“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

“The hero is no saint, and not averse to painting a town red.” —The Lithgow Mercury

“Ranks with Zane Grey’s Nevada and Jack Shafer’s Shane as one of the great pieces of Western fiction.” —John A. Dinan, The Pulp Western

“[Brand] is at his best when he . . . writes about humans on a human level. He does this in Destry Rides Again . . . his best book, and a good one.” —Cynthia S. Hamilton, Western and Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction in America

“An out-of-the-way cowboy story.” —The Border Chronicle

“One of the most thrilling series of gun fights between the covers of a book.” —Glencoe News

“A capital story so filled with thrills that one cannot lay it aside until the final word is reached.” —Margaret E. Lawrence, The Evening Times-Globe

“Here is a yarn containing the thrills of half a dozen mystery stories, and a Wild West novel rolled into one . . . No one can write this kind of story better than Max Brand, and this is the best book Mr. Brand has written.” —The Globe

“A really excellent story of the Wild West.” —The Leicester Mail

“Thrill to the thundering hoof beats of this intensely interesting novel.” —The World’s News

“In [Brand’s] hands, on a good day, the American Myth can be seen in the making, as king-sized heroes move in pursuit of queen-sized heroines, on a landscape of mythological dimensions.” —Robert Easton, Max Brand, The Big Westerner