FEATURED AUTHOR
PAUL KIRCHNER

I’ve worked as a freelance writer and illustrator for most of my life. After a few years of art school in New York City, I dropped out and began working in the comic book field. I gradually got into more conventional illustration, and my work appeared in publications such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I also did concept and design work for the toy industry and storyboards for advertising.

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with weapons and combat, and in the mid-1980s I began corresponding with Jeff Cooper, since I was a longtime fan of his writing in Guns & Ammo and Soldier Of Fortune. After I sent him examples of my artwork, he asked me to design some logos for Gunsite and then to illustrate To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth. I jumped at the opportunity, and as partial payment I took a pistol class at Gunsite. Since then I’ve illustrated four more books for him.

In 1994 I was commissioned to write three nonfiction books for Rhino Records, an experience that taught me how to research a subject. One of those books, Forgotten Fads and Fabulous Flops, was recently featured in the History Channel’s Modern Marvels series. Whenever the program is rerun I get calls from old friends who were surprised to see me on TV talking about rocket belts and paper dresses.

In 1996 I accepted a job offer as a senior art director at a New York ad agency. This required commuting nearly four hours a day on the train, and to stay sane I decided to spend that time writing a book. I wanted to profile the greatest individual warriors throughout history, men such as Jim Bowie, Nathan Bedford Forrest, James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok, and Audie Murphy, focusing on their fights and incorporating information on their training, their tactics, and their mental attitudes. The result was The Deadliest Men: The World’s Deadliest Combatants throughout the Ages. The high-testosterone topic and tone frightened off most publishers, but fortunately it found a home at Paladin.

While working on The Deadliest Men, I became fascinated with dueling and decided that the topic deserved a book of its own, which became Dueling with the Sword and Pistol: 400 Years of One-on-One Combat.

In 2002, with the slump in the ad industry, I returned to the freelance life. Although this was not by choice, in retrospect it has worked out for the best. I continue to make a living off my artwork and write mostly for my own satisfaction.

Q&A

PALADIN: A lot of our readers know you as the illustrator of Jeff Cooper’s books, and he has described you as a “collaborator and good friend.” How would you describe him?
PK: Jeff Cooper is truly an officer and a gentleman of the old school, a breed that I’m afraid is dying out. I’ve been to Gunsite several times and have attended a number of Gunsite reunions, and I’m struck by the fact that people want to be their best around Jeff, not only in their performance on the range but in their conversation at the dinner table. Jeff sets a high standard, and he elevates the tone of everyone around him. I have never met another man with his erudition and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. He tackles every subject that interests him with a powerful enthusiasm. Jeff has little patience for small talk but can spend hours discussing topics ranging from metallurgy to philosophy, esthetics to auto racing. It strikes me that meeting Jeff Cooper and discussing nothing but guns would be like meeting Thomas Jefferson and discussing nothing but tobacco farming. I also enjoy the light-hearted side of Jeff that most people don’t see. For example, in a recent letter to me he listed a dozen famous one-eyed warriors and asked if I could think of any more. (I added Philip of Macedon and World War I ace Edward “Mick” Mannock.) He’s also a huge fan of Tolkien’s trilogy, which he read volume by volume as they were originally published.

PALADIN: Dueling with the Sword and Pistol focuses on the “duel of honor.” How would you define that term?
PK: Fencing historian Egerton Castle described it as “a premeditated fight in cold blood, a social necessity which may force the best of friends to attempt each other’s lives for the sake of the world’s opinion.” I would define the duel as a consensual fight between two gentlemen with matched deadly weapons that is waged over a point of honor in accordance with rules implicitly or explicitly agreed upon, is usually accompanied by seconds (who might themselves fight), and is in contravention of the law. It was a kind of mania in Western societies for about 400 years—the earliest duel I cover was in 1547, the last in 1958.

PALADIN: What is it about dueling that fascinates people?
PK: Whatever it is, it’s been doing it for centuries. Shakespeare included duels in his plays, they figured prominently in the books of Alexandre Dumas and Sir Walter Scott, they were front-page news in 19th century European newspapers, and their inherent drama is even exploited in contemporary movies such as Star Wars. The duel is the classic example of a fair fight, and that sometimes seems like the only way to bring a conflict to a satisfactory resolution.

