His technique was repetition, constantly assailing the public with ever more gruesome facts, recycling tales of graveyard degradations, seeking out new examples.
Inspired by these old, dark tales I piled on the heartache, not an easy sell for a children's story (the heroine, a little girl, is eventually imprisoned and comes to a terrible end).
Clearly, somewhere in the years before he released those gritty tales of urban decay as heard on 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, he learned the power of the po-faced.
As the press revelled in wild tales of high-society scandal and political cover-ups, Edgecombe started serving a sentence that he always viewed as unjust.
Many city tours are either generic, big-group walks – in which you are fed dry facts with no particular theme – or super-cheesy, "we're-not-like-the-other-tours" experiences, where you are guided by someone wearing a trilby and strumming a ukelele while telling tales of local cult legends.
The Samoans, among whom he settled, called him "the teller of tales", and readers who return to him as adults are still caught up in the engaging pace and clarity of those tales.
There are rumours of shipwrecks buried hundreds of metres below where I was pitched, and tales of Vikings turning their ships in a nearby bay to redouble their efforts at invading Britain.
Is it perhaps because in many bookshops poetry is likely to be found under signs which say "Fairy Tales and Gifts", "Jokes", "Rhymes and Giggles" and "Hobbies"?
And there were pleasing oddities that suggested a venturesome actor not content to do as his agents told him, like Richard Kelly's extraordinary heroic failure of an epic, Southland Tales.
And I am deeply disappointed that there was nothing for Matteo Garrone's outstanding Tale of Tales.
As of last weekend, Curzon is now warning viewers: "Following the Germanwings flight incident on Tuesday 24th March, please be aware that Wild Tales features a sequence that some customers might find disturbing".
