Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, December 1954

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my taped, trimmed, and tattered copy in the scan, but other than being beat up, it’s intact and fully readable. The cover art is by Sam Cherry, as usual during this era of TEXAS RANGERS. It’s not one of his better covers, in my opinion, but it’s certainly not bad. I don’t think Cherry was capable of painting a bad cover.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue, “El Diablo’s Treasure”, is by Roe Richmond. I’ve mentioned many times in the past that Richmond’s Hatfield novels aren’t really to my taste, but I read one now and then anyway because he was a pretty good writer otherwise. This one starts out very promising. Hatfield is in Del Rio, on the Texas-Mexico border, and is already in the middle of his current assignment. He’s supposed to accompany a famous archeologist, the man’s beautiful daughter, and a young mining engineer who’s engaged to the girl, as they search for a famous lost mine in the Sierra Madre of Mexico. Not only is there the potential for gold, but the mine also is supposed to be the hiding place for a fortune in gems left there a couple of hundred years earlier.

Unfortunately, the arrangement with Mexico calls for the party to be escorted by a troop of Rurales commanded by an officer who is actually little more than a bandit, and there’s a gang of actual bandits roaming the area where the search is to take place. Throw in the fact that the archeologist’s daughter is a beautiful hellcat with her eye on Hatfield, angering her fiancée, and there’s plenty going on to wind up with Hatfield getting plenty of trouble heaped on his head.

That’s exactly what happens, as Richmond provides plenty of gritty, well-written fistfights, shootouts, and even some epic battles. There’s quite a bit to like in this novel. However, Richmond makes a serious misstep by never providing any sort of interesting backstory for the fortune that’s supposed to be hidden in the mine. It’s just sort of there, with a couple of vague hints that maybe the Conquistadores left it. There’s also no mention of anyone known as El Diablo, let alone an explanation of why it’s his treasure. Was Richmond simply referring to the Devil? Who knows?

My main objection to Richmond’s Hatfield novels is the presence of the annoying sidekicks he introduced to the series. Hatfield is called the Lone Wolf for a reason! Thankfully, although those characters are mentioned once, they play no part in this novel.

Ultimately, “El Diablo’s Treasure” isn’t a bad yarn. But Richmond shares something with Joseph Chadwick: he just doesn’t have a feel for the Jim Hatfield character. Hatfield never really seems like the same person who’s in the novels by Leslie Scott, Tom Curry, Walker Tompkins, and Peter Germano. If this had been a stand-alone with a totally different Texas Ranger, it would have been a better story. As is, it’s worth reading but not a great example of the series.

“War Bonnets in Wyoming” is a cavalry yarn by Gordon D. Shirreffs, one of the best all-around Western writers who was especially good in the cavalry sub-genre. In this one, the captain who’s in charge of establishing a new fort saves the life of a young Shoshone brave who’s being pursued by hostile Arapahoes. Will this be enough to save the lives of the captain, an Indian agent’s beautiful daughter, and a troop of cavalry later on? I think we know the answer to that, but Shirreffs is such a good writer it doesn’t matter. This story doesn’t have a lot of action, but it’s very suspenseful and I enjoyed it.

Harry Harrison Kroll isn’t somebody I think of as a Western writer. He wrote non-fiction about folklore and Americana, and his fiction is usually of the backwoods, hillbilly variety. But he made a few appearances in Western pulps, including the story “Catchers is Keepers” in this issue. It’s not actually a Western, though. It’s about a riverman on the Mississippi who finds a valuable raft and tries to salvage it, only to end up with trouble and a beautiful girl (but I repeat myself). Out of place though it may be, this is a fairly entertaining story.

