Destry Rides Again: Max Brand’s Most Famous Outlaw

Harrison Destry returns from six years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, and the whole town that framed him expects the gunfighter they remember — fast, furious, out for blood. Instead he arrives calm, almost gentle, and lets his enemies destroy their own nerves waiting for a revenge that never quite comes the way anyone expects, including the reader.

It’s the trick that made Frederick Faust — writing, as always, under the pen name Max Brand — one of the most reliably surprising writers the pulp Western ever produced: a genre built on fast draws and clear moral lines, subverted by a hero whose real weapon is patience and psychological pressure rather than a faster hand.

Faust wrote it in roughly a week, one of hundreds of novels he produced at a pace that made him, by some counts, the most prolific American writer of the twentieth century, gathered here alongside sixteen more of his best.

Read Max Brand: Seventeen Classic Western Novels →