Claw 1: Day of Fury by Matthew Kirk

Claw 1 Day of Fury
by Matthew Kirk (Angus Wells)
1983, Granada

Blacksmith Tyler Wyatt agrees to watch some money in a safe, which makes him the target of bandits. To stop his father in law from being tortured, he brings in his wife, who is gang raped in front of him and later murdered. Wyatt himself has his left hand crushed with a hammer, which he replaces with a multi-claw prosthetic.

The origin story is the main tale, with some flash forwards of him starting his long trail of revenge. Pretty basic story-wise, but nasty and gory in parts. The origin stories are usually the weakest, looking forward to future installments.

From Amazon

Crow 4: The Black Trail by James W. Marvin

Crow 4
The Black Trail
by James W. Marvin (Laurence James)

Crow becomes the guide and bodyguard of Zulu Prince Mavulamanzi, who is touring America with his entourage of slaves, which includes a White woman who Crow, of course, has sex with. They run afoul of the local Apaches, and the two make a move to rescue their captive servants.

A step down in the action and sleaze, replaced with casual racism. I didn't get the sense that Crow hates Black people any more than he hates everyone else, but that doesn't stop him from using slurs just to be a dick.

From Amazon

Crow 3: Tears of Blood by James W. Marvin

Crow 3
Tears of Blood
by James W. Marvin

Full blown psychopath Crow is looking to make some money and is town when a prominent citizen and his poorly reputed young wife are kidnapped. Crow agrees to a bounty to rescue them with a bonus for each kidnapper he kills. Crow tracks them down, killing a few folks along the way, is captured, sleaziness ensues, he escapes, then resolves in mass violence.

Continues the pattern of well staged tactics performed by a remorseless monster with no redeeming qualities, so of course the series is a favorite of mine.

There's a weird framing device of someone telling this story years later and a few references to the Apache series shoehorned in at the beginning, neither of which have anything to do with the story.

From Amazon

Breed 2 The Silent Kill by James A. Muir

Breed 2
The Silent Kill
by James A. Muir (Angus Wells)
1977, Sphere

Breed continues his hunt for his family's killers. He comes across a wagon train stranded in the snow trying to cross the Sierras. He comes to the group five days away from Carson City, but instead of turning back they spend over a month facing the elements, and the bulk of the story is miserable winter survival.

A huge step down from the brutality of the first installment to standard western fare.

From Amazon

Jubal Cade 9: Days of Blood by Charles R. Pike

Jubal Cade 9: Days of Blood 
by Charles R. Pike (Angus Wells)
1977 Chelsea House

Trained to heal - born to kill! Jubal Cade is a bowler wearing doctor who is seeking vengeance for his dead wife, earning money to support treatment for his blind adopted son along the way.  There's a lot packed into this slim volume.  Bandits slaughter an entire town before hijacking a train.  There's a train shootout before it crashes in the snow, leaving Cade to lead survivors through the frozen wilderness ahead of a pack of starving wolves.  He runs into an old enemy in town while he takes a job escorting a rich widow back to Texas.

We get a dynamite siege of a church in a town run by fundamentalist, Indian attacks, a range war, naked hooker with a shotgun, sniper attack, ending in a final hand on hand duel.  Your standard western this size maybe has two set pieces, where this burns through several.  The sense of scale adjusts seemlessly, jumping between shootouts with a half dozen toughs to a one-on-one challenge, maintaining the sense of danger throughout.

The series is similar to Edge (it was originated by the same author, Terry Harknett), but with the puns and anatomical details toned down a notch. Cade is a bit more heroic than the rest of the Piccadillys, in that he occasionally goes out of his way to help others as opposed to being a complete psychopath.

Paperback from AbeBooks

Crow 2: Worse than Death by James W. Marvin

Crow 2: Worse than Death
by James W. Marvin (Laurence James)
1979, Corgi

Crow stumbles upon a caravan who have been attacked by the Shoshone.  Most of the men have been killed, and help is days, if not weeks, away.  Crow uses his tactical expertise to hold off the attacks, while hunger and desperation lower the women to his level of depravity.

