It was the cover art that got me
intrigued enough to read this 'Adam Steele' western. For once, the
cover is perfectly faithful to a scene in the story--- in fact, it’s
the most eye-opening scene in the book--- so let’s take a look.
Our hero has come to a frontier town
controlled by a greedy rancher and his henchmen. Four masked
hardcases corner Steele one night. We know that these are the same
creeps who’d gang-raped the book’s helpless young leading lady a
couple of chapters back. Things go badly for Steele at first (he
takes a punch to the stomach and a kick in the crotch), until he
suddenly produces a three-inch “tie pin.” With it, he swiftly
skewers the testicles of one bad guy, whose shrieks of agony distract
the others long enough for Steele to get the drop on them. A fast
gunfight leaves that trio dead, and Steele blows the head off
Punctured Testicle Guy for good measure. Next, he strips all four of
the thugs nude and hangs their bodies on a barbed-wire fence before
castrating them.
I’ll leave it to others to speculate
where the author’s fascination with groin trauma comes from, but
the over-the-top violence isn’t a surprise. The book is credited to
George G. Gilman, but the author is Terry Harknett, the British
pulpster who wrote these 'Adam Steele' books along with the even more
brutal 'Edge' westerns. Steele has a bit more humanity than Edge, but
that’s not saying much considering what a stone-cold sociopath Edge
is, and he shares Edge’s habit of cracking a bad pun at the end of
most chapters.
Harknett’s characters exist in a
stark spaghetti western landscape. That gives his stories a somewhat
different flavor than what you get with conventional westerns by
American authors. Tough-guy heroes are nothing new, but in these
books the hero has a hard, cold core like an under-baked potato. The
same traditional themes of good versus evil are here, but there’s
an emotional detachment which makes it hard to really care about
anyone, or about what happens to them. That’s just as well, because
the author is fond of killing off virtually every named character in
a given novel, and it happens here too.
Even the unfortunate leading lady gets
killed off, casually and pointlessly. A beautiful young widow who’d
helped him earlier in the book, Steele pauses to reflect on why he
nevertheless feels nothing for her. “Sorry, ma’am,” he muses,
“But I’m looking for the best and you were banged around too
much.” Maybe it’s just as well that Steele doesn’t pause for
reflection very often.
It all winds up in an action climax,
but I found the ending pretty unsatisfying, and apart from the spasms
of colorful violence this is a fairly dreary, downbeat book. The
pacing is reasonably brisk and I was grateful for the brevity of its
148 pages, but reading “VALLEY OF BLOOD” just isn’t much fun.
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