The Gold Trail: A Western Trio

Max Brand

Thorndike Press, 2000 - Fiction - 360 pages

In the short novel that opens this new collection by Max Brand, Without a Penny in the World, Steve Borrow, whose industrious efforts have made Jess Fanning's ranch prosperous, finds Fanning outraged when he makes a sale above the fair market price, to a drunken buyer. Phil, the Fiddler is a family ranch drama about a fatal rift in the Rival family, between cousins Joshua and Phil, over the terms of a will. The title story continues the saga of Reata, one of Max Brand's most popular characters. Reata is pursued by the law for his part in a bank robbery while the three criminals with the loot plan to flee to Mexico.

Contents

• Without a Penny in the World: 7
• Phil the Fiddler: 113
• A Reata Story: 221

About the author

Max Brand is the best-known pen name of Frederick Faust, who was born in Seattle, Washington in 1882, and orphaned early. Faust grew up in the rural San Joaquin Valley of California. At the University of California, Berkeley, he became a student rebel and a one-man literary movement, contributing to campus publications. He was denied his degree because of his unconventional conduct. He then traveled, ending up in New York City where he received simultaneous recognition as a serious poet and successful popular-prose writer. Later, he traveled further, making his home in New York, then in Florence, Italy, and finally Los Angeles. He much preferred Italy, where he lived from 1926 to 1938, and where much of his writing was done. Faust, who wrote under more than a dozen pseudonyms, was a prolific writer, not only of westerns, but also of hundreds of other novels and books, including the popular Dr. Kildare series. Faust's first novel The Untamed (1918) was a success and introduced a semimythical character, Whistlin' Dan Barry, who travels the West following the wild geese, accompanied by a black wolf. His characters, who often have a mythic quality, are memorable, and his books are always entertaining. Faust was also a screenwriter for several Hollywood studios, including MGM, Warner Brothers, and Columbia. Once the United States entered the Second World War, Faust abandoned his lucrative writing career and his work as a screenwriter to serve as a war correspondent with the infantry in Italy, despite his fifty-one years and a bad heart. Faust died in 1944, killed during a night attack on a hilltop village held by the German army. Even after his death, new books based on magazine serials, unpublished manuscripts, or restored versions continue to appear so that he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Gold Trail: A Western Trio; Thorndike Press Large Print Western Series; Thorndike Western I; Western Series
• Author: Max Brand
• Edition: reprint, large print
• Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2000
• ISBN: 0786215879, 9780786215874
• Length: 360 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Westerns