Terry Harknett

I generally drop western legend, Terry Harknett AKA George G. Gilman, writer of among others, the classic Edge series of westerns, an email every so often and usually get a prompt reply. However my last few emails went unanswered and I was dismayed to find that Terry, now 80 years of age, is living in a care home in Dorset. He celebrated his 80th Birthday at the home just before Christmas last. He marked the occasion with a special white chocolate birthday cake, golden balloon and a party which he shared with his friends and staff at the 29 bedroomed, Grade II listed Victorian manor house.

Terry's work, especially his Edge series is still widely read and I am honoured to have been involved in getting the first Edge novel into digital print, before fellow western fan Malcolm Davy took over the digital transition of the ancient texts. Terry and I would pass emails back and forth and Terry often read the Archive, several times sending me private messages on articles that graced these digital pages.

The first time Edge ever saw digital print with an introcution by myself

I, and I'm sure all fans, would like to send their very best wishes to Mr Harknett...a true legend of western literature.

Below I have reposted an interview with the great man which was originally published on the Archive back in 2008 -

The US publisher called the Edge series, "The most violent westerns in the world."

And they were but it was stylised violence, Grand-Guignol violence, written by an author who didn't much like violence but managed to tune into what the western reading public wanted.

"I was worried about the amount of graphic violence I was asked to put in the Gilman books and it was a cold blooded decision (pun intended) by me to counter-balence this with humour. Fortunately my publishers and later the reading public didn't seem to mind even though some of the jokes were very anachronistic that tended to ruin whatever degree of realism I had manged to convey in the narrative."


The humour certainly became a big part of the series. And perhaps that's what made them stand out from the other Oater-Nasties in the bookshops, maybe it was this often surreal humor that makes the series so evergreen. The series ended in 1989 and the books are not in print but there is still an huge demand. At the time of writing there is a copy of Edge no 60 on Ebay and it's currently been bid upto £31. Not bad for a cheap paperback.

Besides the Edge books George G. Gilman, real name Terry Harknett, created Adam Steele (there are 49 books featuring this character) as well as other lesser series characters and was responsible for the Fistful of Dollars novelisation under the name Frank Chandler.


"My first published books were hardback mysteries for Robert Hale featuring a London private eye called Stephen Wayne. And later I wrote several crime novels for a handful of paperback and hardback publishers. But it was Edge that eventually allowed me to become a full time writer."


Terry was born in Essex in 1936 to a working class background. He went to a secondary modern school and was a very practical boy, developing an interest in mechanics.

"After my initial boyhood ambition to become a motor mechanic was dashed by a school career visit to the Ford Motor Company factory in Dagenham - I was born only a few miles away. I decided I wanted to be a mystery writer instead."

Motor mechanics to mystery hack is quite a radical turn around. Can't quite see the connection there somehow but for Terry it made perfect sense. The motor industry's loss is the reading publics gain.


"I was always painfully shy as a kid, still am in many ways. In fact I still have a phobia about being the centre of attention. I wanted to be rich and, as a fifteen year old, it seemed to me that only those born with a silver spoon in their mouths or famous people in the public eye got to be rich. There was once exception - writers, who could beaver away in their lonely studies writing books that would bring them wealth - some of them, anyway. And since my favourite reading matter was American hard boiled crime fiction this was the genre I would make my fortune working in."


Only in life, as I'm sure Edge pointed out somewhere in his laconic drawl, things never quite work out as planned. Terry's first job was as a copy boy with The Reuters News Agency. He stuck at this for nine months and then he went across to Fleet Street and got a post in a features syndicate agency. Here his duties was buying articles, crossword and strip cartoons and then flogging them onto various markets. It was here that Terry started writing short stories and he saw several syndicated via Newspaper Services.

National Service came next and saw Terry serve with the RAF. He chose to be a typist which gave him access to a typewriter and a good amount of free time. He started writing books, actually writing two unpublished novels on RAF headed notepaper. Terry says that these books were basically Raymond Chandler copies but not anywhere near as good as the master who was his favourite author.

