Forgotten Books: Eve of Evil - George G. Gilman (Terry Harknett)

I always try to read something Christmas-themed for my Forgotten Books post closest to the holiday. This year's book comes from a bit of an unlikely source. The Edge series launched the British Western boom and also influenced American Westerns for several years with its graphic violence and dark humor. They were reprinted in the U.S. by the original Pinnacle Books with covers by the great Bruce Minney and were very successful. I read quite a few of them during the late Seventies and early Eighties, including this Christmas novel, and I just reread it in an e-book edition.

For those of you not familiar with the series, Edge is really Josiah Hedges, a farmer who went off to the Civil War (his adventures there are chronicled in several flashback volumes within the series) and fought beside several men who turned into brutal outlaws after the war. They show up at Hedges' farm before he returns from the war and proceed to torture and murder Hedges' younger brother because they think there's money hidden on the farm. When Hedges finds out about this, he tracks them down and kills them in bloody fashion, picking up the nickname Edge along the way. After that he becomes a drifter, riding into troublesome situations that always turn extremely violent. He tries to settle down a few times, but that always ends badly. The overall grimness of the series is broken up by Edge's penchant for puns and bad jokes, many of which are veiled references to modern-day popular culture. A lot of these come close to breaking the fourth wall but don't quite.

In EVE OF EVIL, Edge finds himself in a ghost town in Wyoming's Wind River Mountains on Christmas Eve, although he doesn't know what day it is when the book starts. A young couple named Joseph and Maria show up. She's pregnant, of course, and her rancher father has sent gunmen to kill Joseph. The rancher is also involved in a dispute with some sheepherders—or shepherds, if you will. There's a gunman named Starr who dies in the east. There's a whore named Angel. There are three strangers from Japan—three kings from the Orient? You get the idea. The story of the Nativity plays out all over again in Wyoming, although there are a lot more gunfights in this one. And there's a bit of a twist in the ending.

The Edge series is pretty much a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. I always enjoyed the books. Unlike all the house-name Western series, Edge was the brainchild of one man, British author Terry Harknett, who wrote all the books under the pseudonym George G. Gilman. Because of that, the voice remains consistent all the way through. There are stretches where the series gets a little too jokey and the pop culture references a little too blatant for my taste. That's not the case in EVE OF EVIL. Harknett plays things relatively straight, and as a result I enjoyed the book quite a bit and thought it held up well to rereading more than 35 years later. In fact, since I never finished the series before, I think I might go back and pick it up again, along with some of Harknett's other series that I never sampled.