THE COMPLETE EDGE - 2: Ten Thousand Dollars American

‘Stick with me fellers,’ Edge tells a disappointed flock of departing buzzards who had assumed he was dead and ripe for the picking. ‘I’m as hungry for blood as you are.’

When we last saw Edge he had killed the men responsible for the death of his crippled younger brother and accepted the post of sheriff in the newly named town of Peaceville, Arizona Territory. And when this second novel picks up we learn that four weeks have gone by since the events described in the first novel, four peaceful weeks, but that’s enough of that – let the mayhem begin.

The story picks up with Edge laying seemingly dead in the desert but a rattlesnake learns to its cost that the man is very much alive. From there the story goes into flashback mode so that we learn of events that brought Edge to this point.

“He was a tall man, deceptively lean at first glance, for he carried a lot of weight which was evenly distributed – a great deal of it accounted for by the well developed muscles that made his clothes taut at the upper arms and thighs.”

El Matador and his gang ride into Peaceville and rob the bank. They also take the sheriff, Edge, hostage when they ride away. Edge makes no move to defend the bank, figuring it’s not worth dying to protect other people’s money but the fact that the bandits also steal his own money and then leave him in the desert for dead puts a different slant on things. Edge has to walk back to town but upon arriving he discovers that two lawmen are waiting for him and so he collects his weapons and a horse from his friend Gail – a woman who has fallen for him but to whom Edge can not return the feelings. And so he flees South in pursuit of El Matador and his gang of bandits.

“Edge thought fleetingly of Gail back in Peaceville, felt an odd kind of resentment that she would mourn him. She was a link with the past and he was a man for whom the past was a dead thing.”

It is snatches such as that above which make this a far superior novel to the previous volume. Here the author better explores Edge’s inner character and shows the fight that is raging constantly within the man. Of course heaven forbid if that skimped on the action and mayhem...it doesn’t, of course.

The structure is much the same as the previous book – Edge is on the revenge trail and along the way he meets up with various grotesque characters and kills many of them. The first people to fall foul of his gun and razor after riding out of town are a duo of inept bounty hunters. After Edge sends these two men to the great bounty hunt in the sky he finds himself lumbered with their female companion, Amy. She’s not a good looking girl and Edge has no sexual interest in her at all but she is an interesting character and the scenes between she and Edge serve to show just how cold a man Edge has become. His treatment of her is cruel and leaves the reader unsure whether they should be rooting for this anti-hero in the first place.

As bad as Edge is though, he’s an angel in comparison to El Matador and the bandits of who he is in pursuit. There is a sadistic scene in a Mexican village where El Matador and his men coldly take their lusts out on the womenfolk and then kill them without any regret whatsoever.

“Their sexual lusts spent, the bandits were engulfed by another kind of desire. Matador again provided the signal, rising from Maria and whipping out his Colts in a two handed draw, crossing his arms and drilling a hole down through each of the firm, young breasts.”

The world of Edge is a violent world and the central character is the only sort of man who could survive in a world such as this. Some of the violence may seem gratuitous, the author thought so himself and used black humour to off-set the extreme scenes he was, at this stage in the series, forced to include in the books. Over time the books would become less violent and the character would develop naturally but in these early book the genesis of the entire series can be found – No-one at the time thought the books would have had any real staying power, they were written as disposable entertainment and aimed at a very specific male audience but where Edge differed from many of the books of this kind is not easy to pin down – they read better, maybe but I’m not sure if that’s true. Many of the British westerns of this period were just as well done but Edge had that indefinable something that kept readers coming back for more. Indeed the series still has readers coming back for more.

The second Edge book then is another cracking read – once opened it’s difficult to put the damn thing down until the final shoot out and the inevitable groan inducing pun ends yet another adventure. Amongst all the mayhem there is much character development and Edge becomes real and understandable – he’s a cold and mean muther but his actions in the context of this surreal wild west are in perfect keeping with what is, ultimately, a wonderful creation. We will see as the series progresses the character becoming much more human and the stories themselves develop towards the status of true pulp art. The civil war sequences, starting with book four, are classics of the genre.

Nuff said – next time we will look at my personal favourite of the early books, Apache Death.