After finishing his duty to his country Terry went back to Reuters but soon he left and got a job at the Twentieth Century Fox publicity department. He was based in Soho Square and not Hollywood which rankled somewhat. Eventually Terry went back to work for Newspaper Features again but the company was in trouble and would soon go down the pan. Eventually Terry came into contact with the late Peter Haining when he went up before a board for a job with The National Newsagents Society.

Someone there thought Terry was unsuitable for the job but meeting Peter Haining was the start towards becoming a bestselling writer. By this time Terry was churning out Chandleresque crime novels for Robert Hale, present day publishers of the Black Horse Western series. Terry was a Chandler buff and read everything the great man published but he felt he could never aspire to his greatness. Didn't stop him trying, though.

Eventually Terry ended up with New English Library where Peter Haining was in charge of the paperback division. Terry's first novel for the imprint was The Weekend Game and he followed that up with W.I.T.C.H. The latter book, about militant bra burning feminists, was written under the name Jane Harman which was Terry's wife's maiden name. The title stood for - we intend to create havoc.

Terry took whatever commission he could find (although he did turn down an offer of £1000 a book for writing hard core porn) and this led to him penning the novelisation of the Clint Eastwood movie, A Fistful of Dollars and then several other spaghetti western based novels. He was asked to create a new western series for New English Library - all action, violent in the style of the Italian westerns which were taking so much money at the box office and Edge came from that.



"I had never read a western novel when I did my first and I consider that fact was a cornerstone to the success of George G Gilman.. For Edge had to be an original concept since having no idea what a western book should be like I had to create the series almost out of thin air. Of course I was aware of Hollywood's version of the Western locale and what the stock characters that peopled it looked like since I grew up in an era when the cinema and television were awash with oaters."


Gilman's Edge was a hit - not initially but it gradually gained a large audience which continued to expand, making the Edge series the benchmark by which all other westerns of the period were judged.

In total the series went on for 61 books, spawned a series of Italian comic book adaptions and the pen name George G. Gilman even had his own fan club.

" I think a good western needs a fast moving story, believable characters and some violent action with a seasoning of gallows humour."

The Edge character certainly delivered those ingredients in spades. Edge would always emerge from seemingly desperate situations, often cheat almost certain death. In many ways the character was a superhero - where Batman had his utility belt, Edge had his cut-throat razor. Where Superman had his cape, Edge had his Winchester. The Edge books provided sheer enjoyable escapist fiction, never taking itself too seriously so that although westerns, the books seem to be lodged in a sub-genre of their own.


I wondered if Terry had ever been to the American West.

"Jane (my wife) and I took one of those bus tours of the South-western US many years ago - Los Angeles-Grand Canyon-Las Vegas-San Francisco and many points between. All this really gave me in terms of research for the Gilman books was a sense of "the big sky" and vast distances spread out beneath it. And I must admit the most significant part of the trip for me was walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles where my all-time favourite fictional hero Philip Marlowe plied his trade."

And so I've spoken to a literary hero of mine and I'm as excited as the kid I was when I first read the Edge novels. To my mind the Edge series is the perfect example of the British pulp tradition and the books, although very violent, are never downbeat and the narrative is so slick your eyes slide smoothly from page to page. Pick one up and before you know it your hooked which is part of the reason the books fetch so much on Ebay. Terry though, forever modest, has a theory on that.

"It never ceases to amaze me that that my ancient scribblings continue to interest readers. Although I take little notice of how they come and go on e-bay. For I think most people who acquire them in this area are collectors hopeful of making a bob or two profit in the future, rather than readers seeking to enjoy my deathless prose!"



We'll have to agree to disagree on that point as I know many people who love the Edge series as well as a lot of Terry's other Gilman stuff. Adam Steele is always worth a read but Edge is something special - these are great books that I believe will one day see a resurgence. All it takes is an enterprising publisher to start issuing the classic westerns, much in the way Hard Case Crime are doing for mysteries and a new legion of fans will be found.

Terry's top ten western movies
In no particular order:
Leon's Eastwood Dollar Trilogy
Once upon a time in the west
The Shootist
The Searchers
Soldier Blue
Rio Bravo
High Noon
Terror in a Texas Town

George G. Gilman on the web:

A man called George G. Gilman

Gilman Forum


Known Pen-names
George G Gilman, Adam Hardy (with Kenneth Bulmer), Jane Harmon, Joseph Hedges, William M James (with John Harvey and Laurence James), Charles R Pike (with Kenneth Bulmer and Angus Wells), William Pine, Thomas H Stone, William Terry

EDGE - The eSeries is finally here

We've all been waiting.

