George G. Gilman

Josiah Hedges (soon to be known as Edge) returns from the Civil War to find his farm burned down and his brother murdered. He quickly figures out who done him wrong and spends the rest of the book cutting a bloody swathe of vengeance through the Old West.

The Loner reads like a novelization of a never made spaghetti-western (not surprising since Terry Harknett, who wrote the Edge series under the name George G. Gilman also wrote the novelization of A Fistful of Dollars). Like those films, the show more Old West is shown as a gritty and dangerous place where violence is sudden, copious and extreme. The action is fast paced and brutal and the morals are questionable.

Edge himself is a very grim character. While he generally does ‘the right thing’ as often as not it is because it happens to also be convenient for him. He makes Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name come off as a good Samaritan. Harknett walks a very fine line here as it would be all too easy to find Edge despicable. Yet he never pushes Edge over that line.

The Loner churns along with the breathless pace of an old cliffhanger serial. In fact, one fault of the book is that there may just be too many adventures jammed into its slim 140 pages. Every chapter reads as a new installment with Edge coming into a predicament which is generally resolved by chapters' end (usually the resolution involves a couple of newly created corpses).

This description probably doesn’t make the book sound too promising, but The Loner crackles along with very good, fast-paced writing. Reading this first book, it is easy to see why the series was so popular and still has a cult following today. show less

Check out more crime, thriller and pulp reviews on CriminOlly.wordpress.com

The problem with reading old pulp paperbacks is that they’re often pretty icky. I’ve fallen foul of this with Matt Helm (a bit rapey) and MIA Hunter (massively racist). When I picked up my recently arrived copy of the third novel in George G Gilman’s ‘Edge’ series and saw that the title had the word ‘Apache’ in it, I was pretty sure I’d be shaving a star off my rating for objectionable bigotry. Turns show more out I needn’t have worried quite as much as I did.
Like the previous two books, this is a brutal, nihilistic tale, where the hero’s aim is simply to survive to the last page. This time Josiah Hedges (Edge) winds up in a small town, Rainbow, which sits next to a US cavalry fort. There’s a fragile peace in place between the population and the local Native American tribes, which is broken when a local farming family are slaughtered. Throw into the mix rumours of a fortune hidden in the nearby hills and a foppish English gambler, and you’ve got the makings of another great western page turner from Gilman.
Like the other books this is an insanely violent tale, with a tonne of gory action throughout, culminating in a stunningly destructive ending. The English character adds some humour to the proceedings, with him and Edge indulging in some entertaining banter. Other characters come and go, rarely lasting very long but all adding a bit of colour.
Written in the 70s, and very much aping westerns from previous decades, this was never going to be a book held up as a great example of the portrayal of Native Americans. There are some interesting nuances though. The Apache characters are ruthless and bloodthirsty, but then everyone in these books is. In fact Edge seems to prefer their approach to life and combat than that of the white characters, who are far more likely to be duplicitous. “I’d try exactly what old Cochise is trying,” he comments at one point. What’s more, both Edge and the book seem very much aware that this isn’t a fight of the Native Americans’ making.
“They’re like beasts of the jungle,” a woman said to Edge.
“But it was their jungle first,” he answered. show less

Adam Steele is an unpleasant hero. Whether it is white men torturing an Indian or a female being abused by drunken louts, he observes rather than interfering. There are hints about why he is like this, but never revealed to my satisfaction. I also found the gratuitous descriptions of the results of violence such as the vivid gunshot wound analysis unnecessary. There is also the purposeless plot that I found very unsatisfying. Find me a previously unknown L'Amour, please.

Enjoyably hard nosed and brutal western from the 70s golden age of nasty paperbacks. Thoroughly entertaining