CHRISTOPHER DAWES ON THE ‘EDGE’ NOVELS OF GEORGE G GILMAN

It was Steve Baxter's fault. He started at my school at the beginning of what was then known as the Third Form. I think it's called Year Nine these days. It was 1974 and, like most 13-year-old boys, I was utterly useless at absolutely everything. But for some reason, I was given the task of taking care of the newcomer. Not that Steve Baxter needed me or anybody else to look after him. When a couple of gum-chewing Fifth Formers tried to push him around during the lunch break on his first day, he dealt with both boys in a single movement, smacking one of them across the chops before balling his hand into a fist and punching the other on the snout. 
    
Steve Baxter and I hung out together for the next three years. It was Baxter who introduced me to Black Sabbath and Deep Purple and countless other greasy rockers. It was Baxter who taught me how to spit properly. It was Baxter who told me to bleach my denim jacket and buff my brown Dr Martens boots with black polish to give them a bruised, purple-ish colour. My mum went nuts. And it was Baxter who lent me the first George G Gilman book I ever read. He didn't get it back, mind. If I look up from my computer, I can see it sitting in a long line of Gilman books on the shelf above my desk.

I was a huge fan of George G Gilman as a young teenager. I've enjoyed a host of other writers in the decades that have passed since then - James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, William Golding, Anais Nin, Graham Greene, Norman Mailer, Hunter S Thompson, Gore Vidal, Iain Banks, Pat Barker - but none of them have had as much impact on me as Gilman. Which is perhaps a little strange because Gilman is not what you'd call a literary bigwig. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if most of you had never heard of him before. But when it comes to pulp fiction westerns, George G Gilman is in a league all of his own.

The Gilman book I ‘borrowed’ from Baxter was called The Loner. Originally published in 1972, it was the first in a series of novels about Edge, the meanest sonofabitch to ever saddle up a horse. ‘Edge is a new kind of western hero’ proclaimed the cover - and wasn't that the truth. He wouldn't have made it onto the set of The High Chaparral, that's for sure. Tall and lean and leathery skinned, with ice-cold blue eyes, long black locks and more stubble than Desperate Dan and George Michael put together, Edge is an anti-hero in the same vein as the Man With No Name, the gunslinger played by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's spaghetti western movies. But while the Man With No Name just about stayed on the right side of the goodie-baddie axis, Edge is nowhere near as fussy.  

The Loner is set in 1865, in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, and is a story of revenge. It starts with Edge returning to his farm in Iowa after four years as a captain in the Union Army to find his young brother has been murdered by a group of men who served under him during the war. Edge tracks the men down to the Mexican border and, in the ironically named town of Peaceville, kills them one by one. Killing is what Edge does best and he certainly does a lot of it in the books that follow, some of which incorporate flashbacks to the civil war and feature the characters that our anti-hero bumps off in Peaceville. The violence is often casual and always savage. The titles of many of the other books in the Edge series - Apache Death, Ten Tombstones To Texas, Slaughter Road, Blood On Silver, Blood Run, Bloody Summer - and the cover illustrations - Edge aiming a rifle, Edge wielding a knife, Edge in front of a burning building - speak volumes.

I've no idea why I liked the Edge books so much. Nothing about them related to anything in my life. There weren't any Apaches in the part of Norfolk that I grew up in. Not as far as I'm aware, anyway. But as soon as I'd finished reading The Loner, I spent a month's pocket money on the other Edge novels that were available and, during the next couple of years or so, more of my cash on the new titles in the series as they came out. I can still remember the thrill of seeing a freshly published Edge story in the shops. I also bought another George G Gilman western series, about a character called Adam Steele. Steele was not a patch on Edge, though. He wasn’t as mean and he lacked Edge’s gallows humour. He didn’t have the long hair and the stubble, either. In fact, the drawings on the covers of the Adam Steele novels looked like my Uncle Fred. And Uncle Fred was no black-hearted killer. Uncle Fred worked in a ball bearings factory.

By the time I was 15, I’d grown my hair past my shoulders, but I think I was trying to be like Steve Baxter rather than like Edge. At around this point, I also decided that I wanted to be like George G Gilman. I invented a western character called William Swan, who was my own version of Edge, and devoted my evenings and weekends to writing about him. I wrote three books about William Swan, plus numerous short stories. They were all rubbish, of course, mere pale imitations of Gilman’s work, but the process was crucial to my initial development as a writer. It made me realise how much I loved working with words. How much I loved using my imagination. How much I wanted to try to write for a living. 

Many years later, I was very surprised to discover that George G Gilman was not, as I had always presumed, an American author. He was actually English. He belonged to a group of English pulp fiction western writers dubbed ‘The Piccadilly Cowboys’ because they often went drinking together in London’s West End. What’s more, his real name wasn’t George G Gilman. It was Terry Harknett, a former journalist who had penned several detective stories before turning his hand to westerns at the suggestion of an editor at New English Library, the legendary 1970s pulp fiction imprint. Harknett apparently didn’t think he’d be any good at it. He was good at it, though. He was prolific, too. Between 1972 and his retirement in 1989, he produced 61 Edge novels, together with 49 Adam Steele novels and 50 or so other titles featuring characters such as The Undertaker and Jubal Cade. That’s an average of 10 books a year for 17 years. Which I’d say is an astonishing output for any author, pulp fiction or otherwise.

I stopped reading George G Gilman’s Edge books in 1977. The last one I bought was Rhapsody In Red, which was number 21 in the series. It came out around the time of my 16th birthday. A short while before that, I’d heard New Rose by The Damned, the first punk rock record, and my life zipped off in a different direction as a result. To Steve Baxter’s horror, I had my hair cut short and dyed bright blue. Our friendship ended soon after. In place of Edge, I suddenly had a whole bunch of other anti-heroes to focus my attention on - and they were living and breathing people, not fictional concoctions. They were the snarling top dogs of punk and they had names like Johnny Rotten, Joe Strummer and Rat Scabies. As it happens, Rat Scabies, The Damned’s madcap drummer, is now one of my best friends. I’ve spent the last year running up and down mountains with him in search of the Holy Grail. But that’s another story for another day.