Guns in non-gun books, ones you liked, ones you laughed at.

[FieroCDSP]

Not a real gun, but the "Kill-o-Zap" Gun from Hitchhiker's Guide fame.

The designer of the gun had clearly
not been instructed to beat about the bush. "Make it evil," he'd been told.
"Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it
totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly
for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened
bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the
fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and
making people miserable with."

 

[Vern Humphrey]

Read a book by Tedd Dekker a while back where this sniper was shooting 2000 yards and holding five feet high with a 308. The rifle was zeroed at 400 yars and had 18 inches of drop at 1000 yards.

As opposed to the approximately 300 inches drop it would have.

 

[Beagle-zebub]

Cormac McCarthy books are usually good in this respect. I liked the Webley-Fosbery in the Maltese Falcon, too, but I only saw the movie.

It drove me crazy that the revolver John Wayne has in the beginning of Red River, which was (I seem to recall) in the 1840s, was an 1858 Remington. D'oh!

 

[alexanderplatz]

I offer and enthusiastic recommendation to fellow readers here at The High Road for the books of Alan Furst. Furst writes about espionage in the WWII era, especially in Eastern Europe. Great writing in general, very absorbing. Think For Whom the Bell Tolls + Casablanca + John Le Carre + Graham Greene. As far as guns go, the characters are often making do with what they can get their hands in occupied Poland or France. Lots of Eastern European weapons mentioned, which has me on the internet looking them up for reference. An excerpt:

From The Polish Officer

...the defenders of the Warsaw Telephone exchange, hastily recruited amidst the chaos of the German invasion, were officers of the Polish Military Intelligence, known, in imitation of the French custom, as the Deuxieme Bureau. The Breda machine gun at the casement window was served by a lieutenant from the cryptographic service, a pair of spectacles folded carefully in his breast pocket. the spidery fellow reloading ammunition belts was, in vocational life, a connoisseur of the senior civil service of the U.S.S.R....​

​

a later chapter:

De Milja sighted down the Simonov at 400 yards. Ping. That animated the Russians and drew an appreciative chuckle from Frantek. They leaped off their horses and went flat on the ground. Disciplined, they did not fire their rifles. They waited. Ten long minutes.​

 

[VirgilCaine]

A Simonov?

Ah, I suppose he happened to get ahold of one of the pre-production SKS models the Soviets used while they were invading Berlin?

 

[The Lone Haranguer]

In the original The Executioner series of novels (by Don Pendleton), Mack Bolan needed a powerful rifle for long range sniping. So he chose a .444 Marlin. There was no mention of the spotter he must have needed, as he would have to hold about 50 feet over the target at 1000 yards.

 

[ShunZu]

Whew! I'll be sure to touch base with you guys during the writing of the 3rd book in the trilogy. Don't want to have any of my writings to be part of this thread.

 

[alexanderplatz]

A Simonov?

Ah, I suppose he happened to get ahold of one of the pre-production SKS models the Soviets used while they were invading Berlin?

Since you're relying on friendly sarcasm I'm not exactly sure what you're saying, but I think you're saying that the appearance of the rifle in question is anachronistic. (?)

I'm no expert, but what I read on the internet (and must therefore be true ) is this:

Red Army conducted several trials for automatic rifles between 1928 and mid-1930s, but the first more or less practical self-loading / automatic rifle appeared only in 1936. This rifle was developed between 1931 and 1936 by the Sergey Simonov, and was adopted as "7.62mm Automaticheskaya Vintovka Simonova obraztsa 1936 goda" (Simonov automatic rifle, model of 1936), or AVS-36 in short. Service life of this weapon was relatively short, as it was too complicated and expensive to make and maintain, as well as not sufficiently reliable in harsh conditions. Something between 35 000 and 65 000 AVS-36 rifles were delivered to Red Army between 1936 and 1940, when it was officially replaced in service by the Tokarev SVT-40 self-loading rifle. The AVS-36 seen not much combat, but it was used during Winter War between USSR and Finland in 1940, as well as in early stages of Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. Since the basic design of the AVS-36 was far from being ideal, Simonov consequently dropped its locking system with vertically sliding lock, and turned to the more common and practical tilting block locking. Using this system, he later developed the famous 14.5mm PTRS-41 antitank rifle and 7.62mm SKS self-loading carbine.

So to me it sounds completely plausible that it would a weapon that would end up in the hands of Russian or Polish partisans fighting the Germans in Eastern Europe after Operation Barbarossa began in 1941. Anyway, The Polish Officer is a great read.

 

[TX1911fan]

It just drives me crazy when revolver and automatic are used interchangeably. I know writers don't like to use the same words over and over, but you can't call something an automatic and then refer to it as a revolver later. They are not all just interchangeable terms for "gun."

 

[VirgilCaine]

Ah, the book was set earlier in the war. For some reason I thought it was set later, after the Russians took the AVS-36 out of service.

I wasn't saying it was anachronistic, I was saying he was very, very lucky!

 

[slabsides]

I've always gotten a kick out of the Nero Wolfe detective novels by Rex Stout. Wolfe's sidekick and 'muscle', Archie, has a couple of guns, at least one a .32, which have names never heard of in the real world. Archie's cars are also of a strange and heretofore unknown make. Guess Stout didn't want to give free plugs to REAL gun and auto manufacturers.

 

[Richbaker]

" His gun bloopers are hilarious: in one book he has the victim shot with a 9mm revolver, "called the "Colt 45," which is said to be very common in America. I think he's also referred to safties on revolvers a few times. I suppose somebody, somewhere has made a revolver with a safety, but, even if so, I don't imagine they find much use on the streets of Edinburgh"

Look at the S&W Safety Hammerless model, aka:the "Lemon Squeezer"...it has a grip safety.

 

[Tribal]

you can't call something an automatic and then refer to it as a revolver later

There's no chance the shooter was using a Webley-Fosbery or Mateba?

 

[Checkman]

In Stephen King's The Stand there is one chapter when the Army shoots a radio DJ to stop him from talking about what is going on.

One of the soldiers uses an automatic rifle that has a cyclic rate of 3,000 rounds per second! Oh and it also fires "gas tipped" bullets.

Evidently the Uber Guns only get pulled out when the world ending Plague comes along.

 

[DougDubya]

In the original The Executioner series of novels (by Don Pendleton), Mack Bolan needed a powerful rifle for long range sniping. So he chose a .444 Marlin. There was no mention of the spotter he must have needed, as he would have to hold about 50 feet over the target at 1000 yards.

Actually, Bolan was shooting from only a city block away, not 1000 yards.

(I'm an Executioner writer. I gotta stand up for Don.)