TO his legion of fans, Tex Larrigan was a steely-eyed gunslinger, tough, burly and cool under pressure. In reality, this hero of the Wild West was a grandmother-of-six from the North-East of England.

With her white hair and large glasses, Irene Ord seemed an unlikely chronicler of America's old West, but during her career, she wrote more than 90 books, 50 of them Westerns. Readers loved her tales of courage on the frontier and of justice being meted out with the pull of a trigger.

Irene who died at the age of 83, had her first romantic novel, Desert Romance, published in 1977. She went on to write historical romances under the names Emily Wynn and Kate Fairfax, but it was as a writer of Westerns that she really made her mark. In 1989 her first cowboy novel was published, launching a remarkable career.

Buckmaster told the story of a rider on the Oregon Trail who helps a woman revenge her ex-lover's seduction of her daughter. To Irene's surprise, publisher Robert Hale loved the book and wanted more. It was followed by more than 50 cowboy novels under the pen name Tex Larrigan.

She published so many books she was asked to come up with alternative names and also wrote under the pseudonyms Curt Longbow, James O Lowes and Newton Ketton, but Tex Larrigan was her favourite.

She chose a man's name, she said, because most of the readers "wouldn't like the idea of an old girl like me writing the books". The nom de plume was plucked out of the air but it stuck. "Tex just sounded like one of these typical Texas men, and Larrigan? It sounds Irish American and also sounds like water running over a stone."

She identified strongly with her hero, whom she thought of as a burly Irish American, writing the books in the first person and placing him at the centre of all the action.

Irene became one of Britian's most prolific writers, pounding out title after title: Cattlelifters, A Devil Called Clegg, The Coffin Filler and Devil's Spawn.

Full of coarse language and gun-blazing action, her novels recreated the Wild West so vividly and convincingly, readers were astounded to discover her true identity.

"We all knew who she was but it came as a surprise to a lot of people," says friend and Darlington-based author Albert Hill, better known as Elliot Conway.

"Tex Larrigan was so much part of her that she got called Tex more than her proper name."

Irene, who lived in Fife Road in Darlington, was born in the town, and her father owned well-known drapers JO Lowes, which had shops on High Row and Northgate and in Richmond and Northallerton.

She had five children with her husband Reg - four boys and a girl - and her first foray into writing was bedtime stories. She jotted them down in notebooks "because the little devils would want the same story the next night."

Once bitten by the writing bug, she began penning a column in the women's pages of the Northern Despatch, sister paper to The Northern Echo and now no longer published and, at the age of 44, became one of the founder members of the Darlington Writers' Circle.

Her first published works were bodice rippers about spirited heroines with flashing eyes. Her books sold well but after about 30, her publishers decided they didn't want any more.

It was Albert who encouraged her to turn her hand to Westerns and, at the time, she told The Northern Echo that the change of direction in her writing helped to stop her going stale.

Albert says: "She started writing long before I did. She had about 30-odd romances published before she got into the Western genre but she took to it straightaway.

"We used to discuss what we were doing but we wrote in completely different styles. To be honest, I could never keep up with her. She could bash a book off in no time at all. She was incredible."

At her peak, Irene could write a novel in four weeks, spending six hours a day at her typewriter, and between 1977 and 1986 she had 28 novels published.

"I get ideas all the time," she said at the time. "I can't write fast enough."

Irene continued to write around two novels a year until her sudden death at home on Sunday, November 30. Her son, John Ord, said that the last two or three Tex Larrigan novels would be published next year.

Irene's descriptions of the plains and mountains of the Wild West, of pioneers and cowboys, were based on hours of painstaking research, but the key to her success was her remarkable imagination.

"I kind of jump out of this environment into where I'm at. I can kind of smell it and taste it and feel the wind," she said.

Astonishingly, despite being successful Western writers, neither Irene nor Albert had ever been to America, until the BBC Here and Now programme took them to Wyoming. The trip, which took place in 1998, fulfilled their dreams to tread in the footsteps of Butch and Sundance and visit the area of Custer's last stand, fire guns and ride horses.

"It was a marvellous experience, absolutely marvellous. I think we got about three books each out of it," Albert recalls. "We had both done a lot of research over the years and read a lot but to go out there and see it for real was marvellous. It was a real inspiration."

When she wasn't writing, Irene enjoyed spending time with her family and, following a knee operation a few years ago, kept herself fit with a weekly visit to the gym. She also did a lot of work helping younger writers.

Albert says: "She was a grand person. She never stopped writing and she never stopped helping people. We thought she would go on forever. In a way, she will, through her books. They were a good story from beginning to end, what I would call a rattling good yarn, and that's why people loved them."

There will be no disagreement from Irene's thousands of fans.