Paddy Gallagher (aka Greg Mitchell) says, "While stationed in Japan for three years I picked up some good books on the Old West and a couple of good ones on Frederic Remington's work. I learned a lot just looking at the detail in Remington's paintings and shetches. The old trick of carrying the rifle in a leather loop attached to the saddle horn has never been translated into Hollywood as far as I know, but it is a much better way than slinging it on one side of the horse where it can be a nuisance to the horse or the rider. This method was used also by the Canadian Mounties and sometimes by the US Cavalry but somehow did not survive the transition to Hollywood. Just another bit of trivia . . . . One of Remington's paintings of a pack train has me puzzled though. A man on a mule in the foreground has both reins on the same side of his mule's neck. The artist would not make such a glaring mistake. He had a great eye for detail. I have never been able to figure that one out. My brother Mike is an artist as well as a horseman. He suggested the paint against the mule's neck might have faded and did not reproduce properly in the print.Who knows? I certainly won't lose any sleep over it."

Find Madigan!
Hank J. Kirby

Keith confesses a hatred for rewrites. "I don't mind editing on the word processors we have now, but total rewrites give me the irrits. I work from an outline, too, although I don't always stick to it. Sometimes a character seems to speak of his own accord and I get a sudden notion to shoot off at a tangent and try it, see how it fits in. Works many times. But when I worked for the TV programme makers Crawford, writing episodes of Homicide, Matlock Police and Division 4, it was a set routine."

Homicide began late in 1964 in Melbourne. It became for eight years Australia's most popular show and established the Crawford company as the largest drama production house. Keith explained how it worked.

"First came the storyline, followed by special meeting for all the bods who thought they knew better than the writer to sort it out, then a mandatory scene breakdown which, when approved, the script was written from. A final meeting was held with the editor and sometimes the director chosen to film the episode.

"All good stuff, mostly because they were knowledgeable about what was right for TV and what not. I'd always used a story outline for westerns anyway, so I didn't have much trouble fitting in to the TV system -- luckily! I say that because it was, and still is, I guess, an industry where crises arise overnight, if not more frequently.

"Schedules are put forward or disrupted in some other way, and you might've just about forgotten the script three back up the line when a phone call comes about length or inability to film in such and such a location. You have to come up with a substitute scene that won't throw everything out of kilter. Still, it makes for an interesting time, and it was probably the most enjoyable period of my writing career -- five and a half years of it and Hector Crawford actually recognized that writers were different to your usual employees. We worked from home, went in for the script meetings and so on, then returned to the suburbs, which was the beach in my case. Very good, plus a hefty bonus for bringing in a script on time or earlier."

Thus Keith honed his talents as a "speed writer", which had already been developed in working for the voracious Cleveland publishing firm of Sydney.

One of the many keen readers of his westerns was David Whitehead in England. Dave says, "I remember Keith's earlier incarnations as Kirk Hamilton and Brett Waring, two of the most popular writers in the Cleveland stable."

At BH Extra's request, Dave promised to look for a long-lost interview with Keith which he wrote up in 1994, shortly before Keith moved on to writing BHWs. "I searched through my loft yesterday afternoon, without success. Then I thought I'd check a few boxes still tucked away in the garage and to my great pleasure I found the article, which I have now retyped. I hope you can find a good home for it."

We certainly can, and most gratefully.

The Interview

DW: Can you tell us something about your early years? 

KH: I can lay claim to have started “writing” when I was about 12 years old and World War II was raging. Always an action fan, I lapped up war films and began to write my own war stories, illustrating little home-made booklets with pictures cut from Life magazine and a wartime one called Victory. I played around with these on and off, but I was working during the day and studying chemistry at night. I was about 18 when I finally read a book of western short stories I’d bought. The lead story was called Jailbreak Justice. I can’t recall the author. But I felt it was a pretty poor effort, and I could do much better. So I wrote a western short story -- my first, apart from a couple of cowboy booklets I’d made up -- and sent it to a publisher who was later bought out by Cleveland Publishing. A couple of months passed before they accepted it. Then they paid me the princely sum of £6-15-0 and asked for more. That was how I started. Eventually the stories moved up through 20,000-word novelettes, then 48,000-worders. They dropped back through 42,000 then settled at the later 40,000. As I was being paid so much per thousand words, earnings fluctuated wildly.

I wrote westerns full-time between 1957 and 1961 when -- by this time married to Rita and with my first son born -- I went into journalism with the Queensland Department of Health, where I worked until 1970 as a departmental editor, writing fiction and articles at night and whenever spare time allowed. I had a boys’ adventure book published in 1966, The Scuba Buccaneers, as by James Keith, and two hardback thrillers, The Naked Nemisis and Hammerhead Reef under the name Keith Conway, both published by Robert Hale.

I moved to Victoria and worked for Crawford Productions from 1970 to 1975. These, I would say, were my happiest years. When the company almost went broke due to American TV shows being dumped on the Australian market at giveaway prices, I returned to writing westerns full-time for Cleveland, with a little freelance television work in between. Since I was also free to write anything else apart from westerns, I did a book on metal detecting which is still selling, some books-of-the-film, and had a couple more hardback thrillers published, again by Robert Hale -- A Dragon out of the South and The Judas Coast, both under my own name.

