J.T. Edson
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John Thomas Edson was born in 1928 near the Derbyshire County border, in a small mining village. He was obsessed with Westerns from an early age and often "rewrote" cowboy movies that he had seen at the cinema. One thing that always intrigued him was the minutiae - how did the baddie's gun jam? What were the mechanics of cheating at cards? His writing was helped to develop by a schoolteacher who encouraged him.
Early Life
During his 20s and 30s, Edson served in His Majesty's Armed Forces as a Dog Trainer. He was also a postman, and the proprietor of a fish 'n chips shop. Furthermore, he wrote the "box captions" for comic strips, which instilled discipline and the ability to convey maximum information with minimum words.In his 30s, he won a story-writing competition and his story Trail Boss started him writing Westerns commercially. From 1961 onwards he wrote prodigiously, until forced to take a semi-sabbatical by health problems in the 1990s.
Later on
Edson openly claimed he wrote for the money, and in an article for Time magazine in February 1999 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/intl/article/0,9171,1107990201-20413,00.html, he declared that unlike such authors as Louis L'Amour, he had "no desire to have lived in the Wild West, and 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.” What set his books apart was his attention to historical detail but which he didn't let drag the story down into a glorified geography lecture. Not including his individual novels such as Slaughter's Way and Is-A-Man, J. T. Edson wrote 9 principal series, covering the following eras of American Western history:
| Event | Timespan |
|---|---|
| Ole Devil | 1835-1837 |
| Civil War | 1861-1865 |
| Floating Outfit | 1866 – early 1880s |
| Waco series | late 1870s - late 1890s |
| Calamity Jane | Late 1860s – c.1880 |
| Waxahachie Smith | 1880s – 1890s |
| Alvin Fog | c.1918 – c. late 1920s |
| Rockabye County | 1960s – 1970s |
| Bunduki | 1960s – 1970s |
His Style
J T Edson delighted in using real-life and fictional characters as crossover "guest stars" in his works and often used the relatives/descendents of his characters to create spin-off series. His first hero, Ole Devil, is the maternal uncle of his Civil War & Floating Outfit hero, Dusty Fog. Fog in turn is the first cousin of John Wesley Hardin the gunslinger (Ole Devil's paternal nephew). Lon Ysabel's cousin is "Bad Bill" Longley. Alvin Fog was Dusty's grandson; Rockabye County hero Bradford Counter was Mark Counter's great-grandson, and Bunduki was Bradford Counter's cousin and another great-grandson of Mark Counter, his lover Dawn Drummond-Clayton being the adoptive great-granddaughter of Tarzan through their adopted son, John Drummond, aka Korak the Killer. Alvin Fog shares his series with Edgar Wallace characters J G Reeder and the Three Just Men. A variety of real (Wyatt Earp) and fictional (Matt Dillon) characters pop up in every series.Edson's female characters (Calamity Jane, Belle Boyd) and are also notable for their portrayal as active, strong personalities. Many of them are experts in shooting or fighting. Belle Boyd, based on the real Civil War character, is both an active spy and an expert in savate, for instance). Some of his novels have women as the primary villains. Wrestling fights between women are also present in a few Edson novels.
1980's
Despite selling over 11 million books globally and producing over 100 books, in the 1980s his books fell out of favor. His works from the 1990s were only published in the USA.1990's
In the 1990s as his health began to fail he cut back on any new series and began to write "expansions" of some books or "fill in the gaps" books or anthologies of short stories about characters. The last J T Edson book available in the UK, Mark Counter's Kin, was an anthology. However, he also wrote and published the first three in a quartet of new books to fill in what happened to Dusty Fog, Mark Counter and Lon Ysabel as they made their way home to the OD Connected after the events of the Floating Outfit title Return to Backsight (which Edson used as a springboard to launch his Waco series): Wedge Goes To Arizona, Arizona Range War and Arizona Gun Law are only available via American bookstores, as his his long-promised "Belle Boyd"-centric novel, Mississippi Raider (also a new work).He eventually decided to semi-retire but couldn't stop writing altogether; he lived near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire and would often come up with plots at his local Public House.
His American publishers Dell began to periodically reissue his books, causing a surge of new interest, though their tendency to change the books' original titles causes problems for eager collectors who should ensure that they are getting one of the few new books and not a republished old one under a new name - for example, White Stallion, Red Mare is now Range War and Calamity Spells Trouble is now The Road To Ratchet Creek.
As well as Arizona Takeover, the purported 4th title in the quartet listed above, the most eagerly awaited of J T Edson's new works by his fans was Miz Freddie of Kansas, an anthology of anecdotes related by the octagenarian widow of Dusty Fog in which, so Edson promised, would be revealed details of how Dusty, Mark and Lon were killed together in Africa in 1911.
At the time of his death, J T Edson had had 136 books published and had sold over 27 million copies globally. Unfortunately, it is not known whether he had finished the above mentioned new books at his death, or whether sufficient exists in manuscript form to be posthumously published (or if he has any family/his agent Jackie Miller at Dell Books who intend to do this). J T Edson did have at least one complete, unpublished novel at the time of his death, Amazons of Zillikian, which was #5 in the Bunduki series, but which remained unpublished due to his disillusion with the intransigence of the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, as mentioned by Laurence Dunn in his online article [link].
Western authoress and journalist Jean Henry-Mead did a brief online interview with J T Edson for her 2002 book Maverick Writers, which can be found at www.jeanhenrymead.com. A full retrospective of J T Edson's literary career and his books can be found in the article, The Inkslinger, by Catherine Stewart on the Non-Fiction page of the wesbite The Cat's Whiskers. [link]
Controversies
J T Edson's treatment of racial politics and issues in the post-Civil War South dealt with potentially controversial issues. His novel, The Hooded Riders, portrayed a Ku Klux Klan like organization as a heroic resistance group. His heroes, Dusty Fog and Mark Counter, are responsible for founding this group. The same novel also portrays the outlaw and gunfighter John Wesley Hardin as a wrongly accused hero, and his killing a black man is presented as self defense. In other novels, Edson refers to black slaves in the South who came to the defense of their masters against Northerners.
References
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