At last the wait is over and the classic western series Edge by George G. Gilman, over eighteen million copies sold, is now back in print. The first eBook in the series went on sale from Solstice Publishing today for a bargain price of £2.01 UK - great value for the first book in the most important British western series of them all. Back in the day the series seduced the world and Edge is about to do so again.


The book is currently on the way to the servers of all the major retailers - Amazon, Smashwords etc but it can be bought immediately direct from the Publisher - click HERE

And visit the Archive tomorrow where I will be detailing the plans for the rest of this stunning western series.

Edge the eSeries trailer now appearing on You Tube

The Bish is still all on Edge

In a great tie-in to the Archive's Edge/Gilman week, The Bish over on his blog, Bish's Beat has posted a nice review of this rare thriller from Mr Edge himself, Terry Harknett.

"Aside from his westerns, however, this current revival of interest in Harknett’s work made me go digging for another, more contemporary series, written under his own name."  CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL REVIEW

WRITING A WESTERN BY GEORGE G. GILMAN PART 3

Writing Western by Terry Harknett Part 3


PART ONE

PART TWO

RESEARCH - What about research? Which brings us back to my early point about writing of what one knows little.

When I wrote the first two Edge titles my only sources of reference were a map of present day United States and my recollections of movies I had seen. Since then, I've built up an extensive library of reference books on the Old West. But I use them sparingly, and only when I'm engaged it writing an outline of a book. Thus, if I should need to set a scene in a train or a mine, in an actual town or perhaps feature people who actually lived, then I will pull the necessary books from my shelves. Doing research on the hoof, as it were, keeps me from padding out my westerns with unnecessary detail, which almost strikes me in a lot of other books, a pretentious airing of knowledge that only serves to slow down the story.


On my desk when I'm writing are a half dozen dictionaries, because my spelling is bad. Also Roget's Thesaurus, because although invariably the first word a writer thinks of is the best, there are times when no one can delve deeper enough into the memory to find the right word.

I did finally go to the United States, to the Southwest, where the majority of my books continue to be set. And what did I get from the trip that will be of use to me in writing my westerns? A whole pile of source books to add to my library. Plus, I have to admit, a sense of the vastness of the place; first hand knowledge that the big sky really is big.


Now it may seem that because of the facile methods of my researching and writing, the quality of my work would be higher if I researched at great length and depth and took three months to write the books I produce in three weeks. That may well be so. But I subscribe to the school of thought that if one takes one's produce to the marketplace and it sells, one would be foolish not to return as soon as possible with the same brand. Crass commercialism and now the view of an artist? All I claim is that I am successful because my products sell on a free market and that I work as hard as I can to do the best I can within my known limits.

PERSPIRATION: - Should you wish to tread the same path I do, I cannot teach you. All I can offer are the following rules:

1 - If you are in an ivory tower about getting published, climb down out of it. Writing books is a public service job. And if you want people to pay good money for what you are producing, you have to give them what they want and not what you think they should want.

2-Do not only write in a field you enjoy reading, unless you can totally forget what you have read before you write. It is impossible for me to be this objective and I guess for most people.

3-Polishing is something you do with wax and a cloth. Writing is not an exact science, so forget about trying to write the perfect sentence, let alone the perfect novel. If what you first put down makes sense and advances the story, your readers will not mind half a dozen split infinitives.


4-Research as you write. That way you do not overload your story with too much irrelevant material just because you spent a great deal of time digging for it.

5-Write each novel as if it were the first one in a series. Which simply means leaving it open ended. If you are doing a series or serial, allow your central character to develop a little with each story.

6-Pay no attention to other people. Ignore people who look down on you because you write westerns. Just enjoy your royalty cheques. These will not be for large amounts but they will be regular. Western readers are very loyal.

7- Never set a Western in the East. Never set an entire series during the Civil War.

8-Write fast. That way the action comes fast.

9-Write - to apply that first cliché I mentioned - apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and write.

10 - Not a rule, but I wish all of you to be visited by that very important percentage of luck.



