JT Edson: Politically incorrect author of bestselling Westerns
JT Edson, who has died aged 86, was a former British Army dog-handler who wrote more than 130 Western novels, accounting for some 27 million sales in paperback.
Edson’sworks contain clear, crisp action in the traditions of B-movies and Western television series. What they lack in psychological depth is made up for by at least 12 good fights per volume.
His authentic descriptions of 19thcentury weapons, his interest in what causes a gun to jam and in the mechanics of cheating at cards enjoyed a strong following, especially among serving British soldiers.
But his accounts of catfights involving women punching, scratching and biting as they tear the clothes off each other in the mud, did not appeal to the new breed of feminist publishing executives. Others pointed out that a young man sent to Broadmoor for killing a Sunday School teacher claimed to have modelled himself on Edson’s hero, the half-Comanche, half-Irish Ysabel Kid. There was also the novel The Hooded Riders (1968), which portrayed an organisation resembling the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic resistance group.
Edison, who lived in Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, England, delighted in pricking southern, mid- dle-class pretensions. The dedication to JT’s Ladies declared: “For all the idiots of the press who have written articles entitled things like ‘The Fastest Pen in Melton Mowbray’ and have been filled with the most stupid, snob-oriented pseudjargon never to appear on the pages of mine or any other author’s books. May the bluebird of happiness fly over them when it has dysentery, because that is catching.’’
John Thomas Edson was born at Worksop, Nottinghamshire, on February 17 1928, the son of a miner who was killed in an accident when John was nine. He left school at 14 to work in a stone quarry and joined the army four years later.
Edson served in Kenya during the Emergency, on one occasion killing five Mau Mau on patrol. He started writing in Hong Kong, and when he won a large cash prize in a tombola he invested in a typewriter.
On coming out of the army after 12 years with a wife and children to support, he learnt his craft while running a fish-and-chips shop and working at a pet food factory. His efforts paid off when Trail Boss (1961) won second prize in a competition — a promise of publication and an outright payment of £50.
The publishers offered £25 more for each subsequent book, and — with the addition of earnings from serial-writing for the comic Victor — he was able to settle down to professional authorship. When the comic’s owners decided that nobody read cowboy stories any more, he had to get a job as a postman.
Edson’s prospects improved when Corgi Books took over his publisher, encouraged him to produce seven books a year and promised him royalties for the first time.
In 1974 he made his first visit to the US. He declared that he had no desire to live in the Wild West, adding: “I’ve never even been on a horse. I’ve seen those things, and they look highly dangerous at both ends and bloody uncomfortable in the middle.” — graph, London