Greatest Pulpist

MAX BRAND (199 pp.)--Edited by Darrell C. Richardson--Fantasy ($3).

A dead man was telling tales last week to almost as many readers as any man alive. In the eight years since his death, 28 of his novels have sold at an average rate of 200,000 apiece in hard and soft covers; two of them have sold more than 1,000,000 copies; three others have passed the 500,000 mark. Writers such as Erie Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane have sold more in the paperback market, but in the long run, the dead man might yet beat them all. In his estate he left more than 50 complete novels still to be published.

Who in the world was this phantom--the author of Singing Guns, Destry Rides Again, the Dr. Kildare series? Few of his readers knew him by his proper name. They knew him as 19 other people: Frank Austin, George Owen Baxter, Lee Bolt, Walter C. Butler, George Challis, Peter Dawson, Martin Dexter, Evan Evans, Evin Evan, John Frederick, Frederick Frost, Dennis Lawton, M.B., David Manning, Peter Henry Morland, Hugh Owen, Nicholas Silver, Henry Uriel and--most often--Max Brand.

Faust of California. Under each of these pseudonyms, "a very obscure and hardworking fellow" compiled a separate tower of fascinating babble as massive as the lifetime production of any common word-slinger. In Max Brand, a volume containing a biographical sketch, some testimonial essays and a prodigious index of the man's works, the "tormented genius" of the "greatest" pulp writer of all time is volubly celebrated.

Frederick Shiller Faust was his real name. Born in Seattle in 1892 of a poor family, he had written enough by the time he was ten to acquire "a sense of high destiny." At the University of California he was editor of the humor magazine and, he acknowledged, "the best known of campus writers."

Out of school in 1915, he joined the Canadian army, deserted because his unit wasn't going to France. Back home he joined the U.S. Army, fell ill in camp, and developed a fibrillation (muscle quiver) in his heart. The doctors consigned him, at 25, to a rocking chair for the rest of his life.

Fibrillating with indignation, Fred Faust sat down at a typewriter and began drumming out fiction at a rate unknown since Walter Scott dashed off the Waverley novels. The pulps, expanding rapidly in the early '20s, began to buy him right away.

$70,000 a Year. In 27 years of production, Faust ground out about 30 million words. His annual output was often close to 2,000,000 words. He wrote more than 200 novels and hundreds of short stories. He wrote them in all the fields--detective, romance, sport, aviation, science fiction--but he was at his best in westerns.

The paradox of all this productivity is that Faust hated to write prose. "Junk," he called everything he did. "Gibberish." He really wanted to be a poet. Morning after morning, Faust locked himself in his study and vainly wooed the muse with a quill pen, until he was brain-fagged with failure. In the afternoon he turned to his typewriter and beat it out for dear old bread & butter.

It took plenty of both, and more besides, to satisfy Fred Faust's appetite for life. For years he and his wife and three children lived in a handsome villa in Italy, heavily staffed and mountainously supplied with the good things of life. Wherever Fred went, he bought drinks and food for the house. "I now need to make $70,000 a year," he said in his heyday, "simply to keep my mouth and nose above water."

Somehow, to the bewilderment of his doctors, Faust's heart stood up to the burden he put on it. It held to the end, in 1944, when a German shell fragment pierced his chest while he was serving as a war correspondent for Harper's in the Garigliano sector of the Italian front.

In postmortem, some of the contributors to Max Brand have tried to assess the essence of Faust. They fail because there was no real essence to Faust's writing--unless it was the gooey residue of boiled pulp. There was only a phenomenal flow of unreality, as impressive as an endless herd of buffalo stamping upside down across the sky in a mirage.

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