ORIGINAL ARTICLE TERRY HARKNETT (c) 1979
This revised edition 2010

HOW TO WRITE A WESTERN BY TERRY HARKNETT PART TWO

I would like to correct an error (mine of course) from the first part of this article. I stated that A.S. Burack edited the piece when in fact Mr Burack passed away in 1978 after editing The Writer magazine for a great many years. Terry's original piece was edited by Sylvia K. Burack. Thanks to Keith Chapman for the correction.

And now back into the time capsule and over to Terry:


Writing Westerns by Terry Harknett part two


Why this success with Edge? And why have not Adam Steele, Jubal Cade and Apache (three more westerns series I created?) achieved the same bestseller status?

Because Edge was an original. He had to be, since as I've said, I had never read a western in my life before I wrote the first two Edge books. The sole influence I had was the movies and TV series - preconceptions from another medium unlike all those unsuccessful mysteries I had written previously (and which I continued to write for some time after Edge was a success). They had been very strongly influenced by my ceaseless reading of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Mickey Spillane, and all the other American hard-boiled school of writers that I tried to emulate. And then when I wrote my other western series I was subconsciously influenced by myself. Certainly I had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time and to know the right people. That was part of having the forty nine% luck. After that I sat down and perspired my forty nine% working in a field that initially had no appeal to me, and set aside what I wanted to write in order to give the public what they wanted to read - or, in the first instance, what a publisher thought the public wanted to read.

I became a commercial writer, writing for money and, as it turned out, for more pleasure than I ever got from writing those unsuccessful mysteries. For I can ensure you sitting down at a typewriter with a virtually pre-sold project in mind is much more fin than working in limbo with only a hope and a prayer for company.

Now to the mechanics of how I, as a commercial writer, produce my books (a technique that is much the same as when I wrote those first two Edge books).

I start out with an outline of the projected story - a chapter by chapter breakdown, which may be as few as three or as many as eight pages long. (Nowadays I write eight such breakdowns each spring - four each for Edge and Steele, the two series I presently do. And the publisher gives me contracts for these eight books. Thus, my year's writing and publishing schedule is set). I then write the books at a rate of at least 15 pages a day, or about 3,000 words, come hell or high water, five days a week. And in three weeks I have a finished manuscript of from 225 to 260 pages.

At the end of the working day I read through the work I have done, and then at the end of the book I read the entire typescript. On books that do well, I need only to correct typing and spelling errors. On the books that go less easily, I may have to rewrite ten or a dozen pages before I am finished.


NEXT IN PART THREE - TERRY TALKS ABOUT RESEARCH AND THAT PERSPIRATION FACTOR.

HOW TO WRITE A WESTERN BY TERRY HARKNETT PART ONE

The following article was originally published in the August 1979 issue of The Writer Magazine, edited by A. S. Burack. Thanks to Keith Chapman for bringing the article to my attention and supplying scans of the piece.

WRITING WESTERNS - PART ONE BY TERRY HARKNETT

The essence of my advice to would-be writers of any kind of category fiction, i.e, Westerns, Romances, crime novels or any sub-division of these, is related to the fact that I wrote successful westerns before setting foot in the U.S. Contrary to what the textbooks may say, my advice is to write about what you don't know.

Sounds crazy? Do you think I am putting you on while my tongue is lodged firmly in my cheek? Well, I can only speak with authority on my own experience. Which will not teach you how to write but which, I hope, will help you to achieve success with your own writing by adopting a fresh approach.

Initially, a couple of cliches about writing, which like most cliches on any subject, contain more than a mere grain of truth:

1) There's only one way to be a writer - apply the seat of your pants to the seat of the chair and write.

2) Writing is ninety eight % perspiration and two % inspiration.

If I paraphrase the second point I think it puts in a nutshell the "secret" of my own success - 49% perspiration and 49% luck.

Because, you see, I am a frustrated mystery writer who has achieved success in a field that I have no particular penchant. For fifteen long years, I wrote mystery novels that were published twice yearly - and sank without trace at the same rate. This taught me how to sweat as I wrote five pages a night every night after completing a day's work on one or another fringe of journalism.

