Rough Justice

The sign at the town boundary read: ROSARITA-Pop. Growing FastNot a claim borne out by the deserted main - and only - street. Then a tolling bell and the sound of voices raised in a funeral hymn told Adam Steele that all Rosarita's human life was in church and that the town had recently suffered a net population loss of one.Later he did not have to ask who shot the sheriff. It was in self-defense and the lawman was more creased than deceased. But with more killing to come, it soon became clear that most of the pains being suffered in the little Arizona town came not from growing but dying. 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. The success of Edge led George G. Gilman to create a companion series featuring a shorter, greyer and somewhat milder (though no less murderous) anti-hero: ADAM STEELE. 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.