Thu 14 Jan 2010
A Review by David L. Vineyard: MAX BRAND – Big Game.
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Reviews[4] Comments
MAX BRAND – Big Game. Warner Paperback Library, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1973. First published in Argosy as a six-part serial, beginning 9 May 1936.
It’s hard to think of Max Brand, Frederick Schiller Faust, in terms of anything but superlatives and broken records.
One of the great pulp writers, he went on to live in an Italian villa where he hosted guests like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, then became the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood penning, among others, Errol Flynn’s last great swashbuckler, The Adventures of Don Juan. He died in World War II Italy as a war correspondent for Harpers Magazine during the battle of Santa Maria Infante.
Though he is best known for his westerns, Max Brand penned a little of everything under a dizzying array of names, from science fiction, to historical novels, to the Dr. Kildare series, to spy stories, to hard boiled crime tales.
Big Game falls in the latter category and involves Terry Radway, a one time big game hunter still bearing the scars of a too close encounter with a tiger, and down on his luck. Looking for adventure closer to home, Radway finds it right under his nose when he spies the pretty girl in a room across the street preparing to kill herself.
At first Radway only watches in a somewhat detached manner, but pretty soon he can’t help himself and intervenes. Seems the girl, Nell, is in trouble with a Hollywood big shot named Hugo Bigi. Radway decides to take matters in is own hand and pays a visit to Bigi, and being who he is puts the game to the big shot in the only way he knows how:
But things aren’t that simple, and soon Radway also finds himself involved with civic minded reform committee lawyer John Battersby Wilson, who has begun a private crusade to shut down the rackets in New York.
After saving Wilson from a car full of killers, Radway is enlisted in that crusade — which leads to the doorstep of banker Chandler Orme Gregor, and back to Bigi who ends up ironically enlisted in Radway’s crusade to smash the men behind the crime ring.
With the help of a couple of hoods originally hired to follow him, and the beautiful Lady Nell, who isn’t all she seemed, Radway tackles the drug ring and begins to root out the men behind the rackets, including the biggest of them all, the big game, the secret face behind the rackets controlling the city.
The prose is tough and lean in the appropriate manner:
There is nothing terribly original here. It’s a fairly standard tough story in the pulp vein, well enough written and competently plotted by one of the masters of the form.
It’s a tightly written book, slick and fast moving, the plot a fairly familiar one often used in that era (both in The Secret Six (MGM, 1931) and Leslie Charteris’s The Saint in New York, and Raoul Whitfield used the big game hunter angle in Killer’s Carnival written as Temple Field), but it’s well handled here, and it touches on the classical references common to Brand’s work (here Radway playing at Theseus negotiating a labyrinth of lies).
Still, it’s prime Brand and well worth the time it takes to read. It may lack that word savagery that marks the best of Black Mask or Dime Detective, but it’s fast paced, fun, and a reminder of that special quality that made Max Brand one of the most successful writers of all time.
Brand did somewhat better with The Night Flower (Macauley, 1936, as Walter C. Butler), another of his tough crime novels, but Big Game is well worth looking for. Even if you find you’re more than a few steps ahead of the hero and the writer in terms of the plot, it moves at an action-packed pace, and Brand keeps the big revelation hidden right down to the wire; in the true pulp tradition you can’t ask for much more than that.
January 15th, 2010 at 6:13 am
I’ve always had a problem with Max Brand. Sometimes I find his pulp work to be of high quality, then I come across mediocre or even poor quality fiction. He wrote so very much and everything was done very fast, leading to such a large span of quality.
I’ve known many pulp collectors who love his work and read it without any problems at all. I’m talking about major collectors like Darrell Richardson, Harry Noble, Digges La Touche, Ed Hulse, and others. I still read Max Brand. I just never know what to expect about the quality of the fiction.
January 15th, 2010 at 5:54 pm
While I can read Max Brand’s work all day long, within reason, I agree about the general inconsistency in his fiction — sometimes within the very same book!
(It occurs to me that even if I could read his books all day long, it would take me several years to read all of them. I think he could type faster than I can read.)
Mostly I’ve read his westerns, and believe it or not, a new one just arrived in the mail today from Leisure Books.
And as another coincidence, one of the four or five books I’m working my way through right now is SPY MEETS SPY, which Brand wrote as by Frederick Frost.
I think if you’ve read enough Max Brand you can identify his style, no matter what genre or what name he happens to be working under. While not quite “purple prose,” there is a distinctive flair or flourish to his writing that’s pretty much unmistakable, along with a strong dose of unabashed heroic romanticism.
Whether that appeals to the individual reader or not is, of course, purely a matter of taste, but as noted above, his books are still being published today.
— Steve
January 16th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
Steve:
In the review of THE NIGHT FLOWER by Walter C. Butler, there is a typo in the last paragraph, which incorrectly calls him Walter C. Brown
January 16th, 2010 at 10:07 pm
It’s fixed now, Victor. Thanks!