Drifter's Vengeance – Max Brand, 1973 [1932] ★½

Playing with Western Conventions

Think “western fiction” and many ideas spring to mind.

Not all are flattering. With an emphasis on action, westerns cater to shorter attention spans. Action is emphasized, dialogue spare. Even more than other genres, plots conform to expected formulas. Outcomes are simpler, too: Even revisionist westerns are tough on bad guys.

Max Brand’s Drifter’s Vengeance doesn’t change the formula, but still threw me. For one, it’s not a straight novel but three interlinked novellas. For another, the hero doesn’t carry a gun, resolving his disputes instead with a combination of jujitsu and sunny optimism.

Not a good western, but different.

We begin with a young man, Speedy, who arrives at the rough-and-tumble mining town of Sunday Slough and quickly makes trouble for the heavy characters who run it. First he strikes it rich on their roulette wheel, then easily disarms two of their toughest hombres when they try to dry-gulch him for his winnings, leaving their guns in a store window as public humiliation.

“I like thugs,” Speedy explains. “I like to see the way they jump.”

There is no love interest for Speedy, and killing is kept very much to a minimum. Like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, no motivation is given for why this stranger rides into town to clean it up until much later. Just something to do.

Mostly, Brand seems to enjoy playing against western conventions, to humorous effect:

He could endure the rope that would hang him by the neck until he was dead; he could not endure the laughter with which the world would greet his capture in this fashion by a man who did not even carry a gun.

Max Brand. Most of his titles were westerns, but he also penned stories featuring Dr. Kildare, a physician whose fame lasted through much of the 20th century on radio, television, even comics. Image from https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0062738/.

Max Brand (born Frederick Faust) knew western conventions. He was one of the best-known western writers during the western’s period of greatest popularity, the 1920s and 1930s; after Zane Grey’s heyday but well before Louis L’Amour showed up.

Brand wrote western novels, most notably Destry Rides Again, which became a famous 1939 film starring James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich. His specialty was writing for pulp magazines.

In Brand’s day, western-themed pulps like Cowboy Stories and Ranch Romances catered to national audiences. Robert E. Howard famously created Conan the Barbarian for the fantasy pulp magazine Weird Tales, but what little success Howard did enjoy in his brief life came mostly from writing western pulp stories with a broadly comedic flavor.

I was reminded of those Howard westerns reading Drifter’s Vengeance, a tale told with tongue firmly planted in cheek. It doesn’t hold together as a story, and the characters are never beguiling or near-enough convincing, but you get the sense from reading it that Brand enjoyed himself.

This issue of Western Story Magazine, from March 1932, promotes on its cover "Speedy's Mare," the third and final story that together make up the Speedy saga repackaged in Drifter's Vengeance. Image from http://www.philsp.com/homeville/WFI/t510.htm.

Speedy prefers an old mule to a fast horse, shows genuine compassion for those he bests in hand-to-hand combat, and dresses like a tramp because, at heart, that’s what he is:

“Going nowhere is the best place to go,” said Speedy. “There’s no place I’ve ever where I’d like to live. There’s no place I’d like to drop anchor. But to drift from one spot to another – that’s a good deal better.”

In the style of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, Speedy also carries a guitar, bursting into song while escaping a Mexican dungeon.

Not every screen cowboy in the 1930s carried a guitar; it only seemed like it sometimes. Image from https://www.harmonycentral.com/forums/topic/1505938-what-guitar-would-john-wayne-play/.

A deputy marshal can’t understand why Speedy is so set on cleaning up Sunday Slough, a town with a ten-to-one ratio of crooks to honest men:

“I don’t think that I’ll ever find another of your type.”

“I’m not a type. I’m a new kind of business.”

The irony alone is pretty diverting, for a few dozen pages or so. But it goes on awhile longer than that.

As I said at the top, the book is actually a combination of three tales published in Western Story Magazine over the course of five weeks in February-March, 1932: “Speedy – Deputy,” “Seven-Day Lawman,” and “Speedy’s Mare.” These stories were combined in abridged form into a hard-cover novel, Drifter’s Vengeance, published nearly 40 years after Brand’s death. [He was killed in action in World War II.]

The main problem with Drifter’s Vengeance is a feeling one gets of Brand writing without a net – or an editor. According to one source, Brand wrote his fiction the same way Howard did, in a frenzied rush, and more than with Howard it shows here. The story moves, yes, but in a rambling, repetitive direction. Story points are rehashed as characters go through the motions without much in the way of tension or drive.

