Max Brand, Destry Rides Again (1930)

1930 edition

This is my new favorite Max Brand novel. Neatly plotted and briskly told, it illustrates Brand’s remarkable gift for storytelling. It begins with the usual western conventions and then quickly posits a premise that strikes off in one unexpected direction after another. Maybe most remarkably, it defies convention by presenting an indomitable but flawed hero whose estimation of himself is mightily revised by the end of the novel.

His first flaw is a nearly fatal blind spot in his choice of friends. The second is his unshaken belief in his superiority to all other men. His becomes a soul-purging lesson in humility and brotherly love.

Plot. Forget the plot of the movie. At nearest, Destry Rides Again (1939) is a sequel to Brand’s novel, with James Stewart as a lawman who has given up the use of a gun. The idea may have been sparked by the final sentence of the novel:

But, as Ding Slater said, the whole county should have been present, because it meant the end of the old days and the beginning of a new regime in Wham, for Harrison Destry had put away his Colt.

There’s no evidence that the screenwriters had read any of the preceding pages.

2009 edition

Character. Max Brand’s Destry is a man that other men live in fear of. He is tougher and stronger and faster with a gun, and he knows it. When a train is robbed of $72,000, the crime is wrongly pinned on him, and a jury of his peers, tired of his bullying, happily finds him guilty.

Released after serving six years of a ten-year sentence, Destry determines to take vengeance on each of the 12 men who put him away. Two he kills in self-defense, and the rest live in terror or flee for their lives. Meanwhile, he is unaware that the true villain is a man he believes to be his best friend, Chet Bent.

By the end of the novel, only four jurymen are left, but Destry has learned the error of trusting the murderous Bent. A boy, Willie Thornton, has been witness to Bent’s skullduggery and gets word of it to Destry, who then confronts the villain. The final chapters are a revelation of self-knowledge that throws Destry into an identity crisis. At the end, marriage to a long-time sweetheart marks the start of a whole new life.

Max Brand, Red Hawk’s Trail (1925)

Five Star has been publishing Max Brand westerns in modern editions, three and four of them a year since 1998. This is a new one, the first time in hardcover since it ran as a serial in Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine in 1925. It appeared there with the title “Fire Brain” and was published under one of Frederick Faust’s pen names, George Owen Baxter.

Plot. Sprung from Faust’s fevered imagination, it tells a complex story of a hard-luck loser, John Sherburn, who is befriended by a man who gives him a second chance. The man, Peter Gresham, owns much of a frontier town, Amityville, in Texas. He is widely respected there for his ongoing fight against a gang of robbers led by an Indian chief, Red Hawk.

Not just generous but one could say magnanimous, Gresham takes Sherburn on as a business partner. His job is to keep order in Gresham’s saloon, a popular hangout for a rough crowd of miners and cowboys. To win their respect, Sherburn talks big and pretends to consume large quantities of whiskey, which are in fact weak tea.

A girl in town, Jenny Langhorne, catches his eye, and she makes little secret of her interest in him. An obstacle between them, however, is that Gresham has already laid claim to her. There’s reason to believe he would kill another man, even Sherburn, who gets too friendly with her.

The issue in which the serial began

Another suitor, Oliver Clement, tangles with Sherburn over Jenny, and after some fisticuffs they come to an odd agreement. Clement wants to settle their differences with a gun duel, but Sherburn doesn’t want to kill the young man. So he gets him to agree that the loser of the duel, should he survive, must hunt down Red Hawk and try to kill him.

Sherburn arranges to lose and gets himself inducted into the gang. The gang’s next raid is a stage holdup, involving the dynamiting of a bridge. It’s a suspenseful climax as Sherburn is given the job of lighting the fuse while the suspicious gang leader holds him at gunpoint. When Sherburn returns to town, the separate threads of the plot converge and we learn the identity of Red Hawk.

