Ralph S. (Ralph Selwood) Kendall

Born in Birmingham in 1878 and educated at Solihull School, he served in South Africa during the Boer War before moving to Canada in 1902. There he joined the Royal North-West Mounted Police and built the first-hand knowledge that later shaped his fiction.

After years of police work, he retired in the 1920s and wrote novels including Benton of the Royal Mounted and The Luck of the Mounted. Those books draw on the world he knew well, mixing action, hardship, and the romance of the mounted police frontier.

Library and public-domain records identify him as Ralph S. Kendall, or Ralph Selwood Kendall, born in 1878. Some sources disagree on the exact year of his death, so that detail is best treated with caution.