Guns in Literature

I can't believe everybody has skipped over Larry Correia. The man was a gun dealer, instructor, competitor, and wrote for magazines like SWAT. Some of the writing in his novels borders on gun ****. He gets it right most of the time unless he stretches it for literary effect.

He also wrote one of my favorite gun control articles.
http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/

Check out his Monster Hunter series or the book Dead Six. Dead Six was actually coauthored with an active duty member of the military. (Not a POG, if I remember correctly.)
 
King's Solomon's Mine qualifies as both literature and a gun book. :)

I had to read it in high school and barely finished, in fact I skimmed just enough to make a C or so on the exam.

However, I re-read it over AT after bumming it from a buddy and it was really enjoyable the second time around.

Lot's of talk of elephant hunting.
 
Patrick F. McManus’s Sheriff Bo Tully carried a .45 ACP Colt Commander.

Patrick F. McManus handles firearms quite well in his books. He was a columnist for ‘Field and Stream’ and ‘Outdoor Life’. Some writers don’t handle guns at all well and even if they get the terminology right the gun stuff seems labored and clumsy in their books. Patrick McManus tosses gun references in his books that seem natural and effortless.
 
McManus....

My grandparents kept several McManus novels in the camp. :D
These were his humor books that he wrote in the 1970s/1980s.
He told some funny stories about the woods & hunting.

In 2012, I was in AK briefly & saw a McManus novel in a bar/hotel. Good stuff.
 
knowing how many rounds a specific rifles holds in a specific caliber is good. Writing a paragraph about capacity, finish, how the gun works, every time the charecter picks it up is not good writing.


for example, its like a movie that shows a 3 minute gun commercial for glock every time the gun appears on screen. matrix series would be 3 times as long.
 
A .455 would be a ".45 caliber". :D

I believe (I'd have to look it up to be certain) Sam Spade identifies the gun as "a .45 caliber Webley-Fosberry, they don't make them any more..."
 
Louis L'Amour mentions specific guns and gets them right.

Stewart Woods is specific in his books. Stone Barrington carries a Terry Tussey custom 1911.

Robert B Parker mentioned a lot of specific guns for his characters but was also wrong a lot.
 
H. Beam Piper was mostly a science fiction writer, but he also wrote a detective story called "Murder in the Gun Room". Piper's SF books were also full of gun stuff, particularly his short story "Police Operation."

Donald Hamilton wrote popular fiction, Westerns, and spy stories, the most famous being his "Matt Helm" series. Before you recoil in horror, the only connection between them and some horrible Dean Martin stories was a character name. I particularly recommend the first Helm novel, "Death of A Citizen," and the standalone novel "Assassins Have Starry Eyes."

Most of those authors' works are 40 to 60 years old now; American society was just a bit different in their day.
 
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