Christian Bale rides with Todd Field in The Creed of Violence

We first wrote about The Creed of Violence in October 2009 when we heard director Todd Fields had turned his attention away from trying to adapt Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and was looking for a similar property. Now that Christian Bale may be signing on to star, this long-delayed project might finally be gearing up. A bleak and nihilistic western in the same vein as The Wild Bunch, Boston Teran’s Creed of Violence is a rawboned novel about assassins, gun runners and frontier law enforcement on the Texas border during the 1910 Mexican Revolution. How rawboned is it? The main protagonist is named Rawbone. Hollywood should take a look at Teran’s first books too, God is Bullet and Never Count Out the Dead, two of the darkest nightmare noir novels I’ve ever read.

Mexico, 1910. The landscape pulses with the force of the upcoming revolution, an atmosphere rich in opportunity for a criminal such as Rawbone. His fortune arrives across the haze of the Sierra Blanca in the form of a truck loaded with weapons, an easy sell to those financing a bloodletting.

But Rawbone’s plan spins against him, and he soon finds himself at the Mexican-American border and in the hands of the Bureau of Investigation. He is offered a chance for immunity, but only if he agrees to proceed with his scheme to deliver the truck and its goods to the Mexican oil fields while under the command of Agent John Lourdes. Rawbone sees no other option and agrees to the deal—but he fails to recognize the true identity of Agent Lourdes, a man from deep within his past.

As they work to expose the criminal network at the core of the revolution, it is clear their journey into the tarred desert is a push toward a certain ruin, and the history lurking between the criminal and agent may seal their fates.