Hawk Carse

As many are aware of, this movie is based on/inspired by the short story "Farewell to the Master" (1940) by Harry Bates.

But Bates was also involved in the writing of the Hawk Carse stories:

Under the pseudonym of Anthony Gilmore, Harry Bates wrote the Hawk Carse series with Desmond W. Hall.

Boucher and McComas described the 1952 collection as "strongly commended to all connoisseurs of prose so outrageously bad as to reach its own kind of greatness". P. Schuyler Miller described the stories as "space opera of the old, raw, gloves-off school including every cliche of the period," concluding "Hawk Carse was so bad that he was almost good." Everett F. Bleiler characterized the series as "the Hawk Carse stories, which are dated vaguely as in the period A. D. 2117-2148, are for all practical purposes traditional pulp Western stories transplanted into space, with the addition of an Oriental villain in the mode of Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu. While stories by other authors have approached this same aesthetic, the Hawk Carse series is a typological extreme."
"Despite its popularity at the time, the Hawk Carse stories so epitomized all that was bad about interplanetary fiction, that nothing of the kind could follow it. To produce any type of interplanetary story after 1932 writers had to take an intelligent new approach to the theme."

"Hawk Carse", Astounding, November, 1931
"The Affair of the Brains", Astounding, March, 1932
"The Bluff of the Hawk", Astounding, May, 1932
"The Passing of Ku Sui", Astounding, November, 1932

Ten years later, Amazing Stories printed the final Hawk Carse novelette, The Return of Hawk Carse, written by Bates alone. This story has never been collected or reprinted.
"The Return of Hawk Carse", Amazing, July, 1942

While stories by other authors have approached this same aesthetic, the Hawk Carse series takes the premise to the extreme. Hawk Carse, "the greatest adventurer in space," "he of the spitting ray gun and the phenomenal draw," is so fast and so accurate with either hand that in face-to-face duels he permits his enemies to draw their weapons before he shoots neat holes in their foreheads. Four- and five-to-one odds are nothing to the Hawk. In this expertise the Hawk excels his cowboy prototypes. Carse is cold, icy, and passionless, except for anger when harassed by badmen.

For his trusty steed the Hawk has the Star Devil, the fastest ship in space, designed by his friend and associate Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow. For a faithful companion, the Hawk has the giant black man Friday.

The Hawk's ultimate purpose is revenge for an injury done to him in the past, a wound that necessitates his wearing his hair in bangs over his forehead.

The Hawk's counterbalance and relentless foe is the diabolic Eurasian scientific genius Ku Sui. A monster of evil, he is the overlord of gangs of space pirates and similar criminals. He is the master of strange knowledges and tortures, and only the Hawk can stand against him.