But his accounts of catfights involving women punching, scratching and biting as they tear the clothes off each other in the mud, did not appeal to the new breed of feminist publishing executives. Others pointed out that a young man sent to Broadmoor for killing a Sunday School teacher claimed to have modelled himself on Edson’s hero, the half-Comanche, half-Irish Ysabel Kid.

There was also the novel The Hooded Riders (1968), which portrayed an organisation resembling the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic resistance group. At the same time, Edison delighted in pricking southern, middle-class, pretensions. The dedication to JT’s Ladies declared: “For all the idiots of the press who have written articles entitled things like 'The Fastest Pen in Melton Mowbray’ and have been filled with the most stupid, snob-oriented pseud-jargon never to appear on the pages of mine or any other author’s books. May the bluebird of happiness fly over them when it has dysentery, because that is catching.’’ John Thomas Edson was born at Worksop, Nottinghamshire, on February 17 1928, the son of a miner who was killed in an accident when John was nine.

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He left Shirebrook Selective Central School at 14 to work in a stone quarry and joined the Army four years later. As a sergeant in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, Edson served in Kenya during the Emergency, on one occasion killing five Mau Mau on patrol. He started writing in Hong Kong, and when he won a large cash prize in a tombola he invested in a typewriter. On coming out of the Army after 12 years with a wife and children to support, Edson learned his craft while running a fish-and-chip shop and working on the production line at a local pet food factory.

His efforts paid off when Trail Boss (1961) won second prize in a competition – a promise of publication and an outright payment of £50. The publishers offered £25 more for each subsequent book, and — with the addition of earnings from serial-writing for the comic Victor — Edson was able to settle down to professional authorship. When the comic’s owners decided that nobody read cowboy stories any more, he was forced to get a job as a postman (the job had the by-product of enabling him to lose six stone in weight from his original 18). Edson’s prospects improved when Corgi Books took over his publisher, encouraged him to produce seven books a year and promised him royalties for the first time. In 1974 he made his first visit to the United States, to which he was to return regularly in search of reference books. He declared that he had no desire to live in the Wild West, adding: “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.

My only contact was to shoot them for dog meat.” Edson’s bachelor-tidy study, with a wall covered in replica firearms, was the setting for a daily routine broken by a lunchtime stroll to the local pub. A secretary in the room next door handled his fan mail, income tax demands and the sales in Danish, German and Serbo-Croat. Occasionally he would ask her to help him act out some particularly complicated Main Street gunplay and to help produce a JT Appreciation Society newsletter.

His heroes were often based on his favourite film stars, so that Dusty Fog resembled Audie Murphy, and the Ysabel Kid was an amalgam of Elvis Presley in Flaming Star and Jack Buetel in The Outlaw. Buku Ekonomi Kelas X Kurikulum 2013 Pdf. Before becoming a recluse in his last years, JT’s favourite boast was that Melton Mowbray was famous for three things: “The pie, Stilton cheese and myself – but not necessarily in that order’’.

Edson and his wife Dorothy were divorced. They had two sons and a daughter, and he also adopted her three sons by a previous marriage. JT Edson, born February 17 1928, died July 17 2014.