Melvin Richard Ellis / Mel Ellis

Mel Ellis (1912-1984) also wrote under the name Melvin Richard Ellis, though the majority of his books were written as Mel Ellis.  The Wild Horse Killers was filmed as Wild Horse Hank in 1979, starring a young Linda Blair (later to win fame as the heroine of The Exorcist).  Mel Ellis wrote some episodes of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, as well as numerous other children’s books.

Finding the book: easy to find in the USA; not quite as easy to find in its British incarnation.

Sources and links:

Terri A. Wear:  Horse Stories, an Annotated Bibilography, Scarecrow Press, 1987

Wild Horse Hank

Bibliography - horse books only

The Wild Horse Killers

Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, c1976, 191 pp

Scholastic, pb, 1976

Star Books, London, 1980, 192 pp

“When Sandra Bradford starts out to drive a band of wild horses on a hazardous journey to
federal lands, it doesn’t matter to her that her own horse Rimrock is running with them, it only
matters that this is the only way to protect them all from the wild horse killers.”