Then luck took a hand, when I got a job on a book trade journal. There, one of my chores was to write a weekly review of new paperback titles for the retail trade, and this inevitably brought me into contact with people in paperback publishing. One such person heard of my evening fiction writing and gave me my big chance - i.e., he commissioned me , for little more than pocket money to write a novel of a movie, i.e., a paperback original based on a screenplay.

The movie happened to be a western. I had not seen it and I had never read a western novel. But I had seen my fair share of oaters on the big screen and TV - enough, anyway, to know what the western landscape looked like.

This was William Terry (the name I used on the book) born. And after my first western was well received, commissions for four more books from movies followed. Then the publisher was struck by that 2% inspiration - this all happened when the screen westerns were heavily influenced by the Italian movie makers and had hung up the guitar in the cozy bunkhouse and come out with blazing guns onto the dusty streets and wind blow high plains. Clint Eastwood did not wear a white hat, and when he shot a man, the blood flowed - and showed. The movie west was suddenly tough, but nobody was writing books like that.

So William Terry/ Terry Harknett was asked to write a couple to test the market. But for these he was called George G. Gilman. And thus my protagonist, Edge, came into being, destined to appear in from four to six books per year (current number of titles available, twenty nine) and would chalk up sales of more than 10 million in the five or so years since his inception.


NEXT IN PART TWO - THE BRITISH WESTERN BOOM

JUBAL CADE 1 - THE KILLING TRAIL

Jubal Cade 1 - The Killing Trail
Charles R. Pike
SEVEN HOUSE HARDCOVER EDITION 1979
Originally published as a paperback original 1974
Cover price £2.50

This was a lucky find for your friendly neighbourhood western freak - This book was originally published in paperback original but Severn House experimented with library editions in 1979 and this is from that printing. It's not even got a library stamp, making it very rare and I found it in a second hand shop. Plus the old lady only charged me 20p but I gave her a pound because that's the kind of guy I am.


Course the fact that Charles R. Pike is really George Gilman who is really Terry Harknett who is actually the author of the legendary Edge series and my all time western writing hero.

I was curious about this hardback edition and so I dropped Terry an email and he confirmed that they were published as library editions. Here's Terry -



"Gary:

That same year Severn House also published a hardback edition of 'Jubal Cade 2: Double Cross' for distribution to the library market but the books obviously failed in this area for the publisher did not continue with the experiment.

A similar fate befell Severn House's attempt to launch Edge into the libraries that same year when for some reason they chose to published #6 and #7 as hardbacks.

And in l985 an outfit called Chivers Press only managed to put out #1 in the Steele series as a hardback under the Firecrest brand before calling it a day. But they fared somewhat better with large print editions of Jubal Cade, publishing the first three titles in the series.

NEL had the same lack of success with two Edge Doubles hardbacks, #l consisting of 'The Loner' and 'Ten Thousand Dollars American' bound into a single volume and 'Apatche Death' and 'Killer's Breed' likewise published some time after the first paperback publication.

NEL also put out in hardback a volume called Edge and Steele Double Action comprising 'Blood Run' and 'Valley of Blood'.

None of these experiments worked in terms of making money for anybody and thus ended this writer's forays into the hardback market. But I'm not complaining since I didn't do too badly out of paperbacks!"




Isn't that great - the power of the internet. I get to chat with someone who entertained me for years when I first disovered the Edge series - anyone who hasn't read them start now. They are the Eastwood/Leone westerns taken to the extreme - yeah, their violent but it's all OTT violence and done very much with tongue in cheek and a style that few other writers were not able to pull off. Edge was a totally captivating character but enough of the bad tempered old half-breed.


What about Jubal Cade?

Cade was raised in a Chicago foundling home and later went to England to learn medicine from the best teachers of the day. He qualified as a doctor and then returned to his native land with his pretty young wife and a dream.

However it's a cruel world and soon the man trained to heal finds himself on a killing trail and by the time the book ends he discovered some things about himself that he rather were kept hidden.

Pike's characters are very much of the sub-genre of Brit-Adult Westerns. And it's not unfair to compare the adult westerns to the video nasties that came a decade later but like the best of these films, the books are widely entertaining without pretension to high art.

What more could anyone want for their money?

Anyone wanting to know more about the Brit adult westerns can check out this brilliant website HERE