Customer Reviews

Armed and Dangerous: A Writer's Guide to Weapons (Howdunit Writing)

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

I've made my living writing articles for gun magazines since 1992, so obviously I was intrigued by the idea of a writer's manual for gun facts. I knew I was in trouble when I found two out-and-out errors and one seriously debatable before I was even through the Introduction.

STATEMENT: "In fact, the .44 - and every other large revolver - holds a maximum of six rounds; only .22 and automatics offer the increased capacity."

FACT: Okay, I note the book's 1990 publication date, and at that time this was true. However this "fact" is very out of date. Today we have 7 and 8-shot large-frame .357 Magnum revolvers, available from the factory, from companies like Taurus and Smith & Wesson.

STATEMENT: "Stephen King, in Cycle of the Werewolf, drops his furry fiend with silver bullets from a nonexistent ".45 Magnum," proving once and for all that he knows more about werewolves than firearms."

FACT: The .45 Winchester Magnum auto pistol cartridge was introduced in 1979. Ammunition, and guns to fire it, have been in continuous production ever since.

STATEMENT: "King also plays fast and loose with his hardware in The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three. In the space of five pages, he...introduces a nonexistent "Llama .38 automatic," and discourses at length on the uncontrollable recoil of the M-16 rifle - a weapon specifically designed for minimal kick."

FACT: Llama has been producing auto pistols chambered for the .38 Super cartridge since the 1930s. As for the M16, while it's true it was designed for minimal recoil, this assumes (1) it's being fired on semi-, not full-auto, and (b) a decent amount of skill on the firer's part. If I remember the scene in The Dark Tower II correctly, the M16 in question was being fired (a) on full-auto and (b) by someone with only the most casual familiarity with firearms. In such a situation it's not at all unbelievable the shooter might find the gun getting away from him.

Don't get me wrong, Stephen King doesn't know jack about firearms, and rather than do his research he just fakes it, but the author of Armed & Dangerous has chosen to criticize King primarily in areas where, through sheer luck I'm sure, he got it right.

And this was only in the Introduction. Out of curiosity, I flipped to the back cover to see what credentials this guy has to put himself forward as a firearms expert. Uh-oh, he's written books in The Executioner series - which have a very bad reputation among gun people for their lack of technical accuracy, vis-a-vis guns.

Continuing on, we find:

STATEMENT: "In spite of countless problems, Civil War rifles were more lethal than ever before, thanks to the introduction of the Minie ball...designed to expand in the grooves of a barrel on firing, the Minie ball increased effective range from 100 to 500 yards..."

FACT: Actually, the Minie ball was considerably LESS accurate than the round ball that preceded it. The Minie ball was a conical projectile, solid at front, with a hollow "skirt" at the rear. When the rifle was fired, gas pressure, flowing up into the Minie ball's hollow base, pressed the thin skirt out into the rifling. Since the Minie ball lacked the structural consistency of a round ball, it wasn't as accurate. However, surprisingly, it was accurate ENOUGH. What really made the Minie ball work was that it was UNDERSIZED for the rifle's bore, so instead of having to execute the time consuming process of shoving an OVERSIZED ball down the rifle's bore with a rod after dropping the powder charge, with the same gun you could simply drop a Minie ball down the barrel on top of the powder, a far faster process. A well-trained shooter with a muzzleloader firing conventional round balls could only fire one shot per minute - the same soldier firing Minie balls could fire 12 shots per minute, a quantum leap in performance. The Minie ball didn't increase the lethality of rifles in the Civil War by increasing their range, it did it by increasing their firepower.

STATEMENT: "His [Sam Colt's] Colt Model 1860, a .44 caliber cap-fired percussion piece, became the principal side arm during the [Civil] war..."

FACT: No. The 1860 was the principal issue sidearm of the UNION forces, however, the number of Starrs, Remingtons, and other types of Colts easily bury the 1860 for total numbers used in the war. In fact the most popular Colt percussion revolver was the .36 caliber Model 1851. This gun was so popular among Confederate troops that after the outbreak of the war its production was continued in numerous Confederate arms factories (all in Georgia, BTW, one reason Sherman had such a hard-on for the state - that's where the Confederacy's arms production capability came from).

STATEMENT: Referring on about percussion Colts, Newton says, "Regardless of their innovations, early Colts - and most other revolvers - were still muzzleloaders..."

FACT: Jesus wept. Colt's Models 1851, 1860, 1861, etc. are NOT muzzleloaders. They load through the front of the cylinder. This is a basic fact about one of the most famous marque/classes of weapons in history.

And that only took me up to page 12. I can only weep with pity for the writer using this book as reference material for gun facts.

