J.T. Edson
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John Thomas Edson was born in 1928 near the border of the County of Derbyshire, England, 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? How did Westerners really dress and speak? His writing was helped to develop by a schoolteacher who encouraged him.
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[edit] 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' chip 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. He eventually incorporated Trail Boss into his popular Floating Outfit series From 1961 onwards he wrote prodigiously, until forced to take a semi-sabbatical by health problems in the 1990s.
[edit] Later Life
Edson openly claimed, though rather tongue-in-cheek, that he wrote for the money. In an article for Time magazine in February 1999 [1], 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.”
In actual fact, this placed Edson in good company with the "first" of the "great" Western authors, Zane Grey, whose blood-and-thunder Westerns were hugely popular and gave no hint that their author was a middle-aged East Coast Dentist who was as far from a cowboy as you could get. Another example is Western author George G. Gilman, real name Terry Harknett, who was born and bred in Essex, England.
What set his books apart and took them to the next level was Edson's scrupulous attention to historical detail and accuracy, but which he rigorously didn't allow to drag the story down into a glorified geography or anthropology 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 |
[edit] 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/descendants of his characters to create spin-off series. He backs the existence of these guest stars with frequent references to "fictionist-genealogist" Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton family
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.
[edit] Anti-Stereotypical Characters
Above all else in his books, Edson was determined to create characters far removed from the usual Western archetype of dirty cowboys, blustering townsmen, blousy saloongirls/prostitutes and uptight, inept matrons. His most popular hero, Dusty Fog, for instance, was not a Kevin Sorbo as Hercules type, but more like Michael Hurst's Iolus - barely 5'6" tall and pleasant but unremarkable in looks. Being of mixed race, Lon Ysabel portrayed the conflict between the "white" and "red" men of the Wild West, and Edson's book Commanche, a "biography" of Lon Ysabel, is a sympathetic without being sentinmental exploration of the Indian way of life before white people came on the scene.
Even the most stereotypical of the trio - 6'3" Greek-god handsome, hunky, blond-haired, blue-eyed Mark Counter - gets to buck the trend. Mark is rich but hardworking, and above all is intelligent; for some reason there is a tendency in the real world to portray big men as stupid while nerds have all the brains, as if IQ reduces in direct proprortion to stature. Everyone from saloongirls to prospectors is imbued with a "reality" that only highlighted the one-dimensional/caricature nature of some other Western writers.
Most obviously, Edson's female characters (Freddie Woods, Calamity Jane, Betty Hardin, Belle Starr/Boyd etc) are notable for their portrayal of women as confident, intelligent and competent years ahead of the "Girl Power" phase of Xena, Buffy and so forth.
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/heroines, and Calamity Jane even got her own series (see above). It was true wrestling and hair pulling fights between women, in which the two women finally end up naked, or nearly so, are also fairly regular features in Edson novels, and on occasion he has written in huge brawls between two sets of feuding saloon girls, which end with a whole roomful of naked, bruised women - he claimed that one particular fight, which he termed the "Battle of Bearcat Annie's", was based on a famous saloon brawl involving over a dozen women. Of course, when his book covers had pictures of buxom women in scanty or tight-fitting clothing, sales increased!
The huge procession of characters from book to book ensured that the first few pages of an Edson book always ended up looking alike, with descriptions of a small, insignificant looking Dusty Fog, who suddenly appeared to become a giant when villains he faced down felt the full force of his personality, the tall and Greek-god handsome Mark Counter, the baby faced but highly dangerous, black dressed, rifle and bowie toting Ysabel Kid, and various other characters. His later novels moved all these descriptions, and their associated family histories, to lengthy appendices/footnotes at the back, to save regular readers from being bored by this repetition. Shrewdly again, Edson also littered these appendices with the titles/references of other books dealing with that character, which enticed/encouraged the reader to go and buy those as well.
