Harold Bindloss

Harold Bindloss (1866–1945) was born in Wavertree, Liverpool, and came to writing late. He spent years at sea and in the colonies, working as a sailor, a dock worker, a planter, and a farmer in Canada, until malaria broke his health and sent him home in 1896. Journalism came first, then two travel books drawn from West Africa and Canada, and after 1900 a long run of fiction: catalogues list nearly ninety titles under his name, most of them adventure stories set in the Canadian West and built on country he had worked himself. Alton of Somasco and Delilah of the Snows were among the best known, and the town of Bindloss, Alberta, established by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1914, carries his name.