Harknett wrote a number of fiction series including: This is an error resulting from incorrect copyright information printed in one of the Edge westerns. Fantastic Fiction, list Adam Hardy as one of Harknett's pseudonyms, in fact a nom de plume of Kenneth Bulmer. On at least one occasion he wrote as a ghostwriter for Peter Haining (for novel The Hero). Stone, Frank Chandler, Jane Harman, Alex Peters, William Pine, William Terry, James Russell and David Ford. He wrote under an array of pseudonyms, including George G. He was author of almost 200 books, mostly pulp novels in the western and crime genres. But if you like those old noir books or the Kurosawa samurai movies or Italian Westerns that followed them, you will still enjoy this.Terry Harknett (born 1936) was a British author. There's a certain sunbaked, bloody charm to the stranger's ability to manipulate warring factions to maximize his personal profit.Īlthough this book can trace its roots to Dashiell Hammett (whose The Glass Key and Red Harvest inspired the Dollars film trilogy) it probably goes without saying that this novelization doesn't measure up to Hammett's books. Eventually the book takes on a more realistic, grittier quality which is more effective. That probably suits the dreamy Spaghetti Western film style that preceded this novelization. The first forty pages are so read more like a parable or allegory than literal action.
Judging this as a novel, it's a bit more mystical than the typical hard-nosed Western. But The Man With No Name isn't totally unsympathetic because he helps reunite a family victimized by one of the gangs. The stranger plays both ends against the middle until he has incited an outright gang war/blood bath between Ramon and the Baxters. Ramon Rojo returns to town after a notorious and bloody double-cross, he becomes the central villain of a forlorn and deadly escalation of events. He offers to help one family by attacking the other. Since they specialize in different fields, they usually leave each other alone, but they are the dominant rivals controlling the town, so friction is bound to occur. One family are gunrunners and the other are bootleggers. The Baxters and Rojos are crime families. Everybody else in town seems to be a member of the Baxter family, the Rojo family, or dead. Juan de Dios gleefully tolls the bells every time another widow grieves. The Man With No Name-also called the stranger or Americano in this book-an expressionless, almost emotionless gunslinger, arrives in violence-pocked San Miguel, Mexico.
I saw the movie about twenty years ago, so no danger of me conflating the film with this novelization.
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