Some Must Die

by Gil Brewer

Genres: Westerns

156 pages

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Florida writer Gil Brewer was the author of dozens of wonderfully sleazy sex/crime adventure novels of the 1950's and 60's, including Backwoods Teaser and Nude on Thin Ice; some of them starring private eye Lee Baron (Wild) or the brothers Sam and Tate Morgan (The Bitch) . Gil Brewer, who had not previously published any novels, began to write for Gold Medal Paperbacks in 1950-51. Brewer wrote some 30 novels between 1951 and the late 60s – very often involving an ordinary man who becomes involved with, and is often corrupted and destroyed by, an evil or designing woman. His style is simple and direct, with sharp dialogue, often achieving considerable intensity.

Brewer was one of the many writers who ghost wrote under the Ellery Queen byline as well. Brewer also was known as Eric Fitzgerald, Bailey Morgan, and Elaine Evans.

http://www.gilbrewer.com/

Reviews

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some Must Die is a quasi-western, a mishmash of 13 French Street, Hell's Our Destination, and Bret Harte. It's also the first Gil Brewer novel where his prose style fails him. Paragraphs are short and disjointed; sentences are overwritten and sometimes nearly incomprehensible. Consider this sentence/paragraph from page 133:

"In the fogged-up, thudding silence of the bedroom, he sensed Horn falling back and saw him trying to ward off a series of steady blows to the body and head, aimed and quietly careful in the blind cold mist of the moment."

Oh, my. This book took me longer to read than any of Brewer's previous novels simply because I found myself reading sentences like this one over and over again. In the end, I came up with two possible explanations for what went wrong with this book: (1) Brewer is drinking too much and writing too fast. Some Must Die was the seventh Brewer novel published in a three-year span, appearing only three months after his masterpiece A Killer Is Loose. Brewer simply can't keep up the pace and the quality, too. (2) Brewer is working hard to vary his formula. Thus, rather than Brewer's usual settings in contemporary Florida, his gives us nineteenth-century Wyoming. And rather than his usual straight-forward prose style, he pushes himself stylistically. Unfortunately, he pushes too hard.

[Edwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gil Brewer is renowned for his over-the-top noir paperback originals, all brimming with violence and sexual obsession His lone attempt at writing a Western proves to be a drawn-out and aggravating novel that tells the story of six unlucky characters snowbound in a cabin with a saddlebag full of stolen money. This trope provides the conflict and forwards the minimalist plot. The characters showed illogical restraint when it came to violence when a killing or two could have resolved the conflicts and ended this dirge fifty pages early. This may have worked better as a short story or novelette. Stick with Brewer's crime novels, which may be inconsistent, but often burn as brightly as the best of the crime fiction of the era.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gil Brewer's only western, Some Must Die, is a long and ponderous novel about six people snowbound in a farmhouse for a week somewhere in Colorado after three of them have had robbed a stagecoach. It reads slowly, like real-time--the complete opposite of a typical Brewer novel, which moves at break-neck speed. Obviously he was trying a different style, deliberately changing the pace and trying to write like someone else, which almost begs the question--_was_ it someone else writing the novel under Brewer's name?