This novel was as lusty as its cover, but the Hays Code made for a toned-down film version.

“A lusty novel of the Southwest” boasts the copy in this 1947 advertisement for a 25-cent thrift edition of Niven Busch’s melodramatic novel, Duel in the Sun. The story concerns a half-white, half-Native American woman who gets caught up in intrigue–romantic and otherwise–while living with her white rancher relatives.

Before becoming a novelist and Hollywood screenwriter, Busch was a magazine writer for the New Yorker and Time. Duel in the Sun was made into a film by David O. Selznick and King Vidor in 1946 and remains a popular classic, one which Martin Scorsese identifies as one of the most influential films of his childhood. But the out-of-print novel is all but forgotten. An excerpt from the ad copy:

“When hot-headed handsome Lewt McCanles gallops recklessly along a trail that can lead only to flaming gunplay, a million-acre cattle empire trembles in the balance. Brother wars on brother in an action-packed, swift-shooting story of the great American Southwest in its sprawling, brawling infancy.”

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