you said he was a pro, and that for sure he had to be.
Thanks also for the long comment, one I really enjoyed reading. It would make a good Wikipedia article for him.