A standard western stands or falls on its villains. Here Drifter’s Vengeance comes off particularly slack. The main baddie is a fat guy named Levine who sits in his office a lot and laughs to himself about how stupid everyone else is. He may run Sunday Slough, and makes a bundle, but for some reason fantasizes about a day when he can “clean it like a fish” and make a quick getaway to parts unknown.

James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich star in the best-known film adaptation of a Max Brand story, 1939's Destry Rides Again. Like Speedy, Stewart here plays a wry kind of guy who cleans up a wild town despite his aversion to guns, though the movie plot is much different than the book. Image from https://www.themoviescene.co.uk/reviews/destry-rides-again/destry-rides-again.html.

There is also a crooked sheriff, a one-eyed bully who works as Levine’s muscle, and a bandit chief whom we are told has a rule about not killing people. One of his henchmen obligingly explains to Speedy:

“He says that one killing is worse than stealing a million dollars. It’s the one thing that leaves a trail so rank that a sheriff can follow it. Even a sheriff!”

The henchman is gunned down soon after by the bandit chief himself, so maybe he oversold Speedy there a bit. I’m not sure if Brand was going for more irony there, or forgot the idea, as it is never called back. Drifter’s Vengeance is that kind of novel. Things just sort of happen in it, which is not typical for westerns, either. At least not good ones.

Speedy has friends, too. One is a miner whose claim was jumped by one of Levine’s men, and whom Speedy sets out to avenge, thus justifying the novel’s title. There is also the deputy marshal, a Mexican mother and half-breed son who look after Speedy at his hideout, and a former bad guy who Speedy wins over to the side of good by giving back his prize mare.

A spring holster like this one is worn by one of Speedy's foes, One-eyed Mike Doloroso. But Speedy manages to disarm him before he makes any use of it. Image from https://www.cascity.com/forumhall/index.php?topic=37556.0.

None of this is handled in a trite or pat manner, because Brand is a seasoned writer who knows how to work his story, but surprises are few and developments pedestrian. Speedy is always one step ahead of his foes, right up to the end, which reduces any tension. The most gripping piece of writing involves the fate of an injured horse.

Brand is best working along the margins of the story, with dry humor and observations on Western life:

It is almost the only word that cannot be used in the West. You may curse a man in ancestral terms and still remain within the terms of familiar conversation. You may, indeed, call him all sorts of a liar in the most colorful vocabulary. But never, if you are wise, use the verb. Never tell a man that he lies.

Or this exchange, when Speedy is warned going after a claim-jumper unarmed may not be the swiftest notion to act upon:

“I don’t carry a gun; everybody knows it; so guns aren’t likely to be used on me,” said Speedy.

“Don’t be so sure of that,” said Jedbury. “Neither does a wild cat or a grizzly pack a gun, but gents will go shooting for them!”

So you are getting some amusement value, even if each section doesn’t build into much of anything so much as end. Like a frontier James Bond, Speedy sets up his opponents by falling into their clutches and letting them jaw themselves hoarse how they’ll torture him to death – without ever quite getting around to it.

Another of Max Brand's running Western characters, the honorable loner Silvertip. According to a 1981 New York Times article, Brand wrote the equivalent of 215 full-length Western novels, often in serial form, as well as more than 40 non-Western novels. Image from www.pininterest.com.

In reading this novel, I tried to imagine myself one of its original audience, back when it was one of a number of stories crammed like pastrami into a thick pulp magazine. For those readers, I think, one story didn’t need to carry the whole load, just offer diversion.

Alas, what worked in a magazine offering other western tales doesn’t hold up as well in a novel. The slightness of the concept, and of the characters, become a weight that grows as, instead of a story about a haunted mine shaft or Colonel Abercrombie’s lost command, we move on to stories two and three and more of the same.

You do get Brand’s seasoned prose, and some offbeat sparks. Having a hero in a western boast about his gunmanship: “I can hit the side of a barn when it’s not too far away” is a new one on me which I enjoyed. Brand’s goofing on western tropes is refreshing for a while, but a novel needs something more to keep you reading. Unless it’s an out-and-out comedy like The Paleface or Blazing Saddles, and this ain’t those.