Steele's War – The Stranger

Steele.Storekeeper, settled and accepted. Him and his wife. Until the stranger rode into town. A hard, silent man with an old newspaper photo all crumpled up in his hip pocket. A photo that just happened to show something from his past.That was when Steele realized that there were two kinds of past. The past a man tries to forget, that forces itself into his sweat-soaked nightmares. Memories of blood, pumping, hot, vivid red on Confederate gray. Of triumphant Rebel yells that rise horribly to bone-chilling screams.And then there is the past you didn't know about.Until it rears up, sudden as a diamondback and strikes to kill. 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.