The Loner

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 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’ show more 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

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