The Hellraisers

Adam Steele was doing the shopping. The girl, blonde and bright, checked off the rest of his list and started packing it all away in a gunny sack. The old man, her grandfather, looked proudly down at her as he rummaged around on a high shelf at the back of the little general store. Then brought out the special offer that might tempt the stranger who'd just ridden into the small town of Barclay, Texas.One 9mm Belgian Lefaucheux revolver, finely engraved … His sales pitch was interrupted.Three new customers who burst in and weren't about to wait their turn to be served. Who weren't armed with shopping lists but with guns. Who wanted not provisions but money and didn't aim to pay but to kill.Three masked men who didn't know that Steele was not a man to interrupt when he was going about his domestic chores. 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.