Of course David is no stranger to the digital format and he is one of the men responsible for the wonderful Piccadilly Publishing House, a digital publisher that has for several years been bringing new and classic adventure fiction into digital print. Find them HERE but be warned, take a few pennies because while you are there you will buy.
OK so - So Drum Roll please.
and it's over to David Whitehead:
Last night I finished reading WAR CLOUD’S BRIDE by Sundown McCabe, whose real name is Roger Norris-Green. I’ve always been a sucker for Australia’s Cleveland westerns and now that they’ve finally started appearing in digital form, I’ve started getting enthusiastic about them all over again.
Overall, this is a fast-moving western, and certainly among the best Cleveland westerns I’ve read in a while (my favourite still remains BELFREY JUAREZ by Clint McCall – check it out if you can find a copy). Characterisation is sketchy but adequate and the author builds a neat sense of location. I doubt the wisdom of naming one character Brand and another one the very similar Brandy, but that’s only a minor technical quibble. WAR CLOUD’S BRIDE is well worth reading and I’m glad to see more Sundown McCabe titles finding a new readership in digital print.
Although he had no particular interest in the western apart from a very general impression of the form culled from the western movies he'd seen, his first western short story, Guns at the Silver Horseshoe, appeared in the 14 January 1955 issue of Reveille. In 1955 he was called up for National Service, and served in the Royal Air Force until 1957, when he returned to civilian life and went to work as a publicity assistant at the British office of Twentieth Century Fox. He married Jane Harman in 1960, and became a reporter and features editor for National Newsagent, a weekly book trade magazine, in 1961.
Edge really was, as the cover copy promised, "a new kind of western hero." He was violent, anti-social and chauvenistic, and only survived in his harsh, Spaghetti-western style environment by being twice as mean as his opponents.
Terry followed The Loner with another twist-in-the-tale story in which Edge sets out to track down Ten Thousand Dollars, American (1972); but it was only with the town-under-siege adventure Apache Death (1972) that he demonstrated just how strong his grasp of the ultra-violent western sub-genre really was.
With the fourth book in the series, Killer's Breed (1972), Terry embarked upon a sequence of stories in which Edge's Civil War experiences were related in flashback. The seven books in the Civil War sequence rank as some of Harknett's best work in any category, nowhere more so than in The Blue, the Grey and the Red (1973), with its potent images of life -- and death -- in the Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp.
Writing from nine to five, five days a week, Terry could produce a western in eleven days. Later, when the Gilman books became longer, the writing time increased slightly.
The success of Edge led him to create a companion series featuring a shorter, greyer and somewhat milder (though no less murderous) anti-hero. Adam Steele's life, as that of his forerunner, is changed dramatically and forever at the end of the War. In The Violent Peace (1974) he embarks upon a vengeance hunt when his father, wrongly suspected of being a rebel sympathiser, is lynched in the aftermath of President Lincoln's assassination. In the process he's forced to kill his best friend, a marshal, and in turn becomes a wanted man himself. The story was based upon an unfilmed screenplay that Harknett wrote for a producer who had been unable to buy the movie rights to the Edge series.
The author also created two other western series during this period. As "Charles R Pike" he wrote the first three stories in the Jubal Cade series and, with Laurence James (writing as "William M James"), he produced the Apache saga for Pinnacle Books. In both cases he elected to rework the revenge motif. Both central characters embark upon a vengeance-quest following, in both cases, the murder of their wives.
By this time, of course, Terry had developed a strong interest in the genre and built up an impressive library of research material. But his style remained as visual as ever and he was often capable of some striking imagery.
In the early 1980s, Terry launched his third and final series under the Gilman name. The central character, Barnaby Gold, a.k.a. The Undertaker, makes his first appearance in Black as Death (1980), when he kills the rancher who murdered his libidinous wife. In subsequent books, he finds himself hunted by relatives of the deceased, who constantly frustrate his plans to leave the United States for Europe. Gold appeared in six books altogether, and made a fleeting appearance in the final, ultra-rare Edge novel, The Rifle (1989).
While the end of the British western boom signalled the demise of so many rival series, Edge and Adam Steele remained very much in demand. In 1981 the books grew longer, and allowed the author to spend more time on character and plot development. By the late 1980s, however, sales for both series had declined to around 10,000 per book. To make matters worse, Terry's American publisher, Pinnacle Books, had gone bankrupt in such a way that it tied up US rights and made it impossible to place them anywhere else. Against the wishes of his British publisher, Terry finally decided that the time had come, as he put it, "to throw in the towel."
He continues, "I know it sounds pretentious, but once you get into a book at that level the characters do take over; if it's a strong enough character, it does take you over. While you're actually sitting there doing the thing for eight hours a day or whatever, he goes where he wants to go and develops how he wants to develop. When it ceased to happen, that was when I decided to give up; it happened, I suppose, ten books before I actually finished, but I was getting tired of it and obviously, although he takes over it, you've got to have a little creative grain happening inside you, but when you've done 60 books on one character, again you're warying of copying from movies and TV series, of recycling something, and it happened at the same time as the western was dying a death anyway, and it all came together for me really. I don't think there was any way I could have gone on much longer, even if I had chosen to. The public wouldn't buy them any more."
After writing some 130 westerns in seventeen years, Terry took a year off. In the 1990s he returned to the genre, writing mostly for his own entertainment, but with neither plans nor hopes for publication.
In their time, Terry Harknett's western novels have been called sensationalist and satirical, parodies and pastiches. There is some doubt as to whether or not they should even be called westerns. But of course they are westerns. It may be true that the humour in Terry's work can as easily make a scene as break it. As much as we might hate to admit it, the graphic and sometimes downright gratuitous brutality, particularly of the earlier books, may well appeal to the voyeur in us. Notwithstanding, although Terry himself claimed to have been too busy meeting deadlines to consider such matters as style and development, in truth his books are probably all of the above, for it is generally the cleverest forms of art that work on so many different levels.
