RENFREW OF THE MOUNTED

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Laurie York Erskine was in the forefront of living authors who reached a wide audience. He was also incredibly prolific: 20 full-length novels, over a hundred short stories in such magazines as Colliersand the Saturday Evening Post, articles in the New York Herald-Tribune and Life, eight motion pictures, major network radio broadcasts, a number of stage plays for boys, texts for United States Armed Forces Institute courses in citizenship for enlisted personnel, and a war memoir selected for the Library of the Imperial War Museum in London. There can be no debate that his greatest success was Renfrew of the Mounted, the dramatic series of a Canadian Mountie who was more than a match for the wiliest and most hard-boiled of criminals. The cry known as the Renfrew call — which children all over America imitated, heard daily on the long-running radio program — echoed through city streets and alleys. In an era when brutality and bloodshed seemed to be exerting