Big Jim 1: The Night McLennan Died (HE VOWED TO FIND HIS BROTHER'S KILLER!)

Piccadilly Publishing, the Home of Great Western Fiction, celebrates Christmas 2016 by issuing no less than SIX new western series to its line-up ...

LARRY AND STRETCH 1: DRIFT!
BIG JIM 1: THE NIGHT McLENNAN DIED
DRIFTER 1: SAVAGE
McALLISTER 1: McALLISTER ON THE COMANCHE CROSSING
BANNERMAN THE ENFORCER 1: THE ENFORCER
CLAY NASH 1: UNDERCOVER GUN

THE NIGHT McLENNAN DIED

The bullet that killed Chris Rand sounded the death-knell to one career and started another for the tall, tough and relentless Jim Rand -- the man they called Big Jim.
To strife-torn Libertad, a trouble-town on the Arizona-Mexico border, came Big Jim, hunting his brother's killer. It was inevitable that he should become involved in the struggle for power in Libertad, the conflict between Sheriff Luke Hillary, who had lost the use of his gun-arm, and the Block B outfit, the ten trigger-happy hellions led by the fearsome Old Man Burdette.
And never far behind Big Jim -- always lurking somewhere close -- was that pocket-picking, ugly little Mexican, Beninto Espina. The Mex sided Big Jim in the final hectic shown, and a strange alliance was born.
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.