John Thomas Edson (17 February 1928 – 17 July 2014) was an English author of 137 Westerns, escapism adventure, and police-procedural novels. He lived near Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, from the 1950s onwards, and retired from writing due to ill-health in 2005.
Biography
He was born in February 1928 near the border of the County of Derbyshire, England, in a small mining village, Whitwell, where his relatives still live. Both his grandfathers and assorted uncles were coalminers His paternal family was native to Whitwell, his paternal grandfather Herbert Edson, being born in the hamlet of Steetley, near Whitwell. His maternal grandfather, Robert Gill, was born in Heeley, Yorkshire. Although there was a considerable age gap between his grandparents, Herbert and Elizabeth Ann Edson being 25 years younger than Eobert and Eliza Charlotte Gill, his parents John Thomas Edson and Eliza Charlotte Gill (junior) were the same age (b. 1905) as Eliza was the twelfth born of the Gills' thirteen children
His parents married at Whitwell Parish Church of St. Lawrence on 5 April 1926, and John Thomas (J.T.) Edson (junior) was their first child. In June 1928 the Edson family suffered a sudden bereavement when 7-year-old John Vincent Edson, the young son of John Edson's namesake cousin John R Edson, died suddenly; a month later, John Thomas Edson himself also died in July 1928, leaving Eliza a 23-year-old widow with a six-month-old baby son. Eliza Edson remarried in 1946 when J.T. Edson was 18 years old.
J. T. Edson joined the British Army at the age of 18 years in 1946. Edson served in the army for 12 years as a Dog Trainer. He saw active service in Korea and Africa.
Cooped up in barracks for long periods, he devoured books by the great escapist writers (Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert McCraig, Nelson C. Nye and Edgar Wallace). He also sat through hours of movies starring John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Errol Flynn and his all-time favourite, Audie Murphy. His first appearance in print was "Hints on Self-Preservation when attacked by a War Dog" in the Osnabrück camp magazine Shufti in 1947. Acquiring a typewriter in the early 1950s and putting it to good use while posted to Hong Kong, by the time of his discharge he had written 10 Westerns, an early version of Bunduki and the first of the short detective-type stories starring Waco.
Edson decided to leave the Army on his marriage and as he and his wife began to raise their six children, he sought to turn his hobby of writing into an income to support his family. He won second prize (with Trail Boss, first published in 1961) in the Western division of a literary competition run by Brown & Watson Ltd, which led to the publication of 46 novels with them, becoming a major source of revenue for the company. He sometimes needed additional income and also served as a postman, and the proprietor of a fish and chip shop. He branched out as a writer and wrote five series of short stories (Dan Hollick, Dog Handler) for the Victor boys' paper, and wrote the box captions for comic strips, which instilled discipline and the ability to convey maximum information with minimum words.
His writing career forged ahead when he joined Corgi Books in the late '60s, which gave Edson exposure through a major publishing house, as well as the opportunity to branch out from Westerns into the Rockabye County, the science-fiction hero Bunduki and other series.
At his most prolific, Edson wrote a new novel every six to eight weeks.
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, 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."
This remoteness from the West placed Edson in company with the popular Western author Zane Grey, who was a middle-aged east coast dentist. Similarly, Western author George G. Gilman, real name Terry Harknett, was born and bred in Essex, England.
Edson paid scrupulous attention to historical detail and accuracy, while striving not to overburden his stories with the fruits of his research.
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.