MAX BRAND'S BEST WESTERN STORIES

Six top-drawer actioners from Frederick Faust/Max Brand, the King of the Pulp Westerns--whose output, written between 1917 and his death as a war correspondent on the Italian front in 1944, equalled 215 full-length novels. The standouts? ""Wine on the Desert"" is an often-anthologized shortie about a wise badman who gets his just desserts on the desert after ruining a farmer's grape crop--a canteen full of poisoned wine that makes him blind. ""Virginia Creeper"" is a superbly written yarn about a young man now past college age and still trying to break away from his bedridden father's farm. ""Macdonald's Dream"" is the finest of all--a classically influenced tale in which a mystically unbeatable gunman (much like Achilles) comes into a town much like Hades, filled with all the people he's ever killed, for his last showdown. And ""Dust Across the Range,"" a tart, moody novella, is about a young chief of a Roosevelt CCC camp trying to re-educate the ranchers and save the range from turning to dust. With a solid biographical introduction by editor Nolan--a worthy gathering of grand oldies that are short on clichÉs (no rustlers or bandits), long on crisp details and mythic intensity.