 

DW: Why do you suppose you were particularly attracted to the western genre? And who were your influences?

 

As for influences … my western background stems from reading the classics and plenty of the Street & Smith, pulp-type stuff, as well as the better American authors and reference works like the Time-Life series. One thing I found a bit frustrating writing for Cleveland was that they didn't want Indians. You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to get them to accept a story in which the hero had to call in the talents of Indian scouts from a nearby reservation to track down the villain. It was a pity, because a lot of authentic lore was just begging to be used.

 

DW: How did your two Cleveland pen-names come about?

 

KH: Kirk Hamilton was thought up by Cleveland, probably because the initials matched mine and they had just contracted me to write a western per month. Previously, I'd used the pen-name Clint McCall, but it appeared only on 20,000-worders they put out in the early to mid-1950s. Later, they used it for one of their other writers. I was doing 24 to 27 westerns novels a year from the early 1970s to 1990, when Cleveland decided they had such a backlog of  contract writers' work they no longer required any more. They reckoned putting a hold on for a couple of years, but it went on for quite a bit longer.

As you say, I also wrote as Brett Waring. I didn’t attempt to change my style -- you read a Brett Waring, you read a Kirk Hamilton and vice versa. Cleveland would never tell me when they were going to put out a title under the Brett Waring byline, so I simply wrote the stories and sent them in and left it up to them which name they put on the cover. They fouled up though. I used to write a Brett Waring series about Wells Fargo with the hero Clay Nash appearing in each yarn as an undercover agent for the stage-line. They were mostly routine stories but sold well. Anyway, in their wisdom -- or lack thereof -- Cleveland put a couple of Clay Nash stories out under the Kirk Hamilton name, which gave the game away to anyone astute enough to notice. A bit sloppy, to say the least.
 

DW: Talking of series, your best-known series during this period was Bannerman the Enforcer, in which a task-force answerable only to the Governor of Texas is sent on all kinds of do-or-die missions. The series was extremely popular and ran to 48 titles, then suddenly stopped. Why?

 

KH: At one time, the Enforcer was published in Scandinavia and, I think, Germany, under the title Johnny Colt. Four also appeared in paperback in America. The series sold very well in Australia, but Les Atkins, owner-publisher of Cleveland, phoned one day and said he was axing it. He admitted it was still selling well, but he was getting tired of it.

DW: By your own estimate, you’ve written between 400 and 500 westerns. Plots must have been difficult to dream up, but I imagine finding different titles must have been even harder.

 

KH: Well, one of the reasons I haven’t got a complete bibliography is because probably only one of my titles in every ten was used. Cleveland had hundreds of titles -- usually some vapid western saying like Reach for It! or Drag, Mister! But during the last few years I wrote for them, several of my own titles slipped through. I think they must have been running short.

Actually, they published in quite a haphazard way. Sometimes it would be only a couple of months before a title appeared. At other times it could be two years. I sold them Hatch! in 1986, and it didn’t appear on the shelves until 1991.

I might sound critical of Cleveland, but I’ve no real complaints, apart from the low payment. I guess any author has some sort of bitch about his publisher. I enjoyed working for them, but did eventually became a bit bored with westerns. That's why I turned to a couple of thrillers. Mind you, by the time I’d finished them, I couldn’t wait to get back to westerns, because I had so many fresh ideas to put down on paper!

 
DW: You’ve written more than westerns and thrillers, of course.

 

KH: Sure. I also wrote ten books on soldiers of fortune for Cleveland, using the name James Keith. This was when they were looking for a new direction and were also trying romance. Warhawks sold well, but not well enough to run to a second series.

Apart from Warhawks, I’ve written and published dozens of articles on guns, hunting, survival, metal detecting, treasure hunting, skin diving, etcetera, as well as three short stories for Penthouse Australia and one or two competition prizes.

 

The name Jake Douglas first appeared -- twice -- in the Hale catalogue for July-December 1995, alongside regular BHW names of the time that included Ben Bridges, Lewis B. Patten, Ernest Haycox, Cole Rickard and Chap O'Keefe. Today, Keith Hetherington has out-written them all.

"I've books from Hale piled everywhere in my office."

And the future holds more, including the new Kirby entry, Find Madigan!

"This could well be the last in the Madigan series," Keith says, "though in the best tradition of such things I've left an open ending -- a loophole -- for his return in case I get the urge to return to it. I didn't really want to get rid of him but felt I'd gone about as far as I could without repetition. Anyway, he'd had such a series of batterings in the previous books, I reckoned he'd earned some kind of reward and R&R."

Keith looks forward to every new edition of BH Extra. "It's always interesting and entertaining. Thanks for keeping my name and work in front of the readers."

And Keith's part of the contract is that he'll keep those first-class westerns coming as long as he's able. "I've just finished Kid Lobo today and the manuscript goes off tomorrow. . . ."