Destry Rides Again by Max Brand (Heathen Edition)

Destry Rides Again

Spine #52
Author
Max Brand
Translator
First Edition
August 22, 1930
Heathen Edition
2026
Refreshed
Pages
270
Heathen Genera
Arriving Soon-ish, Yippe-Ki-Yay
Paperback ISBN
978-1-948316-52-1
Hardcover ISBN
978-1-963228-52-6

“Harrison Destry, you have been found guilty by a jury of twelve of your peers, and it is now my duty to pronounce sentence upon you, not for a first offense, in my estimation, but for the culminating act of a life of violence, indolence, and worthlessness!”

Here a clear, strong young voice cried out: “It’s not true! He ain’t any of those things!”

The judge should have ordered the disturbing element ejected from the courtroom, but he merely lifted a placid hand toward Charlotte Dangerfield, who had so far exceeded the proprieties of the courtroom, and continued as follows:

“It is now my duty to lay on you a sentence in accordance with the nature of your crime and of your character. And after duly considering all of these things, I have decided that you must be sentenced to ten years of penal confinement at hard labor, in the honest trust that during that time you may have an opportunity to reflect upon your past and prepare yourself for a different future.”

Max Brand was one of many Frederick Schiller Faust (1892–1944) pseudonyms, a prolific American writer known primarily for his Westerns. First serialized in 1930 as “Twelve Peers” in Western Story Magazine, then published that same year as the standalone novel Destry Rides Again, the book announced Brand at full power: a frontier mythmaker stripping the West to its moral bones. In Harry Destry — half innocent, half avenger — Brand forged a figure who walks straight into the heart of a crooked town and forces it to reckon with the justice it pretends to believe in. Destry’s mission is stark and simple: to settle accounts with the twelve jurors who sent him to prison on a lie. One by one, he means to confront them — not as a madman with a gun, but as a man determined to expose what each of them truly is. And standing at the threshold of that reckoning is Charlotte Dangerfield, the woman whose loyalty, clarity, and quiet courage complicate every step of Destry’s long‑nursed revenge.

“A rapid-fire western thriller, sparing in words, but replete in action.”
The Payson Chronicle

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