Max Brand, The Untamed (1919)

Max Brand burst on the scene with this striking novel less than two decades after Wister’s The Virginian and just as Zane Grey was topping the bestseller lists. In those three writers one can trace the evolution of western storytelling from history into myth. Wister’s Wyoming and his cowboy characters were drawn from life, while Grey romanticized the desert Southwest and the heroes and villains he put there. Brand stripped away realism and romance in The Untamed and left pure myth—with even a touch of the supernatural.

Plot. The “untamed” in the novel is a trio of beings, only one of them human, a young man Dan Barry. The other two are a black horse named Satan and a wolf-dog named Black Bart. All three of them are feral creatures, each in his way a little more than half wild. Dan was found wandering footloose in the desert by a cattleman, Joseph Cumberland, and a special friendship has grown between Dan and Cumberland’s daughter, Kate.

In early chapters, Dan makes an enemy of Jim Silent, the leader of a pack of train robbers. When Silent takes Kate hostage, Dan teams up with Texas Calder, a marshal who has been tracking the outlaw.

Pocket Books, 1955

Silent and his gang rob a train, killing two of the guards. Hot on their trail, Texas and Dan catch up with them at a hotel, but Silent shoots Calder, and the marshal dies in the young man’s arms.

The rest of the novel is a fierce complexity of pursuit and counter-pursuit, with more hostage taking and a jailbreak, in which Dan is shot and nearly dies from loss of blood and a bout of fever. A daring rescue reunites Dan and Kate, and he leads a posse to the gang’s hideout. Silent meets his doom in a saloon, where he dies not in a gun duel but by being strangled to death by Dan.

Character. Dan is known as “Whistling Dan” because of his habit of whistling mysterious and melancholy tunes. From the start there is a youthful, trusting innocence about him. While he is a blindingly fast draw and an expert marksman, he only shoots to maim and never kills another man with a gun.

At first meeting, he is so easy-going that folks take him for a tenderfoot. But as he appears and disappears at will and his behavior seems uncanny, he develops a fearsome reputation. When angry, there is a yellow gleam in his eyes. By the novel’s end, some believe he is a werewolf.

Pocket Books, 1977

Romance. Once all obstacles have been surmounted, the novel seems meant to end in marriage between Dan and Kate. She is thoroughly in love with him, but he is deeply wounded when he believes she has betrayed him to the gang. He begins calling her Delilah, after the temptress who double-crossed Samson.

When he is almost fatally shot, she helps him recover, much as western heroines had been doing since Molly, the schoolmarm, played nurse to the Virginian. Fully restored, he takes his leave again to go after Silent, but he refuses to properly kiss her goodbye. He wants to remove the taste of blood from his own lips before he will touch them to hers.

However, once Silent is dead and gone, Brand finds a reason to keep the two unwed. There is still in Dan the call of the wild. Hearing the sound of migrating geese overhead, he gets restless, realizing that he is unready for domestication. He leaves again, taking Satan and Black Bart with him.

In some ways, the novel is an anti-romance, portraying love as foolish and empty of real substance. Silent’s second in command, a man called Haines, falls in a big way for Kate when he first meets her. His affection for her drives some of the plot points, and his continued belief that he can win her heart while she’s the gang’s hostage makes him seem desperate and deluded.

Meanwhile, a rookie member of the gang, Buck Daniels, plots her escape by making a show of his irresistible effect on women. They like to be “manhandled,” he tells Haines. Ordering her about, he gets Kate to pretend to succumb to his charms. Then he allows her to slip away at night, while he is supposed to be guarding her.

Max Brand, South of Rio Grande (1936)

This exhilarating adventure south of the border first saw light as a serial, “Tiger’s Den,” in Western Story Magazine in 1930. The author, John Frederick, was of course one of the many pen names of Max Brand.

Plot. There’s so much to enjoy in this novel, it’s hard to know where to start. Tightly plotted, it tells the story of two men who travel together from a Texas border town into Mexico. One of them, a lawman Joe Warder, is on a suicidal mission to capture a bandit known as El Tigre. The other, a young tenderfoot Dennis MacMore, is looking for his older brother.