Duels involved society’s elite, people of wealth, power, and position . There is also the punctilious etiquette of the duel, the strange combination of manners and murderousness, as if to say, “You may want to kill a man, but there’s no need to be rude about it.” Then there is the driving element of personal honor, a virtue that has been largely forgotten in our time, but for which gentlemen were once willing to risk their lives. Dueling was always punishable by law and condemned by the church, and yet gentlemen felt an inexorable social pressure to issue and accept challenges. A man who meekly tolerated insults became a social outcast, whereas a man who defended his honor in a few duels was held in high esteem. I guess most of us have fantasized about holding other people physically accountable for insulting or injuring us. A few months ago it made news when Sen. Zell Miller (D–Georgia) told Chris Matthews he wished he could challenge him to a duel. Not so long ago he could have done so.

PALADIN: What particular expertise did you bring to this project?
PK: Mainly my intense curiosity and my skills as a researcher. I’m not a typical Paladin author in that my credibility does not come from my life experience but my determination to ferret out information. I can’t claim to have cleared a biker bar armed only with a pepper shaker and a ring of keys, but if anyone has ever done such a thing and left a written record, I’m pretty confident I could find it.

PALADIN: A lot of the accounts in Dueling with the Sword and Pistol have never before appeared in a book on dueling . How did you conduct your research?
PK: I started out by reading everything I could find on the subject—pretty much everything that’s been published in English in the last 300 years or so in books, magazines, and newspapers. Fortunately, I live close to some of the world’s finest libraries, the New York Public Library and the libraries of Yale University, or I never could have done this. By the time I was finished, I had filled a filing cabinet with articles I had copied and a couple of shelves with books I had bought.

Early on, I decided that in addition to some of the better-known duels that I needed to cover, I had to give readers a lot of material that they hadn’t seen before. Some of this I found by randomly browsing through old memoirs. I also translated a number of accounts. The New York Public Library has some rare French, Spanish, and Italian books on dueling, and although I couldn’t read them, I could recognize enough words to get a sense of their content. If I saw the word for “sword” or “pistol” recurring frequently in an account, I knew it had good detail on the fight. I took the best prospects, transcribed them, ran them through a computer translation program, and then made sense of the results with a foreign language dictionary. While no one wants to do translation for nothing, I did find bilingual people who were willing to proof the results.

I also located a lot of material through the Internet. I searched the online catalog of the British Library and had books and articles copied and sent to me; some of this material is held by no other public library on earth. There are Web sites such as thearma.org, run by Paladin author John Clements (Renaissance Swordsmanship, Medieval Swordsmanship), that present dozens of rare early fencing manuals in their entirety. Sites such as “Project Gutenberg” and Cornell University Library’s “Making of America” contain thousands of pre-20th century e-text books and journals that can be searched. The online chat rooms maintained by enthusiasts of everything from classical fencing to black powder shooting were also of tremendous help. By checking e-Bay every few days over the course of several years, I was able to collect the old prints with which the book is illustrated.

It wasn’t particularly difficult to write about the pistol duels because I’ve done enough shooting to understand the technical aspects, but swordplay was another matter. I really had to bone up on it. In the past 10 years there have been major advances in the understanding of historical fencing techniques, led by John Clements, J. Christoph Amberger, and others, which have made most of the earlier scholarship obsolete. In addition to studying this new material, I took a fencing course in order to get some idea of what fighting with the sword was like.

PALADIN: How would you describe the focus of your book?
PK: I titled it Dueling with the Sword and Pistol rather than just Dueling to stress that it focuses on the fights and the weapons rather than on legal, moral, or sociological issues. There are some real oddities among the sword and pistol duels I describe, such as a quadruple saber duel fought by a Spanish officer in 1827 and a pistol duel fought between high-ranking Nazi officers in 1937. I also have a section on variations, including dueling on horseback, the German student duel, the differences between the Old West shootout and the duel, the bowie knife duel, the "American" or suicide duel, and the custom of caning an opponent who was considered unworthy to fight. Following that, I include in-depth profiles of three habitual duelists, or “fire-eaters,” as they were called: Peter Drake, Alexander McClung, and Benito Mussolini. I end with an account of the most notorious duelist of all, "Fighting" Fitzgerald, who is estimated to have fought 26 times.

