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Post by franklinmarsh on Jun 11, 2008 17:46:19 GMT
Gringos! Guns were their trade - but killing was their destiny! The Gringos - Four men with nothing to lose . Except their lives. Angus Wells and John Harvey's 10 volume Wild Bunch/Professionals tribute. Cade Onslow shops at the same gentleman's outfitters as Pike Bishop.
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Post by killercrab on Jun 21, 2008 1:00:19 GMT
EDGE #6 The Blue , The Grey And The Red by George G. Gilman - Nel , 1979 ( original Edit. 1972) A follow up to EDGE #4 - Killer's Breed . When the armies in blue meet the armies in grey , the land is tainted with red!Picked the above up yesterday - beautiful Clifton-Dey cover I think. EDGE #7 California Killing by George G. Gilman - Nel , 1973. Edge rides into a small township - the kind of town people dream of.
But , it's not!
By The End , there are no dreams left.In contrast to the previous book - this cover depicts an action shot - the rifle just breaking the circular titles. The sepia tones of Edge's legs blend seemlessly into the minimalist background. Arguably the finest cover yet in the series...
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Post by franklinmarsh on Oct 28, 2008 8:46:15 GMT
Too idle to start a new thread. I put up the cover of Breed 2 : The Silent Kill here. Actually got around to reading it. Nothing much to get excited about, apart from a character called Terry Harknett, and a ship called The Elizabeth James.
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Post by tikitnet on Aug 11, 2014 13:23:08 GMT
The artwork is by George Sharp. I visited him yesterday and saw the one original award winning piece he has kept and that was for "Bodie - Trackdown"
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Post by tikitnet on Jan 12, 2017 15:00:40 GMT
The Bodie covers are by George Sharp. He still has the original artwork for the first one as it won an award.
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Post by cromagnonman on Jan 13, 2017 14:42:31 GMT
I have to say that I never really was a fan of J T Edson: all those interminable footnotes and appendices strangling his stories like some insatiable textual anaconda. But if you're discussing Brit westerns in any capacity then he is pretty much an unavoidable obstacle. More than that though his cover illustrator - the indefatigueable Mike Codd - is surely an unsung hero of western imagery. Surprised not to see him here before now to be honest. He must have contributed umpteen dozens of striking gouache illustrations like these over the course of Edson's career. My sufferance of Edson's style never really survived much beyond the Bunduki and Rockabye County series. But I remember being in a second-hand bookshop in Scarborough about ten years ago and seeing carousels stuffed with his entire back catalogue. Was an impressive sight I have to say. Felt like being Codd-Wallopped. Always had a soft spot for this set. Not Codd's best work by any means but there's fun to be had in identifying the reference photos that the various poses were cribbed from. Caroline Munro and Dr Who's Louise Jameson are in there for sure, and who knows how many others. Good seeing JT himself in the guise of Big John Cannon from High Chapperal also.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jan 15, 2017 11:42:09 GMT
I have to say that I never really was a fan of J T Edson: all those interminable footnotes and appendices strangling his stories like some insatiable textual anaconda. But if you're discussing Brit westerns in any capacity then he is pretty much an unavoidable obstacle. More than that though his cover illustrator - the indefatigueable Mike Codd - is surely an unsung hero of western imagery. Surprised not to see him here before now to be honest. He must have contributed umpteen dozens of striking gouache illustrations like these over the course of Edson's career. My sufferance of Edson's style never really survived much beyond the Bunduki and Rockabye County series. But I remember being in a second-hand bookshop in Scarborough about ten years ago and seeing carousels stuffed with his entire back catalogue. Was an impressive sight I have to say. Felt like being Codd-Wallopped. Always had a soft spot for this set. Not Codd's best work by any means but there's fun to be had in identifying the reference photos that the various poses were cribbed from. Caroline Munro and Dr Who's Louise Jameson are in there for sure, and who knows how many others. Good seeing JT himself in the guise of Big John Cannon from High Chapperal also. I went through a brief Edson phase in my civil war phase. Liked the repetitive elements. Would have had fond memories of Edson if pulphack hadn't sent me Bunduki. We need to thrash that out over a beer pulphack.
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Post by pulphack on Jan 15, 2017 21:12:06 GMT
I did warn you, Craig, and my exploding boiler was not an excuse to escape the inevitable retribution...
Nice to see those Edson covers as I have many of them - all 3 JT's Ladies volumes, as well as the short story JT's Hundredth (book no.100, surprisingly)- which has a piece about his DC Thomson days and a reprinted strip, as well - and also almost all the Rockabye County books. I loved the Floating Outfit stuff and Rockabye County when I was a kid, and about 20 years back found a ton of his stuff in a second hand shop in Swanage. I got the short story stuff, the Rockabye County, and also the Company Z books, which I hadn't read back when (actually, I don't think he'd written them at the point I was reading him), but were irresistible partly because they were set in the 1920's (and anything set between the wars makes my nose twitch - I mean ANYTHING), and partly because he revived JG Reeder for two of them, with Penny Wallace's blessing (EW's daughter, and a nice lady). Westerns have long since lost their allure for me, but that's me,not them... I love the Rockabye books as they come over like a Quinn Martin series - right wing cop shows set firmly in period, but for all that built on strong character and plot elements. The Company Z books are ok, really, but the ones with Reeder are the best of his work I've read, simply because his enthusiasm and love of the Wallace characters and settings he uses really do bring out the best in him.