[edit] 1980s
Despite selling over 11 million books globally and producing over 100 books, in the 1980s his books fell out of favor in the UK (see Controversies below). His works from the 1990s were only published in the USA.
[edit] 1990s
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 designed 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 is his long-promised "Belle Boyd"-centric novel, Mississippi Raider (also a new work). The final book in the quartet, Arizona Takeover, was apparently not published at the time of his death. Whether it was completely unwritten or prepared in manuscript form is unknown.
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 Ranch 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 Kenya, 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 of these exists in manuscript form to be posthumously completed and/or 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 [1].
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. [2]
[edit] Controversies
For many years from the 1950s - 1970s J T Edson's books were hugely popular. However, in the 1980s he increasingly clashed with UK publishers over his books' treatment and portrayal of racial politics and issues in the post-Civil War Southern States. Perhaps because of his experiences in the British Army, Edson developed a deep disapproval of Liberal and Liberal-Radical politics and was avowedly Right of Centre in his political ideology.
He believed the doctrine of Political Correctness and such policies as Positive Discrimination were not only patronising but inherently racist themselves. Some columnists derogatively termed "Positive Discrimination" as the "Less-Qualified Catholic Lesbian Black Woman" Bill; shortened to "less-qualified black woman", many people blamed the "LQBW" Syndrome for them not getting a particular job or promotion. Edson believed that Positive Discrimination and Political Correctness actually created racism where none had previously existed, and he also thought it was against the Socialist ideal of people achieving because they were good at something, not because of who or what they were. Unfortunately in the United States, many employers needing to meet an "equality" target did promote or hire an employee solely on the grounds they were a non-male/white/heterosexual/ Protestant, even when it was patently obvious they lacked the qualifications or ability to do the job. This only fuelled resentment and eventually the policy was rescinded by Congress.
By the mid-1980s, Edson was completely at loggerheads with the British Establishment. His books, meticulously researched, could not be argued with when they showed how many black Americans had fought for the Confederacy, and how many Confederate soldiers/supporters (such as Texans) had never owned a slave; most Confederates fought the Civil War in order to exercise their legal right to secede from the Union. There was also the fact that the black Southern slaves moving north after 1865 found themselves been attacked and murdered by ordinary White Northerners who didn't want the competition of their cheaper labour, and so returned south with a deep resentment of the Northern Liberal-leaning newspapers who had painted glowing and completely fictional accounts of the wealthy racially harmonious North.
Edson experienced censorship by editors of his manuscripts and was told certain of his novels were "unacceptable". His book, The Hooded Riders, featured Dusty Fog and Mark Counter creating a resistance group against a villain that wore hoods to preven them being identified. They win and the group disbands and goes home, but because the Fog/Counter characters were wealthy white Southerners, Edson was "told" he was racist and the book was really portraying the Ku Klux Klan as heroic - the censor's other excuse for this accuation to Edson was because 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. When Edson pointed out that according to historical records, Hardin was a teenage boy attacked by a much larger, very drunk knife-wielding black man during the Reconstruction ("if he's black he's right") era, he was told this was irrelevant! The editors also objected to the fact that in other novels, such as Belle Boy's story, Mississippi Raider, Edson refers to black slaves in the South who came to the defense of their masters against Northerners - such as when Belle's parents Vincent and Electra Boyd are murdered by a gang of drunken Northerners and she is saved from the burning mansion by the Boyd family slaves.
Since 2000, there has been a growing backlash against Political Correctness and Positive Discrimination in the UK and the USA, but in the 1980s the fact that Edson's villains are often "soft shells" or "liberal-radicals" - radical left wing or liberal people - who are prepared to go to any extent, including torture, rape and murder, or fomenting Indian wars, to torment the heroes of the story (right wing to a man and woman, and often southern). Yankee and "Republican" are, according to him, and his Texan heroes from the floating outfit, quite insulting terms. These soft-shells are often foul-mouthed, homosexual, physically unhygienic and slovenly in appearance and have long, unkempt hair.