Short and nasty, though a little bit flat.  This time it felt like James was trying a little too hard.  Dead babies, cannibalism, oral emasculation, deflowering, rape, and eye socket bonfires.  That makes it sound more fun than it was.

Some references to Herne the Hunter, and every character had a name of another British author or pen name.  

Available on the cheap on Kindle from Amazon

Crow 1 - Red Hills by James Marvin

Red Hills
by James W. Marvin (James Laurence)
1979 Corgi

Just to let us know what we're dealing with, the book opens with our hero Crow slapping a girl and shooting a dog.  It just gets worse from there.

Crow is a lieutenant with the US Calvary, serving under a psychopathic, alcoholic, cuckolded Captain.  The bulk of the novel is Crow using his cool head and measured tactics to take on Sioux raids under less than ideal circumstances.

In contrast to his calm demeanor in combat in his personal life he's pretty much a sexual sadist.  While there are plenty of psychopaths and borderline personalities among the Piccadilly Cowboy heroes, Crow is a full blown child-murdering, revenge torturing serial killer.

So we'll be seeing more of Crow in the future.

Available in Kindle from Amazon.

Read a sample.

Caleb Thorne 1

First Shot
Caleb Thorne 1
by L.J. Coburn (Laurence James)
1977 Sphere

Caleb Thorne starts out as one of the most distasteful western protagonists put to page, and I hope he stays that way.

He's a rich, bullying layabout who mocks the fighting men of the military and delights in killing them off in duels.  He's engaged to a girl of a rich family but is more interested in her mother.  Thorne has some mother issues, and by that I mean he's banging his mom.  Just shy of a full blown sex scene, it's made pretty clear he took his dad's place after he killed him, so he's got the whole Oedipus package going on.

After a pretty nasty sex scene of him with his mother-in-law to be during the First Battle of Bull Run, his fiance and mother both die in the conflict, giving Thorne his Batmanesque motivation to join the Union Army.

As luck would have it, his new commanding officer is the father of a man Thorne killed in a duel.  He's made the leader of a Dirty Dozen style special troop of condemned criminals forced to fight in suicide missions.  We wrap up with a quick mission to blow up a bridge.

I'm guessing there's going to be some Joseph Campbell thing where our hero undergoes a personal transformation to not be a such a horrible human being, but I hope not.  The series only lasted five issue - there's mention that Civil War books didn't sell well at the time.  I'm guessing because you risk alienating half of your reading public depending on what side your protagonist is on.

Read a sample

Get the Kindle ebook from Amazon

Trackdown by Neil Hunter - Bodie the Stalker 1

Trackdown
by Neil Hunter (Mike Linaker)
Bodie the Stalker 1
Star 1979

Bodie is a bounty hunter who kills people.  A rich guy seeking public office wants him to kill some bandits that stole some guns.  Some people try to kill Bodie, he kills them and then sleeps with a prostitute then kills some more people.

I have a pretty high tolerance for cliches in my popular fiction, but Westerns may be worse than Romance as far as following a formula.  And Bodie seems worse than most about being a string of action and sex scenes with barely a page connecting them.

Which is entirely forgivable, as they're some fine action scenes.  Not to be outdone by his contemporaries in the Picadilly Cowboy scene, Linaker turns up the gore, including a lengthy description of a gunman getting caught under a moving train.  Maybe I'm the one getting jaded, but the violence seemed a little perfunctory this time around.

Linaker really excels in using outdoors setting, and I appreciate that it looks like he did a smidgen of research about Central Texas.

Available from Piccadilly Publishing for Kindle, currently at very gentle prices.

Click here to read a sample.

Herne the Hunter 3 - The Black Widow - by John McLaglen

The Black Widow
Herne the Hunter 3
by John McLaglen
Corgi 1977

Jed Herne is a gunslinger riding the vengeance trail avenging the gang rape that left his wife and neighbor dead.  Accompanying him is Becky, the fifteen year old daughter of his dead neighbor.  This installment has him stalking the last two perpetrators - two rich, spoiled, psychotic twins.  One's gay and the other is a heroin addict, and both have a creepy Oedipal vibe with their overprotective mother.

