Charles O. Locke

Charles O. Locke (1896–1977) was an American author best known for his novels of the West. The scion of a newspaper family, he was born in Tiffin, Ohio, and graduated from Yale University. Locke began his career as a reporter at the Toledo Blade and before long moved to New York City, where he wrote for a number of newspapers, including the New York Post and the New York World-Telegram. Like many, he fell in love not only with the city but with its huge public library and access to the world of theater. He composed songs and libretti for stage shows, wrote plays for radio programs, and joined a local theater group, for which he wrote, directed, and performed, sometimes in his own plays.

Locke published his first novel, A Shadow of Our Own, in 1951, following it with his breakout success, The Hell Bent Kid, in 1957. The story of a young man in the 1880s who is unjustly pursued across the state of Texas by relentless enemies, this mesmerizing tale was heralded by the Western Writers of America as one of the top twenty-five Western novels of all time. 20th Century Fox adapted the book into a feature film, From Hell to Texas, in 1958.

The Southwest continued to fascinate Locke, and it provided the backdrop to two more, equally powerful novels, also set in the nineteenth century: Amelia Rankin (1959) and The Taste of Infamy: The Adventure of John Killane (1960).