Faust's earlier westerns about outlaws and adventurers on the edge of the law are the main precedents for Singing Guns. To a certain degree, Faust created his own conventions for the genre. The outline of the Max Brand hero was established in archetypal form in The Untamed, and except for the addition of guile and a conscience, the pattern is repeated with variations for the next fifteen or twenty years. Indeed, Silvertip, roaming the West in 1933, is remarkably similar in important ways to Dan Barry in 1919. Some variations on the pattern include heroes who use ropes instead of guns, like Reata, or kung fu, like Speedy the tramp, or simply rely on their bare fists, like Harry Gloster in Dan Barry's Daughter (1924). (The major exception is a character like Eddie Clewes, in The Iron Trail [1926], a tramp who uses glibness and guile to manipulate...