His first novel Wake of the Red Witch, published 1946, was a Literary Guild selection and adapted later by Republic Pictures company as a movie featuring John Wayne.
Before I was five I had learned to read and write and discovered a talent for drawing which developed over the years until my ambition was to first become a cartoonist, then an illustrator.
My education was cut short after a year of college when I went to work to help support my mother and young sister.
I was a soda-fountain boy, a sign painter, a door-to-door magazine salesman; I worked in the oil fields and aboard cargo vessels plying the Mexican Gulf and Caribbean Sea, where I met many odd but wonderful characters who appear in my works of sea fiction.
I began writing during the 1940s and after several rejections my book, Wake of the Red Witch, became a Literary Guild selection in 1946.