Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, October 10, 1935

This issue of SHORT STORIES features a good French Foreign Legion cover by Pete Kuhlhoff, although he's credited as E.H. Kuhlhoff. He was a good artist, as you can see here, but he's best remembered as a gun expert who contributed scores of articles and columns on the subject to various pulps. This issue has an excellent group of writers inside, as well: Clarence E. Mulford, Frank Richardson Pierce, J. Allan Dunn, James B. Hendryx, Bob Du Soe, Richard Howells Watkins, Henry Herbert Knibbs, and forgotten pulpsters Perry Adams, Alexander Lake, and Don Cameron Shafer. Plenty of good reading in those pages, I'll bet.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Novel and Short Stories, December 1934

A poker game interrupted by gunplay and a good-looking, gun-toting redhead . . . Yep, that's got to be a Western pulp cover. The artist is probably Sidney Riesenberg. This issue of WESTERN NOVEL AND SHORT STORIES lives up to its name, as most of the pages are occupied by Clarence E. Mulford's novel HOPALONG CASSIDY RETURNS (actually a reprint from a 1923 issue of ARGOSY ALLSTORY WEEKLY). Backing up Hoppy are a couple of stories by Lloyd Eric Reeve and Samuel Taylor. I've read that Mulford novel in book form, but it's been so long ago I don't remember a thing about it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Novel and Short Stories, August 1934

Here's a Sidney Riesenberg cover I like a little more than the one on last Saturday's Western pulp. This issue of WESTERN NOVEL AND SHORT STORIES lives up to its name. Most of the pages are occupied by Clarence E. Mulford's Hopalong Cassidy novel "Black Buttes". I don't know if it was abridged for this pulp appearance. Even at 98 pages of double-columned small print, it probably was. Backing it up are two stories, one by Raymond W. Porter (who I've heard of but never read, as far as I recall) and James Corson (who I've never heard of). 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Greater Western Magazine, June 1935

Considering the five authors in this issue of GREATER WESTERN MAGAZINE, all with new stories, apparently, it's a little odd who gets top billing on the cover: Rollin Brown. Now, as far as I know, Brown was a prolific, well-respected Western pulpster who ghosted for Ed Earl Repp as well as writing a lot under his own name. But deserving of top billing over Max Brand, Clarence E. Mulford (with a Hopalong Cassidy story, to boot!), and J. Allan Dunn? I wouldn't think so. The fifth author is Ralph Cummins, also a prolific, long-time pulpster but not a household name then or now.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, October 25, 1935

Another good-looking issue of SHORT STORIES with a fine Mountie cover by Frank Spradling and stories by the all-star line-up of H. Bedford-Jones, Clarence E. Mulford, Harry Sinclair Drago, L. Patrick Greene, Hapsburg Liebe, S. Omar Barker, and Richard Howells Watkins. SHORT STORIES was always a high quality pulp.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Best Western, September 1935

The inaugural issue of this pulp had quite a line-up of authors: Max Brand, Clarence E. Mulford (with a Hopalong Cassidy story), J. Allan Dunn, Frank Richardson Pierce, and Paul Evan Lehman. Hard to imagine how many millions of hours of Western entertainment those five authors have provided for readers over the years.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Hopalong Cassidy's Western Magazine, Winter 1951

We now know, of course, that the four Hopalong Cassidy novels published in this short-lived pulp under the pseudonym "Tex Burns" were actually the work of Louis L'Amour, which isn't surprising considering that during the late Forties and early Fifties L'Amour was a prolific contributor to all the Western pulps in the Thrilling Group and was a favorite of editorial director Leo Margulies. I'm not the biggest L'Amour fan in the world (although there was a time when I was), but I've read his Hopalong novels and they're pretty good balancing acts between Clarence E. Mulford's original character (which was the way L'Amour wanted to write them) and the movie version of Hoppy popularized by William Boyd (which was what Margulies wanted). And this is a nice cover featuring Boyd-as-Hoppy by George Rozen.

Forgotten Books: Hopalong Cassidy - Clarence E. Mulford

A lot of you probably know the name Hopalong Cassidy (well, fewer than knew it fifty or sixty or seventy years ago when the Hopalong Cassidy movies and TV show and comic books were hugely popular), but I’m guessing that not many of you have read the Hopalong Cassidy novels by Clarence E. Mulford. The gritty, somewhat profane Hoppy character in the books was considerably different from the clean-cut movie hero played by William Boyd. For the record, I like both versions just fine.

HOPALONG CASSIDY isn’t the first book in the series, but it’s my favorite. I read it for the first time during the summer I turned 11, which was a great time to do so. It has some of that mushy love stuff in it, as Hoppy meets and falls for a girl named Mary, if I recall correctly. Mainly, though, it’s about fighting rustlers who are after the Bar-20 cattle (Hoppy doesn’t own the Bar-20 ranch in the books, he just works there), and there are gunfights galore. Those shootouts take a back seat, though, to the final battle between the Bar-20 cowboys and the rustlers, who are holed up on top of a mesa. I’m going by memory here because I haven’t reread the book in a number of years, but it seems to me that this epic conflict takes up something like the final hundred pages of the book and approaches Homeric heights before it’s over. My blood’s racing a little faster just thinking about it and remembering what it was like to read it for the first time when I was eleven years old. I’ve read it a couple of times since then and remember enjoying it both times, although it’s hard to match that first thrill.

Mulford was an Easterner who hadn’t been to the West when he began writing these yarns, but he was acquainted with genuine Westerners and was a diligent researcher, eventually amassing a card file with more than 10,000 entries covering Western history, geography, language, weapons, etc. His first Cassidy novel, BAR-20, is a fix-up of magazine stories published in 1907, and the characters continued appearing in novels and stories until Mulford’s death in the Forties. He also wrote a series about a rancher and deputy sheriff named Bob Corson, as well as several stand-alone Western novels. I haven’t read everything he wrote, by any means, but I’ve read quite a bit and enjoyed all of it. Yes, the prose and the plotting are a little old-fashioned, but if that doesn’t bother you I don’t think you’ll go wrong with just about anything by Clarence E. Mulford. A number of his books were reprinted by Forge during the Nineties, so they’re not that hard to find.