The Making of a Lawman

Waco was a product of the times. Left an orphan in a Waco Indian attack on a wagon train, he grew up among the large family of an impoverished rancher. Although treated as one of the family, some urge set him drifting at the age of thirteen. Even then he carried a gun, a battered but operational old Navy Colt. Four years later he wore a brace of Army Colts and bore a log-sized chip on his shoulder. His truculence might have sent him on the trail of Wes Hardin, Bad Bill Longley or other fast-handed Tejano boys running from the law after a killing too many. Then fate stepped in. Waco met Dusty Fog, the fastest of them all. J.T. Edson was a former British Army dog-handler who wrote more than 130 Western novels, accounting for some 27 million sales in paperback. Edson’s works - produced on a word processor in an Edwardian semi at Melton Mowbray - contain clear, crisp action in the traditions of B-movies and Western television series. What they lack in psychological depth is made up for by at least twelve good fights per volume. Each portrays a vivid, idealized “West That Never Was”, at a pace that rarely slackens.