Wed 3 Jun 2015
A Western Fiction Review by Dan Stumpf: PAUL DURST – Die, Damn You!
Posted by Steve under Authors , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Reviews , Western Fiction[5] Comments
PAUL DURST – Die, Damn You! Lion #75, paperback original, 1952.
I just can’t resist a book with a title like Die, Damn You!, so I’d have bought this in any event, but to my pleasant surprise. it proved to be well worth reading, a noirish, hard-boiled Western, with a moody, idiosyncratic Loner spurred on by vengeance, running into gangsters, goons, femmes fatales, false faces, double-crosses, some very stylish violence (At one point a man sets fire to his own bed to get a rattlesnake off his chest! and a complex storyline the results in lines like:
The author even adds a Mask of Dimitrios touch by keeping the bad guy central to the plot but off-stage till the very end. I have no idea who author Paul Durst is — or was — but he writes a lightly enjoyable, fast-moving mystery/western that’s easy to take.
Some Bibliographic Notes [Steve]: One online bookseller says: “Paul Durst is the author of thirty-one books under his own name and various pseudonyms.”
From Crime Fiction IV, the following:
DURST, PAUL (1921-1990); see pseudonyms Peter Bannon & John Chelton.
Backlash (Cassell, 1967, hc) [Michael Carmichael; U.S.]
Badge of Infamy (Cassell, 1968, hc) [Michael Carmichael; Israel]
Die, Damn You! (Lion, 1952, pb) [Texas; Past] Mills, 1955.
The Florentine Table (Scribner, 1980, hc) [London]
Paradiso County (Hale, 1986, hc)
BANNON, PETER; pseudonym of Paul Durst, (1921-1990)
If I Should Die (Jenkins, 1958, hc)
They Want Me Dead (Jenkins, 1958, hc) [Missouri]
Whisper Murder Softly (Jenkins, 1963, hc) [Missouri]
CHELTON, JOHN; pseudonym of Paul Durst, (1921-1990)
My Deadly Angel (Gold Medal #524, 1955, pb) [Florida]
From bookfinder.com, the following appear to be westerns under his own name:
Ambush at North Platte (John Long, 1957)
Bloody River (Lion, 1953)
Dead Man’s Range (Robert Hale, 2009; previous printing?)
Gun Doctor (Avalon, 1959)
Johnny Nation (Mills & Boon Diamond W Western, 1960)
Kansas Guns (Avalon, 1958)
Kid from Canadian [??] (World’s Work, 1956)
Prairie Reckoning (Gold Medal #619, 1956)
Plus: A Roomful of Shadows, Dobson, 1975. “… his childhood autobiography – from four to twelve – in the American Middle West during the 1920s and ’30s. This era comes alive through the eyes of a small boy who is ‘half-orphan’, introspective, and full of wonder at the unpredictability of life.”
June 3rd, 2015 at 2:21 pm
According to his entry in Contemporary Authors Online he also wrote under the pseudonyms Jeff Cochran (Guns of Circle 8, Avon, 1954) and John Shane (Along the Yermo Rim, Mills & Boon, 1955, Sundown in Sundance, Mills & Boon, 1956, Six-Gun Thursday, Mills & Boon, 1956, and Gunsmoke Dawn, Mills & Boon, 1957).
He also did a little film work, and it lists his birth date as April 23, 1921 in Archibald, PA, and death date as January 1986 in England.
Ben
June 3rd, 2015 at 2:29 pm
Sounds like a fun one to read. The hard boiled western is a sub genre not often written about. Certainly many writers seemed to specialize in it, including Luke Short (Frank Glidden) whose westerns often reached the screen as nourish outings.
I’m curious how long you have to lie still in a burning bed before the snake slithers away.
June 3rd, 2015 at 2:34 pm
Comment #1: Thanks, Ben. I no longer have access to CA through my local library, so I found the new pen name and list of additional titles very welcome. As for the discrepancy in the year of his death, that’s something I’ll send an email to Al Hubin about.
I don’t think I’ll hunt down his westerns published in the UK, but there are some mystery titles worth looking into that I hadn’t known about before.
June 4th, 2015 at 3:38 pm
Steve, Dead Man’s Range was originally published by Robert Hale in 1958 (the 2009 edition is a re-issue) – it may be a re-titlng of his book Kansas Guns. I note that the title character of his book Gun Doctor is called Pete Bannon!
April 15th, 2019 at 2:42 am
I hope this gets to Steve. I am Paul Durst’s daughter, if you are interested in any of his mystery books, he actually wrote a non-fiction about the Guy Fawkes affair, entitled “Intended Treason”; under Peter Bannon; he approached it as a detective story. He researched all the facts and was even able to find from archives such things as the time of the tide when Guy Fawkes escaped by rowboat along the River Thames after he knew the plot was discovered to blow up the king at the opening of parliament.
Every child in England knows something of the story of Guy Fawkes from the burning of the Guy on November 4th bonfires, even if it just means an evening of fireworks and a bonfire! It actually is a very good read.
He even thought that the documents in the Tower of London – at least some of them after examination – are forgeries.
I found these comments when I was researching
the availability of books my father had written so that I can try to buy them since I do not have many of them. His second wife, my stepmother had a few but not many of them and since she died recently I now know which titles I should try to buy. My father actually was buried on the day the Challenger blew up in 1986 in January, I had come from the States to his funeral.