Blood on the Moon (Classic Film Collection)

When hired killer Jim Garry accepts a job in Massacre Basin that includes blackmail, robbing women, and dry gulching, he decides to swap sides to save a family in danger and must fight against his own kind. Reprint. Movie Tie-In.

Originally published as Gunman’s Chance in 1941, this gripping western puts an honorable man square in the gun sights of someone he used to call a friend. When gun-for-hire Jim Garry takes a job with Tate Riling, providing a little muscle for a dispute between homesteaders and a cattle rancher, it doesn’t occur to him that his old friend might be misrepresenting the situation. And when it turns out Tate is planning an elaborate swindle to take some land from its rightful owner, Jim sides with the intended victim, putting his own life at risk. Jim Garry is a fairly standard genre character, the gunman who knows where to draw the moral line, but with a twist: he does most of his fighting with his brain, not his gun. The book is structured like a caper novel, with the hero, Garry, working his own scam so that the villain will be brought down by his own arrogance and greed. The book was made into one of the first “noir westerns” in 1948, with Robert Mitchum as Garry; and the novel, back in print after a long absence, should be considered required reading for genre fans. --David Pitt