The thing about JT, as I think I've said elsewhere, is that he can tell a story, but he does like to come over like your drunk uncle at Xmas, spouting views that make you go 'oh!' 'ouch!' and 'eh?' in equal measure. He's pedantic (those footnotes, which are ridiculous but at the same time give his books a faintly daft area of spurious authority), prurient (his love of foxy boxing, which is disgusting but he's going to tell you why in great detail, like any retired NOTW hack), and also tends to froth at the mouth about liberals and liberal tendencies in a way that is almost as caricatured and innocent (and therefore somehow silly and not as offensive as a reasoned argument) as Sydney Horler. Come to think of it, their Boys Own approaches to their genres are pretty similar.
I haven't bought or read anything for some years now, but I have returned to the short story volumes on occasion. He's firmly of the past, but fun if you're in the mood.
Apart from the Bunduki books, of course, which I got at the same time and never could finish. But I'll leave those to Craig...
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Post by andydecker on Jan 16, 2017 20:10:33 GMT
I never read an Edson, but the civil war novels kind of interest me. I gathered that his novels have nothing in common with the other Brit-Western from James&Co, still civil war westerns are a rare breed. Are his books very traditional westerns like L'Amour or Max Brand?
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Post by pulphack on Jan 17, 2017 15:45:08 GMT
Heh, JT has NOTHING in common with the Piccadilly Cowboys, in fact he openly loathed them. LJ had met him once and described him as 'an odd chap' which is kind of what you'd expect from a counter-culture kid meeting an old soldier of a very conservative hue. And restrained.
Edson's books are very much in the vein of the traditional western in subject and content - he loved the old writers, and was also schooled in the ERB and Wallace traditions of adventure fiction, naming the latter two as huge influences - but his style is something else again: an odd mix of old school pulp from the US combined with the kind of very English style that emerged from the Wallace school of books, and the story paper styles of, for instance, the Sexton Blake Library. He was published in the US for years, and also long after he was published here, so for all the anomaly of his style, he must have been doing something right for the US western fans (interestingly, I'd say he was more successful, and for far longer, than any of the Piccadilly cowboys, even Terry Harknett, in the US and perhaps even here).
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jan 17, 2017 20:26:55 GMT
I did warn you, Craig, and my exploding boiler was not an excuse to escape the inevitable retribution... Nice to see those Edson covers as I have many of them - all 3 JT's Ladies volumes, as well as the short story JT's Hundredth (book no.100, surprisingly)- which has a piece about his DC Thomson days and a reprinted strip, as well - and also almost all the Rockabye County books. I loved the Floating Outfit stuff and Rockabye County when I was a kid, and about 20 years back found a ton of his stuff in a second hand shop in Swanage. I got the short story stuff, the Rockabye County, and also the Company Z books, which I hadn't read back when (actually, I don't think he'd written them at the point I was reading him), but were irresistible partly because they were set in the 1920's (and anything set between the wars makes my nose twitch - I mean ANYTHING), and partly because he revived JG Reeder for two of them, with Penny Wallace's blessing (EW's daughter, and a nice lady). Westerns have long since lost their allure for me, but that's me,not them... I love the Rockabye books as they come over like a Quinn Martin series - right wing cop shows set firmly in period, but for all that built on strong character and plot elements. The Company Z books are ok, really, but the ones with Reeder are the best of his work I've read, simply because his enthusiasm and love of the Wallace characters and settings he uses really do bring out the best in him. The thing about JT, as I think I've said elsewhere, is that he can tell a story, but he does like to come over like your drunk uncle at Xmas, spouting views that make you go 'oh!' 'ouch!' and 'eh?' in equal measure. He's pedantic (those footnotes, which are ridiculous but at the same time give his books a faintly daft area of spurious authority), prurient (his love of foxy boxing, which is disgusting but he's going to tell you why in great detail, like any retired NOTW hack), and also tends to froth at the mouth about liberals and liberal tendencies in a way that is almost as caricatured and innocent (and therefore somehow silly and not as offensive as a reasoned argument) as Sydney Horler. Come to think of it, their Boys Own approaches to their genres are pretty similar. I haven't bought or read anything for some years now, but I have returned to the short story volumes on occasion. He's firmly of the past, but fun if you're in the mood. Apart from the Bunduki books, of course, which I got at the same time and never could finish. But I'll leave those to Craig... Foxy boxing - a term to conjure with. I forgave you, pulphack,the moment I crawled past the first chapter. As you know too well, I prefer awful books to anything decent and Bunduki is virtually at the top of the pile. In fact, if I can dig it out, I'll probably reread it before I tackle 'The Plum in the Golden Vase'. I started reading some of those cheap westerns again. There's just something incredibly warming about mindless reptition of themes, tropes and conventions. I've always been plain jealous of anyone who can write pulp. Any time I try it I get bogged down and it comes out as uninteresting and unentertaining rubbish.
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