Wed 4 Dec 2013
Archived Western Review: BRIAN WYNNE – The Night It Rained Bullets.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western Fiction[11] Comments
BRIAN WYNNE – The Night It Rained Bullets. Ace Double M-128, paperback original, 1965 (packaged back-to-back with Nemesis of Circle A, by Reese Sullivan).
The author is, of course, better known as Brian Garfield. (Wynne is his middle name.) I didn’t do a lot of research on Mr. Garfield – what I’m about to pass on to you is only what Ace told his readers inside the front cover. In 1965 he was only 26, for example, and he was already the author of 10 other western novels for Ace, and of course who knows how many others from other publishers?
And many (if not most) of the others from Ace were, like this one, short but intense tales of Jeremy Six, long-time marshal of Spanish Flat, Arizona, confirmed by a quick excursion to Google, without which we can obviously no longer live as a successful civilization. Of the westerns that Garfield did for Ace, eight of them were about Jeremy Six.
Even more, when Garfield stopped writing them, they were evidently so popular that Ace hired a ringer to write a ninth one, called Gunslick Territory, in 1973. They even went so far as to use the Brian Wynne byline until Brian Garfield said nothing doing, and that was the end of that. (I am paraphrasing Mr. Garfield’s email to me in April 2006. The actual author of Gunslick Territory was Dudley Dean [Owen] McGaughey.)
Here, from page 18, is a long quote that will tell you something about Mr. Six:
Not only do Lime and his men come to town, but they kidnap Jeremy’s lady friend Clarissa, who is the owner of a saloon on the wrong side of town, during the worst blizzard Spanish Flat has ever seen. This is not all. There is more. A gambler and a notorious gunman is in town, as well as many other drifters and ne’er-do-well’s, along with the naive young (and hot-headed) owner of a local mine, who resists (and resents) being watched over by his sister, and a confrontation between some or all of these elements is pretty much a foregone conclusion.
This was written when television westerns like Gunsmoke had become more and more popular, and the B-western heroes had all but hung up their spurs. (Now, I don’t imagine anyone has ever used that metaphor before, have they?)
And there’s little that happens here that could not also have happened in Matt Dillon’s Dodge City. The scope is narrow, and yet, when all of the various small crises are over, it is not with any immediate sense of closure. The ending is off-beat and subdued, and if you expect the book to fade out with a clinch and a kiss, you’re reading the wrong author, I suspect, and almost definitely the wrong book.
And once you realize that, ah, yes, that’s when the impact finally hits. It’s like a delayed reaction, and a heftier punch is seldom packed. At only 130 pages, the book is short, but it’s as long as it needs to be, and if you’re like me, you’ll find many scenes still playing their way through your head several days later.
I don’t know the technical name for this effect. Maybe it’s just called heavy duty staying power.
July 2004 (slightly revised & updated).
December 4th, 2013 at 7:17 pm
I’ve looked online for a list of the Jeremy Six novels and so far haven’t been able to find one. I must have had such a list when I wrote this review, but if I did, I can’t locate that either.
Given some time, I’m sure I could reconstruct one, but time is something I don’t have a lot of right now. Any help would be appreciated!
December 4th, 2013 at 7:36 pm
Please see:
http://books.google.com/books?id=c91Vrl20Y4sC&pg=PA309&lpg=PA309&dq=%22Jeremy+Six%22&source=bl&ots=LUzh57-W42&sig=S75Yyfy_a3KndYA11Vx51JygHp4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=GMqfUrOkDsi92wWV6YH4Dw&ved=0CFkQ6AEwEA#v=onepage&q=%22Jeremy%20Six%22&f=false
December 4th, 2013 at 8:19 pm
That was fast. Thanks, Mike!
And it looks as though I was in error when I said there were eight Jeremy Six novels and one ringer. This source says there were nine, plus the one done by Dudley Dean.
December 4th, 2013 at 8:28 pm
Brian Garfield:
Westerns – a research and review (fun) tool. Brilliantly observed. Hundreds of listings, most of which make sense, although at least once, The Last of the Mohicans (1936) Randolph Scott version, he reviews as having been filmed in a poor color process. As it is and was in black-and-white assume he mistakenly caught a colorized version. Otherwise, Thumbs Up.
Second, a seldom read novel of Teddy Roosevelt’s Wyoming adventures called Manifest Destiny. Good reading.
December 4th, 2013 at 8:32 pm
Steve, nice coverage of my favorite vintage paperback western series. 8 novels about Jeremy Six, written by Brian Garfield, is the correct number, strictly speaking. RANGE JUSTICE, the Avalon hardcover title, reprinted by Ace in pb as JUSTICE AT SPANISH FLAT (I think the pb cover said it was an abridged version, don’t have a copy at hand to check), had the same setting of Spanish Flat, and several characters also appear later in the Six novels, but Six himself isn’t in the book and isn’t mentioned; the story apparently was set a few years before the Six series. And I wonder how many western fans bypassed Mr. Garfield’s excellent, unrelated 1971 Dell western GUN DOWN because they confused it with the 1969 Six novel, GUNDOWN.
December 4th, 2013 at 8:42 pm
Manifest Destiny correction: Dakota, not Wyoming. Wyoming is the setting of Wister’s Virginian, dedicated to TR.
December 5th, 2013 at 4:34 pm
Garfield was the rare writer (Bill Pronzini and Loren D. Estleman are others) equally proficient in multiple genres.
His westerns are as lean and tough as his suspense novels, and his bestselling spy novels as clever as his bestselling western novels (he also did a terrific little book on British soldier and fraud Richard Meinhertzhagen). MANIFEST DESTINY was great (there is an earlier one in a similar vein that was made into a mini series with Sam Elliot just as good), but then so was the WWII spy novel THE PALADIN and his spy comedy HOPSCOTCH.
This sounds intriguing, and I didn’t know about these, though I knew the Wynne part of his name. What a remarkably intelligent and talented writer Brian Garfield was.
December 5th, 2013 at 6:40 pm
Brian Garfield also wrote one of the very best reference books on western movies. WESTERN FILMS does not cover the B western but does review and comment on over 2,000 A westerns. Despite loving the movies, he is very critical and points out the faults on many of the films.
As I see the film, I’ve been rating the movie and putting the dates seen and my own comments in his book. I’ve been doing this for 30 years now and have seen most of the 2,000 westerns. An excellent reference.
December 5th, 2013 at 6:55 pm
Walker
One of my favorites, and like you for years I marked them off as I saw them. Great critical reference, and painfully honest. I even agree with Garfield that the true Hollywood western died with Gary Cooper no matter how good the later ones were.
December 13th, 2013 at 10:30 am
I read the John Lord bio of Meinhertzhagen when I was a teenager. Garfield’s take on him was an eye-opener to say the least!
January 10th, 2019 at 10:43 am
[…] intentions. I know him for his westerns, which are always quite good. At least one, The Night it Rained Bullets, is great. I expect to find more that are as I explore deeper into his catalog. Here’s where […]