Adam Steele #05 - Gun Run

I've really enjoyed nearly everything I've read by British author Terry Harknett. His penchant for bloody, ultra-violent westerns can be found in long-running series titles including Edge, Apache and Adam Steele. I've been on a western kick lately with the Edge titles so I wanted to revisit Harknett's Adam Steele series. I thoroughly enjoyed the character's debut in Rebels and Assassins Die Hard from 1974. I randomly grabbed another series installment from my shelf and ended up with Gun Run, the fifth installment of the series.

The paperback begins with Steele riding shotgun on a stagecoach headed through the perilous Guadalupe Mountains. With a location between American Arizona, New Mexico and Mexican Sonora, the dusty trail is ripe with thieving bandits and savage Native Americans. Within the opening pages, the stagecoach is attacked by a woman and a band of gun-slinging outlaws. They've caught wind that a cache of money is hidden on the coach and want it all for themselves. Steele, who isn't aware the coach was carrying this vast fortune, is robbed along with the passengers, dragged into the desert and left to watch as the bandits ride off with the loot and his signature weapon, the lever-action rifle given to his father by Abraham Lincoln.

Like a blockbuster Hollywood action flick, nearly every chapter of this novel is another over-the-top, rip-roaring adventure with Steele holding his hat on tight while dodging bullets, knives and despicable killers. Determined to retrieve his rifle, Steele heads through the desert with a knife hoping to locate and ambush the gang. Along the way he's captured by Mexican guerrillas, fights Apache warriors, tangles with the Mexican Army before eventually finding himself jailed by a small-town sheriff hellbent on hanging our hero.

I can't help but think that each of these adventure segments in this narrative could have been entire books on their own. Harknett has so many ideas to explore and he seamlessly weaves them all together to make for one highly engrossing and entertaining story. Like his other literary work, the author pulls no punches or knife-thrusts. Gun Run is filled with men, and plenty of women, being tortured, gutted and shot in a rather macabre and grizzly style. No one does westerns quite like Harknett and this book is another exhibit of his crowd-pleasing roughshod style. Highly recommended!

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Adam Steele #04 - Valley of Blood

It was the cover art that got me intrigued enough to read this 'Adam Steele' western. For once, the cover is perfectly faithful to a scene in the story--- in fact, it’s the most eye-opening scene in the book--- so let’s take a look.

Our hero has come to a frontier town controlled by a greedy rancher and his henchmen. Four masked hardcases corner Steele one night. We know that these are the same creeps who’d gang-raped the book’s helpless young leading lady a couple of chapters back. Things go badly for Steele at first (he takes a punch to the stomach and a kick in the crotch), until he suddenly produces a three-inch “tie pin.” With it, he swiftly skewers the testicles of one bad guy, whose shrieks of agony distract the others long enough for Steele to get the drop on them. A fast gunfight leaves that trio dead, and Steele blows the head off Punctured Testicle Guy for good measure. Next, he strips all four of the thugs nude and hangs their bodies on a barbed-wire fence before castrating them.

I’ll leave it to others to speculate where the author’s fascination with groin trauma comes from, but the over-the-top violence isn’t a surprise. The book is credited to George G. Gilman, but the author is Terry Harknett, the British pulpster who wrote these 'Adam Steele' books along with the even more brutal 'Edge' westerns. Steele has a bit more humanity than Edge, but that’s not saying much considering what a stone-cold sociopath Edge is, and he shares Edge’s habit of cracking a bad pun at the end of most chapters.

Harknett’s characters exist in a stark spaghetti western landscape. That gives his stories a somewhat different flavor than what you get with conventional westerns by American authors. Tough-guy heroes are nothing new, but in these books the hero has a hard, cold core like an under-baked potato. The same traditional themes of good versus evil are here, but there’s an emotional detachment which makes it hard to really care about anyone, or about what happens to them. That’s just as well, because the author is fond of killing off virtually every named character in a given novel, and it happens here too.

Even the unfortunate leading lady gets killed off, casually and pointlessly. A beautiful young widow who’d helped him earlier in the book, Steele pauses to reflect on why he nevertheless feels nothing for her. “Sorry, ma’am,” he muses, “But I’m looking for the best and you were banged around too much.” Maybe it’s just as well that Steele doesn’t pause for reflection very often.

It all winds up in an action climax, but I found the ending pretty unsatisfying, and apart from the spasms of colorful violence this is a fairly dreary, downbeat book. The pacing is reasonably brisk and I was grateful for the brevity of its 148 pages, but reading “VALLEY OF BLOOD” just isn’t much fun.

Edge #05 - Blood on Silver

Working under the pen name George G. Gilman, Terry Harknett had a handful of good ideas in mind for his new 'Edge' western, “BLOOD ON SILVER”. He created a couple of unique characters (one is a giant Zulu in a derby, and the other is a kill-crazy Quaker whose thundering speech is peppered with “thee” and “thy”), along with two or three very strong action sequences.

But as it is when children pound on the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to make them fit, these elements don’t really come together very well, and the plot lacks cohesion. As soon as you get a feel for the story, it’s suddenly about something else, and before you’ve really made the adjustment, it’s turned into something else again. 

It could be argued that nobody reads an 'Edge' novel for the story. This series is famous (or notorious) for its over-the-top gory violence, and I guess there were Edge readers who salivated over the grisly depictions of pain and suffering the way Longarm readers sought stimulation in the extensive sex scenes. You pretty much have to expect violence in a paperback western, and usually that sort of action keeps things lively. But the Edge novels are something else. Virtually every character the reader encounters, no matter how trivial, will be killed off in excruciating ways, and innocent bystanders often get it worse than the bad guys. There’s a difference between two-fisted action and brutality porn, and this series leans toward the latter.

In the opening pages of “BLOOD ON SILVER”, for instance, Edge watches indifferently from the safety of a barn as an entire wedding party is slaughtered by the Quaker and his gang. It’s a powerful sequence. But Harknett cranks it up to eleven. Before it’s over, the bride has been seized, stripped, tied upside down to the pulley rope of a water well, nearly drowned over and over, then tortured with a lit cigar (you can guess where that cigar is ultimately applied as the lusty gang crowds around to watch), before she’s finally killed. 

Again, for some readers this will be the visceral highlight of the book. For the rest of us, it’s nasty overkill which gets in the way of enjoying the story. Harknett isn’t a hack. He can deliver action, color and suspense without soaking everything in blood, as his 'Adam Steele' series proves. But Pinnacle Books demanded crazy violence for the 'Edge' series. (Why? For readers in prisons and psych wards?) So we get exactly that.

There are other idiosyncrasies on display here. One is the author’s insistence on ending every chapter with somebody (usually the humorless Edge) making a wincingly unfunny wisecrack. There’s also a little sloppiness here and there, as when Edge watches a wagon load of silver disappear into a lake and mutters, “Hi-yo silver, away” in a story set decades before the Lone Ranger was created.

For a really good 'Edge' western, try the third book, “APACHE DEATH”. It’s plenty violent, without wallowing in pointless sadism, and everything that’s good about this series is distilled into that novel. The things that work a bit less successfully can be found in “BLOOD ON SILVER”.