Turns out the brother has been profiting from a close relationship with El Tigre. As soon as Denny starts nosing around town, he gets himself into trouble, and Joe is quick to follow. Much of the story takes place in a single night as the two men are pursued by El Tigre’s henchmen.

A heart-stoppingly pretty local girl, Carmelita, then gets into the action. She is being unwillingly courted by Denny’s brother. When Denny finds her, he falls in love with her himself, and by novel’s end, she has joined the two men in a daring escape from town.

This may all sound hopelessly contrived and clichéd, but Brand tells this story masterfully, as if discovering every element of the plot for the first time. What makes it work is a wry sense of humor that wonders at the incredibility of the story even while it’s being told. 

Rio Grande, Texas, 1899

Characters. Joe Warder, the first-person narrator, is something of an anti-hero. He may represent the law, but he’s done time himself. He’s 42 years old and has a busted up face, with no prospects for a life headed anywhere but a dead end – assuming he even gets back to Texas alive.

Denny is the complete opposite. Young and full of energy, he can’t shoot straight, but he is handsome beyond measure. And he has learned to trust the good luck that always seems to attend good looks. Impulsive, and therefore daring, he is undaunted by obstacles that would stop anyone with an ounce of common sense.

The two men make an entertaining combination. Instead of having their differences keep them at odds for comic effect, Brand bonds them with a mutual respect and affection. And the plot whirls them on, sometimes together, sometimes separated, into and out of one tight spot after another.

Max Brand, Best Western Stories, 3

Going from early western fiction to this collection of Max Brand stories was something of a jolt. Emotions run high and wide in them, and the sheer intensity of the storytelling knocks your boots off.

Editor William F. Nolan selected seven stories for this slim volume, published in 1987. They originally appeared over a span of only a dozen years, 1927-1939. Three appeared in Western Story Magazine, and one each in Collier’s, Argosy, Blue Book, and American Magazine. So they range in style from pulp to slick.

Just from this sampling, you can sense Brand’s ability to strike different attitudes with the material and play in different keys. If there’s any consistency, it’s the tendency to toggle back and forth between stereotype and the unexpected in the same story. Or to simply switch keys.

While a story races along, the intent seems to be to get you to let down your guard. Then you are surprised by shifts in the plot and character that you didn’t see coming. It’s hard to tell whether Brand does this carelessly or deliberately.

The collection kicks off with “Reata’s Peril Trek,” which first saw the light of day in Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine in 1934. Like noir fiction, the story takes place in a godless universe, where risking death for a friend is the highest (and maybe only) virtue and cowardice is the deadliest sin.

March 31, 1934

While the early western novel makes an effort to seem realistic, Brand rejects the historical West for an imagined one. The story has a dream logic that makes sense only in the world of its own contrivance. It is a perilous world, where bad men abound and evil lurks everywhere.

In this story, a criminal mastermind, Dickerman, controls a network of henchmen who do his bidding over a vast area of western terrain. Like a plot device from a Batman episode, they communicate with each other using reflected sunlight from high elevations. In an attempt to rub out the hero, Reata, they trigger a rockslide from which he barely escapes. All of this happens in the opening pages.

But Dickerman is not as evil as they get. A more mysterious figure, known as LaFarge, is even more fearsome. He has a plot afoot to get his hands on a fortune by luring its rightful heir to an isolated house and doing away with him. In the climax of the story, Reata and two compatriots make a daring rescue.

While writing what’s already an exciting page-turner, Brand laces it all with imaginative twists. Reata isn’t just a generic hero. He rides a sturdy but ugly horse named Sue and travels with a small dog, who is a fearless tracker. Instead of a six-shooter, Reata carries a pencil-thin leather lariat in his pocket and uses it with lightning speed and accuracy.

And Dickerman isn’t your generic villain. He is a junk collector and lives in a junk-filled barn. Not so predictably, he’s also a cook of no small skill. Meanwhile, there are sudden strokes of realism, as when Reata rides for two days on a nonstop relay of horses provided by Dickerman. Like any normal person after such physical punishment, Reata is near to collapsing from pain and exhaustion.