Gilman were to write a final Edge adventure, tying up all the loose ends and providing a fitting conclusion to his stories and a fitting end to his charismatic anti-hero. It would, of course, be wonderful if George G. Each novel was very fast-paced, and all of them were written in a style that mixed violence, sex, black humour and the western landscape in a very compelling way. I enjoyed reading the Edge series of books very much and I was sorry to see the series come to an untimely (and unexplained) end. The titles are: The Quiet Gun (Edge: The Return, #1) The Deputy (Edge: The Return, #2) The Outrage (Edge: The Return, #3) Killing Time in Eternity (Edge: The Return, #4) Return to Massacre Mesa (Edge: The Return, #5) Name on the Bullet (Edge: The Return, #6) The series of six new books is titled Edge: The Return.

What’s left from those heady days of very violent, but very well-written westerns is a 61-book series of NEL paperbacks, 3 Edge/Steele novels, and 6 e-books that continue Edge’s adventures after Edge #61: The Rifle. For many years, there would be no more Edge novels. To all intents and purposes, the series, although it hadn’t been officially concluded, was over. The Edge adventures finally stopped arriving on bookstore shelves in 1989. Here is a list of the ‘complete’ Edge series:Įdge #2: Ten Thousand Dollars, American (1972)Įdge #6: The Blue, The Grey And The Red (1973)Įdge #29: The Living, the Dying and the Dead (1979) Initially the Edge novels were novels of pursuit, later they became a series of one-off Edge adventures, with each novel containing an extremely violent dénouement. Gilman deliberately emphasized Edge’s loner status: the half-breed psychopath, the western outsider, the amoral existentialist. Later on in the series, he was billed ‘a man alone’. Before long the name Edge would become synonymous with the essential reading of any dedicated or ‘real’ fan of Western fiction.Įdge was billed ‘a new kind of western hero’. Gilman (a pen-name for Terry Harknett) eschewed the puritanical and moralistic conventions of the generic and standardized cowboy stories that were the staple of the western genre and relocated them in brand-new violent territory. Obviously inspired by the violence, the heat, the dust and the bloodshed that were the iconic and instantly recognizable features of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns – films that attracted millions of viewers to the cinema during the late sixties and early seventies – George G. Gilman unleashed his psychopathic western anti-hero Edge onto the world.

That was is the opening sentence of Edge: The Loner, in which George G. Jamie Hedges counted six riders and there should have been only one.

The loner terry harknett