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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.〔Ray Merlock,"Edson, J(ohn) T(homas)" in ''Twentieth Century Western Writers'', edited by Geoff Sadler. Chicago and London, St. James Press, 1991, ISBN 0-912289-98-8 ,p.203-5〕 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. For many decades, every UK town had its own small cinema, showing Saturday matinees and escapist-adventure fare, such as The Lone Ranger, Flash Gordon, and others. As a young son of a working widow, J.T. often went to the cinema whilst she worked, and he became obsessed with Escapist Adventure and Western serials shown from an early age; in the foreword and appendices of many of his later novels he explained how he often "rewrote" cowboy movies and the adventure serials that he had seen at the cinema. One thing that always intrigued him was the minutiae—how did the baddie's gun jam? What were the mechanics of cheating at cards? How did Westerners really dress and speak? His writing was helped to develop by a schoolteacher who encouraged him. 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.〔 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'') 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 〔Bradley Mengel, ''Serial Vigilantes of Paperback Fiction: An Encyclopedia from Able Team to Z-Comm''. McFarland, 2009 (p.26-7).ISBN 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「J. T. Edson」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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