PALADIN: What criteria did you use to decide which stories to include?
PK: First, veracity. I rejected a lot of good stories because I didn’t believe they were true, whether because of internal inconsistencies or lack of corroboration. After that, I looked for detail. When someone tells you about a fight, you want to know exactly what happened—the proverbial blow-by-blow description. To whatever extent possible, you want to know what went through the participants’ minds, what preparations they made, what tactics they used, what proved effective, and what unexpected contingencies arose. This kind of detail is only available in first-person or eyewitness accounts, so I relied on those as much as possible. Another criterion was distinctiveness. I didn’t want numerous accounts of duels that were too similar; each had to be different in a way that added something meaningful to the overall picture. Finally, each had to be dramatically compelling—“a good story.”

PALADIN: What kind of audience is your book aimed at?
PK: I think it should appeal to a broad range of readers because the material is inherently exciting. These are tales of mortal combat, and, as William James put it, “The possibility of violent death is the soul of all romance.” Anyone who enjoyed The Deadliest Men would probably enjoy Dueling with the Sword and Pistol. At the same time, I think it should be of interest to serious students of dueling and fencing, since it contains so many fresh accounts. I was very pleased when John Clements told me that he couldn’t believe how many dueling stories I uncovered that he’d never seen before, and that even the stories with which he was familiar included a number of details that were new to him.

PALADIN: Is there anything you uncovered that gave you particular satisfaction?
PK: I think the chapter of which I am most proud is the one on Mussolini’s duels because that took the greatest amount of detective work. From biographies of Mussolini, I knew he had fought a number of duels in his youth, but there were no details. By searching the index of the LondonTimes I got articles on them, but they were column-filler-type blurbs, useless except for providing the specific dates. It occurred to me that since Mussolini was a newspaper editor at the time of his duels, he had probably published accounts of them. The Yale library has Mussolini’s newspaper on microfilm, and I was able to find these articles, which included the complete “minutes” written by the seconds. I cajoled a friend into getting her Italian father to translate them and then checked the accuracy of the fencing terms through an online fencing group. This is material that has never before appeared in English, and it gives me a lot of satisfaction to be able to present it.

PALADIN: At the end of this project, how did you come down on dueling—pro or con?
PK: There are things I like about dueling. It made politicians and journalists accountable for what they said; if you weren’t willing to back up your words, you had no credibility. I like the emphasis on physical courage, which I think gave the elite a steeliness that it lacks today. Even in dueling’s heyday it had its critics, but its defenders argued that without the duel there could be no honor. It seems to me that the latter view has been vindicated—the duel is gone and honor with it. That said, I don’t think anyone could read these accounts and not ask himself, “What were they thinking?” So much of what passed for honor was just puffed-up vanity and insane touchiness. There were bullies, called bretteurs or fire-eaters, who enjoyed insulting other men just to provoke them to fight. A lot of disputes grew out of drunken quarrels rather than anything serious. Acting under the pressure of their peers, friends might fight over a minor slight or disagreement that should have been laughed off; one would kill the other and have to live with the guilt. The waste of life was often tragic. As much as I’d like to see certain politicians, media types, and performers have to face their opponents pistol in hand, I’d have to say that we’re better off without the code duello.

PALADIN: Do you have anything in the works that might interest Paladin readers?
PK: I’m already pretty far along on volume two of The Deadliest Men. There were a number of people I didn’t include in the first, not because they didn’t belong but because I wanted to have only so many entries of the same type, and there are just too many remarkable Old West gunfighters, World War I aces, and World War II combat infantrymen. In addition, I’ve learned about a number of good candidates since I finished that book .The Deadliest Men II will also include more fighters who are alive today . I think my chapter on Lance Thomas, the Los Angeles jeweler who killed five attackers in the course of four armed robberies, was probably the best one in the original book because I had the opportunity to interview him, and I’m planning to do more of that.

By the way, anyone who has suggestions about people I may have overlooked in the first book may contact me through Paladin or at deadliestmen@yahoo .com. I’d be delighted to hear from them.

DUELING WITH THE SWORD AND PISTOL
400 Years of One-on-One Combat

DEADLIEST MEN
The World’s Deadliest Combatants throughout the Ages