Stephen Hunter, Author Of The Former Marine Sniper Bob Lee Swagger Thriller Series, On 6 Rules For Writing Realistic, Meaningful Gunfights

I’m reading Stephen Hunter’s latest Bob Lee Swagger thriller, Game of Snipers, and I plan to review the book in the Washington Times.

Swagger is a former Marine sniper is in his early 70s, but as a gun consultant for the FBI, the old Vietnam veteran stills gets into a lot of action. 

Guns are the trademark of Stephen Hunter (seen in the above photo). As a knowledgeable gun owner and shooter, he writes about guns with professional accuracy. He gets guns – and he gets it right. 

As a military-trained gun owner and shooter, I often cringe and curse novels, movies and TV shows that make silly mistakes about guns, such as someone with a snubnosed revolver shooting up from the ground and hitting someone with a sniper rifle on a third-story roof.

Crimereads.com offers a piece that Stephen Hunter wrote for his publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons on gunfights.  

Gunfights are chaos events. They make no sense, can never make sense. They are over in seconds. The men who fight them do so guided only by instincts that may or may not reflect training and experience. What happens—no matter how unlikely—happens, without recourse to do-overs, odds and the utter whimsey of luck. There are no rules. Nothing is clear, no one is heroic, self-urination is quite common (never shown in the movies). And they are incredibly loud, even though nobody’s hearing is working. Heartbeats go supersonic, blood chemicals mingle beyond any cocktail maker’s wildest imagination, no coherent thought forms in any brain, and luck is better than smarts, cover is more important than concealment, ammo is more important than heroism and too often the good die young.

I have pretty much spent my professional life trying to capture these moments in prose. Ask me why and watch my face go blank: no explanations beyond the fact that such happenings fire off lots of brain electricity, electricity is energy, energy is work, and work is–well, whatever it will be, from glory and dough to failure, ignominy and self-laceration.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/6-rules-for-writing-realistic-meaningful-gunfights/ 

 You can also read my Washington Times review of The Third Bullet via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/03/my-washington-times-review-of-stephen.html

And you can read my Philadelphia Inquirer review of I, Sniper, below: 

Stephen Hunter On The Police Shooting Of Tamir Rice

 

Stephen Hunter, author of I. Ripper and a good number of thrillers featuring former Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger, offers a piece on the police shooting of Tamir Rice for powerlineblog.com.

 

We first got to know Stephen Hunter when he was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post movie critic. He is best known as a successful novelist, and he happens to know a great deal about guns. I, Ripper is his new novel. Published last month, it is in bookstores now.

Here he offers his reflections on the case of Tamir Rice on the occasion of a Cleveland judge sounding off on the fate of the cop involved, as covered by NBC News. Submitted for your consideration:

We all know that the police are waging war on young black men. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the November shooting of Tamir Rice in Cleveland while he was holding a toy gun. A white officer emerged from his car and in less than five seconds fired lethal rounds into the innocent youngster holding–oh, wait, it was a pellet gun.

Hmmm. Seems to be some confusion here. Was it a toy gun or a pellet gun, which are quite different? Well, one place you won’t find the truth is NBC News, which tonight identified the pistol as BOTH a toy and a pellet gun, the first by anchorman Lester Holt, the second by a field correspondent. Of course both were wrong.

It was a Japanese airsoft gun., which fires (on the propulsion of either spring or gas) a 6 mm BB. But the point of airsoft isn’t what it shoots, but what it looks like. These are brilliantly accurate plastic reproductions of real guns. They are accurate to size, color, precise location and scale of operating mechanisms such as safeties or take-down levers, sights, stocks (frequently wood) and even operation. On the automatic versions the slide may be jacked backwards as on the real things, a magazine may be inserted into the butt and, when fired, the gas pneumatically drives the slide back, as if to eject a shell and allow another shell into the chamber. On the revolver variations, the cylnders rotate and may be disengaged from the frame to allow insertion of extremely authentic appearing cartridges into the six chambers. They cock and function, in all interactions, just like the real thing. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/06/stephen-hunter-the-case-of-tamir-rice.php

Note: I've reviewed several of Stephen Hunter's fine thrillers. You can read my Washington Times review of The Third Bullet via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/03/my-washington-times-review-of-stephen.html

American Gun: Former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle Looks At American History Through Its Firearms

Stephen Hunter, the former Washington Post film critic and author of The Third Bullet and other thrillers featuring military and police snipers, reviewed the late Chris Kyle's book American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms at USA TODAY.

Though readers will learn much about both guns and history in the late Chris Kyle's American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms, that isn't really the point or the delight of the book.

Rather, it's a celebration of Kyle's voice and life: It's like sitting down with him in some funky Texas roadhouse just off the interstate after a hot but fulfilling day at the range, ordering up a tableful of Lone Stars and just talking guns for a few hours. What a treat that would have been and how fortunate are the few who enjoyed it.

Kyle, of course, was the Navy SEAL with four combat deployments in the war on terror who was credited as America's highest-scoring sniper. He became a national figure with the publication of his best seller American Sniper but died tragically in February when another veteran, evidently suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, suddenly shot him down at a shooting range.

American Gun is his second book, written with the assistance of William Doyle, and said by his wife in an afterword to have been a labor of love for the young Texan. What it may lack in rigor — it seems to be based not on original research but merely secondary sources — it certainly repays in friendliness, even avuncularity, as it takes readers on an amble through firearms history, particularly as it intersects with what most academics would call "real history." 

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://books.usatoday.com/book/%E2%80%98american-gun-is-loaded-with-history-and-personality/r851627

You can also read my Washington Times review of Stephen Hunter's The Third Bullet via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/03/my-washington-times-review-of-stephen.html

My Washington Times Review Of 'The Third Bullet," Stephen Hunter's Kennedy Assassination Thriller

 

My review of  The Third Bullet, Stephen Hunter's thriller about the Kennedy assassination, appeared this morning in the Washington Times.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, was the crime of the 20th century.

Like many of the military and intelligence people I met while serving in the U.S. Navy and later as a Defense Department civilian employee, I believed Fidel Castro killed Kennedy. Kennedy attempted to kill the communist Cuban leader and the dictator announced publicly that he intended to return the favor.

My view changed after reading Gerald Posner's book “Case Closed.” Mr. Posner debunked all of the Kennedy conspiracies and laid the deed squarely on Lee Harvey Oswald. Vincent Bugliosi, the famed prosecutor of the Charles Manson “family,” further assured readers that Oswald was the lone assassin in his huge book “Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

Stephen Hunter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for The Washington Post, said that he started writing his first novel, “Point of Impact,” with the Kennedy assassination in mind. When he started the book, he said, everyone thought a conspiracy was behind the killing. Halfway through the novel Mr. Hunter read “Case Closed” and he ceased believing in conspiracy. The premise of his early novel had been destroyed, and in the end, he separated the novel from the JFK assassination.

However, in “The Third Bullet,” Mr. Hunter returns to the scene of the famous crime. He sets a serious “gun guy” — the legendary former Marine sniper and Vietnam veteran Bob Lee Swagger, known as “ Bob the Nailer” — on a course to discover the truth behind the Kennedy assassination.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/8/book-review-the-third-bullet/?page=all#pagebreak