Close friend Laurine Le Man has exchanged daily emails with Mr McKay, and says the toll the situation was having on her friend could be seen in the tone of his emails.
He embodied “the good-bad man”, a figure in search of redemption, and reached his peak with Hell’s Hinges (1916) and The Toll Gate (1920), and he bowed out in 1925 with the epic Tumbleweeds.