Best/worst Gun AUTHORS (of fiction)

[boomer1911a1]

Unlike tbreed's very-worthwhile thread elsewhere under this category, I want to hear about novelists and writers who do either really good or really bad jobs of putting guns down on paper.

I'll start off. Mine are all good because I tend to forget/dismiss the bad ones and remember the ones I like...

David Morrell
The author of around 20 excellent thrillers, Morrell began his writing career with First Blood, which was the basis for the Stallone movies. He has always shown a fine sense of weapon knowledge (despite an early habit of calling propellant "cordite"... a habit he has since corrected.) His later books, especially, shown a great deal of research and attention to detail.

Robert B. Parker
Follower of Raymond Chandler, creater of the Spenser series as well as the newer Jesse Stone And Sunny Randall books, Parker has always put in enough detail about weapons to qualify. Aside from a jarring early reference to the M-16 rifle being chambered in "7.62 mm," his gun knowledge is pretty firm and always poetic.

Thomas Harris
You know him best from the Hannibal Lecter movies/books, although he also did the novel Black Sunday about the blimp attack on the Super Bowl (talk about a movie crying out for a remake...) Harris has always sounded gun-savvy. The opening gunfight in Hannibal was gorgeous and sublime in the novel, later ruined (among a great many other things) in the movie.


Let me hear some others. I'm anxious to expand.

 

[mpmarty]

Robert Ludlum

Robert Ludlum is the worst; he puts safetys on revolvers, silencers on revolvers, clips on UZIs, cordite is the only propellant he has ever heard of, and when the hero picks up a revolver from a bad guy he takes his extra clips with him!! He sucks.

 

[Biker]

Jerry Ahern is right up at the top. The man knows his guns. Check out "The Survivalist" series.

Biker

 

[ClarkEMyers]

Disagree about Parker - Spenser.

Disagree about Parker - Spenser. There is a little research in what Parker and in what Jess Stone carry and use. The Gray Man used a .458 Win Mag bolt gun in a rather silly fashion to shoot Spenser and the entire book on the Earps was full of silly and avoidable mistakes. It's a testimony to the author's other skills that I overlook his mistakes on guns - much as I will allow a B movie western to have a Win 94 play the role of the Winchester 73 and Peacemaker/Frontier to play the role of a an earlier revolver. Parker acknowledges doing research on Boston for one of his non-series books writing "God help me I thought I knew enough" but Parker apparently either thinks he knows enough about firearms or doesn't care and neither do his editors. Decent books bad gun play.

Donald Hamilton is the best of the successful writers in dealing with guns - and of course his book Donald Hamilton on Guns and Hunting and his articles in Gun Digest and the gun press are right on as well.

Gavin Lyall does a first rate job including especially the Mauser in Midnight Plus One.

 

[taliv]

mpmarty beat me to it. ludlum is teh suq

 

[Firehand]

Donald Hamilton in the Matt Helm books was very good. Knew what he was writing about.

My brain blanked right now, sci-fi author who wrote a book Rivers of Time about hunting dinosaurs was awful. Insisted his clients carry a .600 Nitro Express because "it's the only rifle powerful enough to knock a dinosaur down", etc. Absolute crap.

 

[Dirty Bob]

Stephen Hunter is generally good, although the plot of Point of Impact hinged on a few rather improbable gun-related issues.

Regards,
Dirty Bob

 

[JesseL]

Good!

Correia and Nightcrawler!!

 

[Hutch]

Fully agree that Ludlum is invincibly ignorant. I even wrote him a letter many years ago, offering to proof/edit his stuff. No response, funny that. Here's another gun-Muggle: Jack Higgins. 25 millimetre (Brit, I s'pose) Colt auto, anyone?

 

[Nightcrawler]

Correia and Nightcrawler!!

*BLUSH*

Thank you. I do try to keep my gunfights grounded in reality. Writing a gunfight is tough; on one hand, you want to include enough detail that it's not glossed over. On the other, you want to keep the pacing fast and intense.

You will, of course, find my personal bias in my writings. I mean, a badguy hit with a .308 soft point will require a second shot far less often than will a badguy hit with a 5.56mm ball in my stories. (But it has happened. Nothing is a death ray.)

