"American Gunfight" can be a maddening read.
The actual gunfight at Blair Mansion took only a few seconds, and the two would-be assassins nearly won through.
While the police were shooting Colt revolvers in the old "Duelist" extended one-hand single action target shooting method, the two attackers, not knowing anything about guns, instinctively used both hands and nearly won the fight.
What's so maddening about the book is that while the fight took seconds, the book takes LOOONNGGG side trips into the politics and culture of Puerto Rico. After a while you just want to scream "GET ON WITH IT".
This is Hunter's only book that was co-written with another author, to the detriment of the book.
I agree with your evaluation - it was a tough read due to the jumping back and forth. It'd be great if someone copied and pasted just the gunfight all into one piece.
There is an unofficial Stephen Hunter fan site here:
The Unofficial Stephen Hunter Website Unfortunately it doesn't look like it's been updated for several years. It does list most of his books in order here:
Books by Stephen Hunter The newest ones not listed are
I Sniper,
Dead Zero,
Soft Target and
The Third Bullet. According to Amazon his newest book is titled
She, Sniper and is due to come out May 2014. From reading a small excerpt it appears to be about a female sniper in Stalingrad during WWII, and Bob Lee Swagger's efforts to find out about her.
Hunter Books
It's probably best to read the books in the order that they were written, rather than trying to read them in "chronological" order or at random.
Point of Impact is the first Bob Lee novel - his earlier works are only tangentially related to the Swagger world, if at all.
I first learned of Hunter and his work when I read an interview with him in American Handgunner (reprinted here:
The Unofficial Stephen Hunter Website). In the magazine they talked a little bit more about
Pale Horse Coming, and I just had to read it. That got me hooked, and I've read all the rest of his books except
Target, which is a book adaptation of a movie. I finished his latest book
The Third Bullet a few weeks ago - not bad. His previous book
Soft Target was not worth reading - skip it.
Pale Horse Coming was a hoot, with the last third containing thinly veiled characters based on real life gun writers and pistoleros. Totally implausible, but real fun to read.
Elmer Kaye (Elmer Keith)
Jack O'Brian (Jack O'Connor)
Ed McGriffin (Ed McGivern)
Audie Ryan (Audie Murphy)
Bill Jennings (Bill Jordan)
Charlie Hatchison (Charles Askins)
Hunter has a great talent at describing guns and shooting, with not just technical descriptions but is able to evoke the smell of burning powder, the greasy feel of lead bullets, the thump of recoil and slap of muzzle blast - the viscera of the experience.
His primary characters have been Bob Lee Swagger and his father Earl, but I love the way he interweaves characters from his earlier books - for instance a Russian mentioned in several books, and the character Frenchy Short.
Havana has several characters like that, including one from his first book
Master Sniper. However Earl didn't live long enough to have a lot of adventures so that well is pretty much dry, and Bob Lee is getting old. In the book
Dead Zero Hunter has introduced a new character Ray Cruz whom he can continue with, thanks to a
deus ex machina.
My personal favorite is
Hot Springs, and I wish he'd go back to explore a character from that book - Charles Swagger, Earl's father and Bob Lee's grandfather. How did Charles actually come to be mortally wounded in that Hot Springs whorehouse? Did he really drive Earl's brother to suicide? Was he really as bad as Earl thought he was, a hypocrite quoting the Bible on one hand and consorting with black boy prostitutes on the other? But what do we really know about him? Only what small amount Earl described in bitter memory that may be tainted. I think it'd be extremely interesting to read stuff set in the Roaring '20s, Depression '30s and early '40s.
Regardless, I'd like for Hunter to flesh out this part of the Swagger clan, and read his take on an early 20th century Bible thumping, head thumping, fire and brimstone Arkansas lawman.