My area of interest lies in pre-1900 firearms so I won't make any effort to comment on the author's coverage of 20th century arms. I find no fault with his writing style since that's his own, but those several initial chapters on pre-1900 weaponry contain enough errors as to make them dangerous to an author relying on the material presented. To select just a few of the most obvious, the Kentucky rifle (often called the Pennsylvania rifle) was not a key weapon in the hands of the Continental Army during our Revolutionary War (page 12). Although much more accurate than the smoothbore musket, it was slower to load and could not be fitted with a bayonet and played a lesser role than did the musket. On page 13, the author incorrectly writes that large numbers of Kentucky flintlock rifles were converted into pill locks. Presumably he meant converted to percussion since pill locks were not common. He wrote of plains rifles ranging in caliber from .26 to .40 (page 14). A bison or grizzley bear struck by a .26 caliber ball would probably take little more notice of it than a bite from a fly. Most such rifles were about .50 caliber or larger On the same page, he incorrectly states that the U.S. Model 1842 pistol used the Maynard tape primer. It didn't, although the rather uncommon Model 1855 pistol with a detachable wooden shoulder stock did. Moving to page 26 he states the term "sharpshooter" was a tribute to the famed Sharps rifle yet the term was in use decades before Christian Sharps designed his breechloader. Just one more example of the author's numerous errors is on page 30. He describes Colt Peacemaker revolver serial number 139345 as being originally owned by Wild Bill Hickok and which was allegedly used by him to kill 14 men in 1875 and 1876. This is a difficult feat since that Colt by serial number wasn't manufactured until 1891! Hopefully the author did better in his chapters on more modern guns.

Duane Thomas and Charles Worman have pretty much summed up everything that is wrong with this book, but I'll add one more: Mr. Newton says that Jesse James and Cole Younger preferred the Schofield .45-caliber when they rode the outlaw trail. In fact, Cole Younger's weapon in the Northfield raid was a Colt .45 SAA Peacemaker, serial number 19242, now residing in the Saunders Memorial Museum. That museum also has Jesse's .44 caliber double action percussion revolver. The Public Museum of Oshkosh has a Colt Navy Model 1851 in .36 caliber presented to Younger by Quantrill himself. In short, the James/Younger gang had a variety of weapons among them, so any such categorical statement as Mr. Newton proffers requires *some* substantiation. Yet he blithely makes an assertion that, if echoed by a naive writer, would land the writer in hot water with a lot of readers. With so many errors of historical fact on display, I have to say that one cannot rely on Mr. Newton's assertions on technical matters either. Give this book a pass.

I picked this book up because 1.) I enjoy the Howdunit series, and 2.) I was hoping to find out some useful information about guns for my own writing. From reading the first few pages of the book, the author comes off as all-knowing and haughty. I decided to overlook this because many writers have done the same thing, especially when they're pretty much an "expert" on what they are writing. It took me a week to get through this book. Why? Because I found the text boring; it read like an outdated text book.

Firstly, the book presented a lot of history. Maybe too much. I didn't really count that as a negative since not every mystery/action writer writes in the present year(s). The way the material, though, was presented was enough to cure my insomnia. I nodded off on this book more times than I'd like to mention. The only thing that interested me in that "history lesson" was the depictions of the 'Old West'.

Secondly, where were the pictures? It was hard for me to get a mental image of the guns he was describing. Yes, he described them nicely, but I'm not going to describe the gun exactly as he did in my own story. It would have been nice to see pictures, so that I could have rendered my own descriptions. In the back, there are only 4 guns pictured. I found myself relying more so on internet sources (handguns.com) than the descriptions in this book.

Thirdly, unless you have at least a little prior knowledge of guns, then this may confuse you. There are too many technical terms and not enough layman terms. You'll find yourself constantly flipping back and foward through the book to make any sense of some the things he mentions.

But in defense of the book, it's obvious the author knows his guns. I was impressed with his knowledge on the subject, but I wasn't impressed with the way he presented his knowledge. It seems like he was trying to exercise his rather extensive vocabulary rather than actually educating his readers. Would I recommend this book for buying? I don't know it depends on your knowledge thus far on firearms. It might come in handy as a reference every now and again, but personally I feel there are better references out there.

This book will be very helpful to someone needing correct information about guns. It is completely worthless to those of us (like me) who picked it up believing that it would touch on all sorts of weapons - knives, swords, bows, etc. I know they are targeting mystery writers, but not all mystery writers want a gun-toting suspect.

Clear, well-written and hugely useful--I rate it a 10 with a bullet! Whether you write crime fiction or just need a few realistic details about a gun for any type of book, this is an indispensable guide. Highly recommended!

There are several good books in the Howdunit series, but this one is absolutely essential reading for any writer who plans to use firearms in his or her work. Newton doesn't take sides in various firearms debates, but he does go into near-encyclopedic detail about every aspect of firearms, both in antiquity and in the present day. Where he doesn't have space to cover a subject in full detail, he tells you where to find more info. Newton also supplies examples of where other writers, even really good ones, have screwed up badly in their presentation of firearms. If accuracy is important to you as a writer, then you need to read this book, so you won't have your characters blasting each other with ".75 magnums," or taking out targets with sniper-like precision using only a .38 snub-nose revolver (both of which I've actually seen in print).

This book was helpful, albeit a bit too much a history of weapons than I'd have liked. I did glean a few interesting facts, and some exposure to more exotic firearms, but not enough hard facts on everyday weapons that a mystery writer needs. A table of commonly available firearms, shot capacity, effective ranges, etc might have been helpful as well. Not the best of the Howdunit series, but as I said, helpful on occasion.

For writers out there, this book help break down the types of weapons you might need to use in a script. I've used it more than once, and it pays to be accurate!