Max Brand, King of the Spaghetti Westerns

Our pal James Reasoner, a fine writer of westerns and crime fiction, has a nice blog named Rough Edges. In a recent post, he reviews an indie film, Shoot First and Pray You Live. This is apparently based on a Frederick Faust/Max Brand novel serialized in 1919 in Argosy, Luck, which later was published in book form as Riders of the Silences. One of the comments to James' post notes that Brand gets no credit for the story -- which really isn't surprising, as the novel's 1919 publication date puts it in the public domain.

James notes that the film is very faithful to Brand's novel, even though the title sounds like it came from a spaghetti western, and "it made me realize for the first time that what Faust was doing, decades before the genre was even invented, was writing the literary equivalent of Spaghetti Westerns."

Makes sense. I've said somewhere or to someone before that Brand's westerns are true horse operas -- bigger than life, played on a large stage. And Faust loved that kind of storytelling, as his biographies point out his love of Shakespeare and The Faerie Queene. He lived in the home of the spaghetti western for years in a villa -- it really makes sense that perhaps with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Sergio Leone was simply putting on film the sort of story that Faust had been hammering out for popular consumption decades earlier.

Lewis B. Patten: Massacre at San Pablo

As I began reading this novel, I thought, “Wow, this has all the makings of a great spaghetti Western.” Remarkably, this Patten novel wasn’t written in the violent-western boom following the popularity of Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name films: it was first published in 1957 by Fawcett Publications as Gold Medal # 706. (Now it’s newly available as a Large Print book from Center Point Publishing.)
As you read the opening paragraphs, can’t you just see the cinematography Sergio Leone would apply to a film version?
“At the end of the day, the desert lay flat and shimmering behind them and they began the long climb toward the high-piled, rocky mountains ahead.
“The brilliant hues of the setting sun dyed the thin clouds gold and rose, yet of all the passengers in the stagecoach, only one noticed the radiant beauty in the sky.”
In Massacre at San Pablo, Patten tells the story of Mark Atkins, first seen as a twelve-year-old traveling west with his parents. He’s orphaned when Apaches attack the stage on which the family is traveling; and he’s taken in by Jaime and Rosa Maria Ortega, who happen across the attack site as they head home from taking on their nine-year-old nephew, Leon, whose mother had died just a month ago.
So the Ortegas raise both boys as their own in the village of San Pablo. But their home also is victimized by seasonal Apache attacks, prompting the Mexican government to establish a bounty for Indian scalps.
After brutal scalpers determine the government agents can’t tell the difference between Indian and Mexican scalps, they raid San Pablo. During the attack, Jaime and Rosa Maria are killed. And Mark Atkins, orphaned again, leaves the village to track down and kill the raiders.
Patten does a great job showing Mark as he grows up and learns to handle a gun, learns ranch work, encounters some of the band he seeks, finds love, and learns to live without vengeance. Once Mark finds love, Patten’s novel veers off the track of the typical spaghetti Western, but not everything is sweetness and light: the woman to whom Mark loses his heart has already given her word to marry a man Mark is hunting -- a man named Healy, the leader of the San Pablo raiders.
At that point, Mark adjusts his moral compass as he learns about justice, injustice, and denied desires. He matures, but his struggles don’t fade away -- they intensify as he learns Healy is a rustler, and Healy’s wife discovers her husband is just the brute Mark had warned her about.
Patten’s pacing, his characterizations, his way with settings and descriptions of ranch work are excellent. He doesn’t waste a word, and the storytelling is just dandy from start to finish.
Massacre at San Pablo is available from Amazon.