Added to the mix is Whitey Coburn, Herne's albino, gunslinging friend who's been hired to bring Herne in.  This one is a titch milder than most of the Piccadilly Cowboys I've read, and Herne is a lot less amoral than most of these heroes.  Some decent action, a little sleaze with our villains, and of course lengthy descriptions of bullet trajectories.

Piccadilly Cowboys

The Picadilly Cowboys were a group of British writers who gathered in a pub in Picadilly in London and wrote a series of violent, brutal western paperbacks in the 1970s and 80s.  Writing under various house names, they were Terry Harknett, Laurence James, Mike Linaker, Angus Wells, Ken Bulmer, John Harvey and Fred Nolan.

Much like the serial vigilante genre is a collection of copies, knock offs, and permutations of Don Pendleton's Executioner series, the Picadilly Cowboy genre spun off of the successful Edge series by George Gilman (Terry Harknett).

These ran parallel to other Men's Adventure paperbacks of the era, and had the same feel.  They drew their tone from the spaghetti western films, only much more brutal.  The protagonists were not anti-heroes, or amoral drifters with their own personal code.  They were at their kindest violent bullies, and at their worst outright villains.

The plots were incredibly cliche, but the stories stood out for the massive amounts of gore and violence, which puts most horror novels to shame.  It was obvious the writers were having a lot of fun with it, and were likely trying to outdo each other.  It wasn't unusual for a single gunshot wound to be described over the course of a full page.

Titles are easy to get in used bookstores, though it can be difficult to wade through the Western section to find these gems.  Many have been recently reprinted in cheap ebook editions by Piccadilly Publishing.

Here are the series titles with their credited author name.  There may be a couple of yanks mixed in here that share the same vibe.

• Edge by George G Gilman
• Steele by George G Gilman
• Angel by Frederick H Christian
• Apache by William M. James
• Breed by James A. Muir
• Bodie by Neil Hunter
• Caleb Thorn by LJ Coburn
• Claw by Mathew Kirk
• Crow by James W Marvin
• Cutter by Duff McCoy
• Gringos by JD Sandon
• Gunslinger by Charles C Garrett
• Hart by John B Harvey
• Hawk by William S Brady
• Herne the Hunter by John McLaglen
• Jubal Cade by Charles R Pike
• Lawmen by JB Dancer
• Peacemaker by William S Brady
• Six-Gun Samurai by Patrick Lee
• Undertaker by George G Gilman

More at Vault of Evil.

Edge 24 - Slaughterday

Slaughterday
Edge 24
by George G. Gilman (Terry Harknett)
Pinnacle 1977

Edge wanders into a town in the middle of a political struggle.  One side is the son of a shady land baron who previously ran the town, the other a newcomer who hires mercenaries as deputies and promises to sell the land to the townspeople.  With murky motivation, Edge settles in a hotel and shoots anyone that pisses him off.

Edge aligns himself with a black hotel owner, and the two discover that the prior landowner has paid of some vicious drunk Sioux Indians as muscle.  Everyone quickly figures out this is a bad idea, and all parties band together to face an invasion.

Some gruesome Indian torture and almost a full page description of the effects of a double barreled shotgun against a human torso.  This is my first Edge book, and I was less than impressed by the reputed humor of the character, consisting mostly of wry anachronistic puns.

Apache 3 - Duel to the Death

Duel to the Death
Apache 3
by William M. James
Pinnacle 1975

Cuchillo is picked up for a murder another Apache commits.  He escapes to clear his name, murdering several people in the process, which kind of negates the point.

Not a lot of action, but I felt like I was on the Warren Commission, with the trajectory of every arrow or bullet described in gruesome detail.

We get the same meticulous descriptions of a burst set of testes and the effect a shotgun blast to the gut has on a hanging lynch victim.