The Big Prize

Mesa, Colorado, was a nice town. Settled, growing, thriving. God-fearing on a Sunday, money-making of a weekday, the citizens grew carefully richer, and their life had a pattern to it.A pattern that Adam Steele didn't fit. Not when he rode in, sweaty and shabby after too long on the trail, leading a gelding with two dead men lashed across the saddle.Mesa, Colorado, drew back, squeamish and shocked at the blood dried black round the gunshot wounds, at the flies and the smell.Until the news got around that there was a fortune buried somewhere out there in the hills. And only one man had the map of its location. Then the niceness and the manners were stripped away to the bare bones of greed and hatred. And the citizens remembered how 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.