South of the Border (with Scotland, that is)
A GRANDMOTHER CALLED TEX

Irene Ord

A generation of western fans might have imagined author Tex Larrigan was a resident of Dallas rather than Darlington, the historic industrial town in the north-east of England famed for associations with the birth of railroads . . . or should we say "railways"?

For fifteen years, readers of Larrigan's western novels probably envisaged a clear-eyed frontiersman, muscles rippling under his fringed buckskin shirt and a pair of heavy six-guns at his lean hips. But in truth their pen-pushing hero was a grandmother of six with white hair and large glasses.

And — horror! — she turned to the western only after producing a string of more than thirty romance novels.

Irene, who died two years ago at the age of 83, had her first romantic novel, Desert Romance , published in 1977. Others soon appeared with contemporary settings (Not the Marrying Kind, Midnight Melody, Courier Nurse), and then historical novels under the names Emily Wynn (Straw Damsel, April Squire, The Passionate Prude) and Kate Fairfax ( Sweet Fire, Wild Honey). Some of the books were reissued as large-print Linford Romances; others as mass-market paperbacks from Putnam-Berkley, Ace and Charter in the United States.

It was one of her friends in Darlington, Albert Hill (publicity-shy BHW author Elliot Conway), who suggested Irene try the change of genre. So in later life she made the leap from foreplay under rainbows to gunplay on the range, and in June 1990 her first Black Horse Western was published, launching a notable career.

"As a child, I used to love going to the movies to see westerns," Irene told the Dundee-based paper The Weekly News. "I'd also read quite a few and found I could quickly get into the characters."

Her first western, Buckmaster, told the story of a rider on the Oregon Trail who helped a woman avenge her former lover's seduction of her daughter. Publisher John Hale, of Robert Hale Ltd, enjoyed the book and wanted more. It seemed Irene had a natural bent for bringing rough, tough, sharp-shootin' hombres to life. "As my interest grew, I started to build up a library of books on the Old West," Irene said. "They covered everything from guns and gear to the type of food cowboys ate when on the move."

Eventually, she had more than 200 reference volumes and a "posse of videos to get background scenes right".

Occasionally, she would upset the purists — for example, putting an Indian tribe in the wrong stretch of country — though her action-packed stories never failed to entertain. While US counterparts like Elizabeth Fackler were wowing The New York Times and like critics with explicit and sensual novels set in the historical West, Irene spent the 1990s building a catalogue of traditional westerns with myth and a lively reality interwoven.

"Western fans know their stuff and are quick to point out any mistakes I make. . . . Now, I have maps of old trails to make sure I'm always going in the right direction."

Despite the hours of painstaking research, the key to Irene's success remained her remarkable imagination.

"I kind of jump out of this environment into where I'm at. I can smell it and taste it and feel the wind," she said.

Her western output outstripped what Hale was prepared to publish under one pen-name, so she also became BHW writers Curt Longbow, James O. Lowes and Newton Ketton.

Once again, she was out of step at a time many of her female contemporaries were openly declaring their gender. She chose men's names, she said, because most of her readers "wouldn't like the idea of an old girl like me writing the books".

The Tex Larrigan pseudonym was invented with the ease of naming a character in a story, and it was always her favourite. "Tex just sounded like one of these typical Texas men, and Larrigan? It sounds Irish American, and like water running over a stone."

Irene was quickly Britain's most prolific woman writer of westerns. The books came thick and fast: Mojave Wipeout, Buscadero, Miserywhip's Last Stand, Mustang Round-Up, Tumbleweed, Retribution Trail, The Undertaker, and so on. Many were reissued in Ulverscroft large-print editions under the Linford and Magna Dales imprints, which were more readily available to American readers.

No punches were pulled, the language was rugged, the action uncompromising. The books recreated a Wild West so vivid and convincing that readers who learned her true identity were surprised.

Albert Hill told The Northern Echo shortly after her death, "Tex Larrigan was so much part of her that she got called Tex more than her proper name."

Irene had been born in Darlington, and her father owned a well-known drapers, J. O. Lowes, which had four retail stores in the district — and in due course just the right-sounding name for one of those literary aliases! She had five children with her husband, Reg — four boys and a girl — and her first ventures into the fiction business were bedtime stories. She recorded them in notebooks "because the little devils would want the same story the next night".

Having been bitten by the writing bug, she contributed a column to her local newspaper's women's page and, at the age of 44, became a founder member of the Darlington Writers' Circle.

Her first published novels were bodice rippers about fiery heroines with flashing eyes. The books pleased their audience, but a change of direction by the publishers and her subsequent switch to the westerns "helped to stop me going stale", she said.

Albert told the Echo: "Irene and I would discuss what we were doing but we wrote in completely different styles. To be honest, I could never keep up with her. She could bash a book off in no time at all. She was incredible." At her peak, Irene would write a novel in four weeks, spending six hours a day at the keyboard of a typewriter. "I get ideas all the time," she said. "I can't write fast enough."

But she made the time for at least two trips to the United States. In 1998, a BBC programme called Here and Now took her and Albert to Wyoming to record their impressions of the milieu they wrote about but had never seen. They were allowed to fulfil their dreams to tread in the footsteps of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and to visit the scene of Custer's Last Stand. They fired guns, rode horses.

Whether Irene's journeys improved her westerns in the eyes of their readers is beyond calculation, but Albert declared, "It was an absolutely marvellous experience. I think we got about three books each out of it. We'd both done a lot of research over the years and read a lot, but to go out there and see it for real was an inspiration."

On a later trip, Irene visited an Indian reservation. She said, "It gave me valuable insight into the life of Indians. They're not the baddies they're too often made out to be. A main character in one of my books [Warbuck by Curt Longbow] is a half-breed Indian. My trip to the reservation helped me to understand how he would go about doing things the Indian way."

When she wasn't writing, Irene enjoyed spending time with her family and, after a knee operation, kept herself fit with a weekly visit to the gym. Her grandchildren reckoned they had the coolest granny in the world, and so did many others. She worked extensively to help younger writers in her locality.

She looked forward, too, to wider acceptance of the genre she'd chosen in later life. "It used to be mainly older men who read westerns, but they're becoming increasingly popular with younger readers," she observed.

Irene continued to write a couple of novels a year until her sudden death at home on Sunday, November 30, 2003. Her last westerns — the writings she never saw as bound books — were published in 2004 and are now also available in Ulverscroft editions. One 2005 title is Rodeo Round-Up by Curt Longbow (Dales Large Print), in which fiery Milly Burke, who runs her crippled father's ranch, considers herself as good as any man. With a rugged male lead on a personal vengeance trail, many of the scenes and situations in this novel wouldn't have been out of place in one of Irene's bodice-ripper romances of earlier times. And in its final chapters it has a distinctive, heart-warming quality. Maybe the wheel had come full circle.

Albert said, "She was a grand person. She never stopped writing and she never stopped helping people. We thought she would go on forever. In a way, she will, through her books. They were a good story from beginning to end, what I would call a rattling good yarn, and that's why people loved them."