I always keep track of my round count, though. Guns have to be reloaded. Also, notice that the guns never "jam" requiring the hero to go hand-to-hand. There are some novels where that happens so often that the hero really needs to get his weapons fixed.

 

[MikePGS]

I think John Sandford does a pretty decent job in regards to guns. He mentions them accurately but doesen't really dwell on them. Also in his book Rules Of Prey theres a scene in which the main character makes a silencer and actually screws it up at one point, i'm not sure how accurate it is but it seems pretty realistic to me.

 

[kentucky_smith]

No one's mentioned Tom Clancy. Haven't seen too many mistakes, very detailed. Aside from the flipping the car by shooting the tire out in Rainbow Six.

 

[Geronimo45]

Frederic Forsythe - Day of the Jackal, Dogs of War, The Odessa File. May not have been a gun guy (not sure about it), but he definitely did his research.

Only firearms mixup I ever read was a PPK firing 9mm parabellum in the Odessa File (since the Euro-folks call .380 9mm Browning or 9mm Kurz, no real surprise that the two would be confused to a non-gunny).

Dogs of War is pretty gun heavy - a lot of detail on how a group of men could manage to get some old German SMGs, ammo, bazooka, and mortars out of non-gun-friendly Europe. Very interesting stuff.

 

[ProficientRifleman]

Obvious!

John Ross is one of the best.

Next I would name Bill Branon, who wrote Let Us Prey, and, Devil's Hole. Both of which are excellent shooters' books.

Read 'em and enjoy.

 

[Fat_46]

Richard North Patterson - on of the most overtly anti-gun authors I have ever had the displeasure of reading. Here's a link to an interview with him: http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-patterson-richard.asp

 

[ddc]

thumbs up: Andy McNab
thumbs down: Robert Ludlum

 

[pax]

Thumbs up to Dean Koontz. He knows what he's talking about.

pax

 

[tomhorn]

boomer is on the money with david Morrell Have you read night of the ranger , harold coyle team Yankee has to be the best book i have ever read .He also wrote one about bosnia all the children great book ,lousey ones are the ones who do no research...I read one while in Kotzebue Ak about tankers great book he is a major in the army ..

 

[tomhorn]

Has anyone read anything by Peter Capstick he was a P/H in africa great reads you cant put them down ..I know its off the subject

 

[[email protected]]

One thing I've noticed about Stephen Hunter is that he has seemed to learn more and/or do more research regarding firearms as his career has progressed. Point of Impact has some gun stuff that wasn't so hot, but his later books seemed to be much more accurate concerning guns.

DanO

 

[bender]

Is that for real about Ludlum ?? Dang, I was a big Ludlum reader as a teenager back in the 1970s. Haven't read anything by him since the early 80s I guess...

 

[boomer1911a1]

Better put GOOD or BAD in title

Just so's we don't get confused.

PAX: Which D. Koonts titles? I've read a few and he impressed me by not making any egregious errors, but I haven't read anything really gun-heavy. Whaddaya got? (BTW, interesting website)

 

[pax]

boomer ~

Try Dark Rivers of the Heart.

(And thanks for the kind word.)


pax

 

[Terence]

Jack Reacher Books

There's an author named Lee Child who writes a series about a guy named Jack Reacher. Reacher spends a lot of time carrying large amounts of lethal hardware around and doing really amazing things with it.

The treatment of guns ranges from the impossible (Reacher cocks guns with no external hammer) to the improbable (discovers a .50 Desert Eagle that a small town Georgia detective kept as a service weapon), but the stories are great. And sometimes he even gets it right.

I posted on the Lee Child forum asking why Reacher was doing so many odd things with a H&K P7M10. Overall, most of the other readers, including one guy who claimed to be a former Major in the MPs, told me not to worry about the little details and enjoy the story.

 

[TX1911fan]

John Sandford is not too bad, but he makes some pretty petty mistakes. Everything is a clip. People flying backwards when hit with a .45 slug. That sort of stuff. I just listened to one of his books and swear there were more. Nothing overt, just Hollywood.