Edge 59: Terror Town

Up to now the good people of Winton, Oregon had done a lot of things right. The town was prosperous, the buildings well-constructed and in a good state of repair. The law was upheld and all seemed orderly. The elderly judge was eloquent in his praise for the respectable nature of the citizens.Trouble was, just before the man called Edge rode in to town, things had started to go all wrong. A woman had been brutally murdered and a man hurriedly tried and hanged. The wrong man.And now a person or persons unknown had set up a protest movement. Not by waving banners but by setting up nooses. And beginning to kill, one by one, all the people responsible.That was when bad law became lynch law and the formerly neatly swept streets became all littered with the bodies of those recently responsible people. GEORGE G. GILMAN (11 December 1936 - 23 January 2019) was a pseudonym created and used by the near-legendary Terry Harknett -- is so well-known to western readers for his Edge and Steele books, that he hardly needs any introduction. Arguably the most influential British western writer of the last 50 years, his tough, graphic, wise-cracking westerns are still in demand, even though almost twenty years have now passed since the last one was published. Edge: A veteran of the Civil War with fifty-six kills to his credit, Edge is a six foot three inch Mexican-Swedish halfbreed whose armory includes a vicious, bone-handled razor with which he is capable of performing any number of graphic disfigurements. a series of violent set-pieces shockingly presented within the framework of a basic, generally off-beat premise, with a humorous punchline forming the ending to each of the twelve to eighteen chapters.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.