BRAND, Max

   Best-known pseudonym of US writer Frederick (Schiller) Faust (1892-1944), who from before 1920 used many names and produced innumerable tales and filmscripts in many genres, including the Western classic Destry Rides Again (1930); it was first filmed in 1932, and became famous through the 1939 version, with James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich. The psychic contortions that attend the discovery of a Missing Link in Africa (APES AND CAVEMEN) impart a lurid glow to "That Receding Brow" (1919 All-Story Magazine), which may be his first tale of genre interest. MB began publishing books in volume form with The Untamed (1919), the first volume of the Dan Barry sequence of Westerns, whose protagonist, a "Pan of the desert" and werewolf, enjoys a strangely intimate rapport with wild animals; the series continued with The Night Horseman (1920), The Seventh Man (1921) and Dan Barry's Daughter (1923). The Garden of Eden (1922) is a LOST-WORLD tale, and The Smoking Land (1937 Argosy as by George Challis; 1980) stereotypically discloses another lost world, in the Arctic, complete with futuristic aircraft and rumbustious action. Throughout MB's work, illuminating the most pulp-like plots, can be discerned the voice of a slyly civilized writer.

   JC

   About the author: Max Brand: Western Giant (anth 1986) ed William F. NOLAN.