Max Brand - The Untamed
Max Brand
eBook
(, July 14, 2015)
The Untamed...... He started up from his chair, white faced, his hands high above his head, staring at the apparition of Whistling Dan, who stood with two revolvers covering the posse. Every man was on his feet instantly, with arms straining stiffly up. The muzzles of revolvers are like the eyes of some portraits. No matter from what angle you look at them, they seem directed straight at you. And every cowpuncher in the room was sure that he was the main object of Dan's aim. ...Max Brand's first western introduced "Whistling Dan Barry," an influential character who not only appeared in subsequent novels by Brand but became one of the archetypes for the western genre so successful in popular reading, film and television for decades. Roaming the west with his half-wild stallion "Satan" and the wolf dog "Black Bart," Dan's eyes blazed yellow at the prospect of a fight or the approach of danger, his guns ever at the ready. Max Brand brought a more literary and serious approach to the western than did many others who worked in the genre, and while The Untamed includes all those elements a reader expects in a western--gunplay, posses, horseback chases--in the characteristic action-packed style of Brand's many stories, it is also a well-plotted and thoughtful novel. While the modern reader will almost certainly recognize certain cliches of the western genre, it is worth noting that many of them became cliches long after Max Brand introduced them, as a result of countless others imitating Brand's originals.