Max Brand: Seventeen Classic Western Novels

The Untamed, The Night Horseman, The Seventh Man and Fourteen More Tales of the Old West — with a Critical Essay on the Master of the Mythic Western

By: Max Brand

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Over the shoulder of a hill, on a day that is deathly calm, comes a whistling that is neither of heaven nor of earth — and a wolf-dog lifts its head, a black stallion turns, and Whistling Dan Barry rides into American literature. So begins The Untamed, and so begins the strangest career the Western ever produced.

This volume gathers SEVENTEEN classic Western novels by Max Brand — the pen name of Frederick Faust, the most prolific storyteller the English language has ever known. He wrote some thirty million words under twenty masks, created Destry and Dr. Kildare, despised the cowboy stories that made him rich, longed all his life to be a poet, and died at the front of a war he did not have to fight, exactly as one of his own heroes would have.

THE COMPLETE DAN BARRY TRILOGY
• The Untamed — the wild, half-mythic gunman, his stallion, and his dog
• The Night Horseman — the call of the wild geese that no man can resist
• The Seventh Man — the tragic close of the strangest saga in the genre

…and fourteen more novels of the old West, among them Trailin'!, Ronicky Doone, Alcatraz, and Riders of the Silences — pursuit and reversal, the wronged man riding toward his vengeance, the doubled hero and antagonist locked in their fatal recognition, told at the breakneck velocity that made Faust a legend.

THE MYTH UNDER THE SADDLE
At the centre of this edition is an original critical essay — "Myth in a Cheap Suit" — that makes a case no anthology has made before: that Max Brand was never a realist of the West at all, but a mythographer, the third founder of the popular Western beside Zane Grey and James Oliver Curwood. Grey gives you the land. Curwood gives you the wilderness. Faust gives you the gods — Achilles and Pan and the wandering outsider, stripped of their old names and turned loose under the cruel white sun, in spurs. A full life of Faust completes the volume: from the orphaned boy of the San Joaquin, to the poet in the Tuscan villa, to the death by shrapnel that finished his story like one of his own plots.

WHY THIS EDITION
Faust got the West wrong, and being wrong about the West proved a strange kind of immortality: his books are not documents of a vanished frontier but living myth, and living myth does not date. Seventeen complete novels in a single volume, newly typeset for comfortable reading on any device, with a fully linked table of contents — everything the reader of classic Western adventure wants in one place, and the critical apparatus no free download can offer.

For the lover of classic Western fiction, old-West adventure, and the great pulp storytellers; for anyone who came to Brand by way of Destry; and for the reader quiet enough, on a windless day, to catch the whistle still coming over the hill.