Fort Starvation

by Frank Gruber

From the author of FIGHTING MAN. John Slater dedicated his life to revenge - with a fortune in goldat the end of the trail. The gold meant nothing to Slater. He wanted the man who betrayed his father, the man whose greed led to the stark horror the Army sought to cover up - the brutal siegeof "Fort Starvation."

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

Frank Gruber was an enormously prolific author of pulp fiction. A stalwart contributor to Black Mask magazine, he also wrote novels, producing as many as four a year during the 1940s. His best-known character was Oliver Quade, “the Human Encyclopedia,” whose adventures were collected in Brass Knuckles (1966), and will soon be republished in ebook format as Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia,featuring brand-new material, from MysteriousPress.com, Open Road Integrated Media, and Black Mask magazine.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A complicated mystery set in the west...a man trying to avenge the death of his father. Excellent.

[Van Roberts · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Fort Starvation" was written in the early 1950s before Univeral-International Pictures adapted it into a film written by genre specialist Borden Chase of "Red River" fame and helmed by up and coming western director John Sturges. When Gruber's novel made the transition to the silver screen, the filmmakers renamed it "Backlash." Technically, "Backlash" was a film noir western because the Jim Slater (Richard Widmark) is trying to find the sixth man who either survived or orchestrated a massacre in Utah of five other prospectors. Army records indicate that five men who died besieged by Apaches at a ramshackle fort. In the novel, the hero is named John Slater, but in the movie he goes by Jim Slater. Slater doesn't want the $60-thousand in rarely minted gold coins that the so-called prospectors stole. Similarly, in the film, the protagonist abides by the same behavior. Instead, he is out of vengeance. When we first meet him in the novel, he has just dug up the graves of the five men for any clues when a rider takes a potshot at him. Comparatively, in the Sturges' film, a deputy sheriff perched atop of mountain fires on him with a Winchester repeater not long after Slater is visited at the scene of the massacre by a quirt-carrying dame named Karyl Orton. She asks him to fetch her cigarettes from her horse, and the assassin nearly kills Slater. Slater scrambles up the mountain and kills him. The hero of the novel is shot at, but there is no woman at the scene of the massacre. Suffice to say, the novel ranges much farther than the movie and there is no heroine remotely like the woman that Donna Reed played. Rather, there are two women, and Slater isn't racked with guilt that he may be a murderer like his father. Sporadically, Borden Chase pulled material from the novel. but he also simplified the complicated structure of hte book that sends Slater from Utah to Texas and then Wyoming on the trail of the killer who escaped justice at Fort Starvation. Mind you, Gruber is a pretty good writer, even if "Fort Starvation" wears thin during it last 100 pages. The villain in the novel is nothing like the villain in the Sturges' film. No, John Slater's father had nothing to do with the stolen gold coins in the novel. Gruber's book contains a larger number of characters, too.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A story set in 1861, Utah, the United States Cavalry, five men killed, the Indians, and a cache of gold, all make for a wild chase from Texas to Utah country. Difficult to believe that anybody survived out west in the 1800's!

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow!

This is a really well crafted book. Mr Gruber tells an engaging story right from the jump, and it had some unexpected twists and turns along the way that I didn't see coming. The characters are (mostly) strong, and the story is unusual in that the pivotal events take place at exactly the same location separated by about 9 yrs.

Mr Gruber must not have liked horses, as their death by shooting, mistreatment, or accident happens fairly routinely, but the old west was nothing if not a hard place for man or beast.

The female romantic interest is shallowly wrought as is the relationship with our hero, but we'll overlook that, as the story as a whole doesn't suffer from it. It's almost as if Gruber knows that the romantic interest feature is mandatory and as such he grafts it on the core story in order only to check that box.

My reading was enhanced by the near mint 1954 edition Pennant (Penguin) edition paperback. I got a photo of the cover to upload, but apparently I'm not able to contribute images.