Frank Castle got his start in the business assisting and ghosting for Western author Tom W. Blackburn, then went on to write dozens of stories under his own name for the Western pulps in the late Forties through the mid-Fifties. After that he became one of the most reliable novelists in the business, turning out books by the score: Westerns, hardboiled crime, nurse novels, soft-core novels, movie novelizations, and a lot of juvenile TV tie-in novels for Whitman under the name Cole Fannin. I’ve always thought Cole Fannin would have been a great Western pseudonym, but Castle chose to use Steve Thurman instead for the Westerns he didn’t publish under his real name. He also wrote some of the Lassiter novels under the house-name Jack Slade. I really like his work, so I was glad to see that he has a novelette in this issue called “Wild Night in Dodge”.

And a wild night it is. Dodge City is past its hell-raising peak since the railhead has long since moved on westward, but plenty of trouble is lurking there anyway for Kelly Shannon, who brings in a herd from Colorado. Before you know it, he’s met a beautiful redhead who looks just like a long-dead lover of his from Texas, he’s been accused of cheating at cards, he’s been blackjacked and knocked out, and he’s had ten thousand dollars stolen from him. And that’s just the start of a night full of fights, shootouts, double-crosses, and nefarious plans.

This is a terrific story, a 1950s Gold Medal Western novel in miniature. It’s got a hardboiled hero, a beautiful girl, and despicable villains everywhere Kelly Shannon turns. Frank Castle developed a very distinctive style that makes his later novels easy to identify, but it’s just in the formative stages here. The story races along and comes to a satisfying conclusion, and it just makes me want to read more by Castle. 

“Bedlam on the Box X” is by Ben Frank, the author of the Doc Swap series and a writer whose work I’ve grown to heartily dislike. This isn’t a Doc Swap story, so I had a little hope for it, but it’s the same sort of cutesy, allegedly humorous story and I gave up on it after a few pages. Ben Frank just isn’t for me, and I think I’m going to stop trying to read his stories. (I felt the same way about Syl McDowell’s Swap and Whopper series and finally warmed up to it, but I don’t believe it’s going to happen with Ben Frank.)

I don’t know a thing about Garold Hartsock except that he published a couple of dozen stories, mostly Westerns and a few detective stories, in the pulps during the Forties and Fifties. His story “Feud” in this issue is a grim tale about feuding families in Oregon and includes a stereotypical Romeo-and-Juliet element. Hartsock’s writing is pretty good, though, and he kept me turning the pages to the end, which was a major letdown. So, not bad, but not particularly good, either.

And that’s a pretty accurate description of this issue of TEXAS RANGERS, too. The Frank Castle novelette is superb, and the Shirreffs cavalry yarn is very good and well worth reading, too. The Hatfield novel is okay if you’re not expecting too much but frustrating in that it could have been much better, although if you just want to sample one of Richmond’s novels, this would be a good pick because the sidekicks aren’t in it. Otherwise, I’d say that if you own this one, read Castle and Shirreffs and skip the rest.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Ace High Stories, February 1954

WESTERN ACE HIGH STORIES was one of the last Western pulps from Popular Publications and managed only six issues in 1953 and 1954. It's not to be confused with ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, which was published by Clayton and then Dell from 1921 to 1935, then from 1936 to 1951 by Popular Publications, where it was known variously as ACE-HIGH WESTERN MAGAZINE, ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, and ACE-HIGH WESTERN STORIES. WESTERN ACE HIGH STORIES, which we're concerned with today, lacks the hyphen in the title. Maybe Popular was trying to cash in on some nostalgia for the earlier versions when they brought back a similar title in '53-'54, or maybe they just had a lot of stories in inventory they needed to burn off. I don't think the cover of this issue is a particularly good one, but it is another example of the iconic "poker game interrupted by a fight" scene that's so common on Western pulps. There are actually some really good authors in this issue: Gordon D. Shirreffs, Frank Castle, J.L. Bouma, Roe Richmond, Bruce Cassiday, and house-names Lance Kermit and David Crewe. I suspect Bouma wrote one or both of those house-name yarns, but that's just a guess on my part. Really, the authors could be almost anybody. I don't own this issue, and I don't recall ever seeing any issues of WESTERN ACE HIGH STORIES. That's a lineup of authors worth reading, though. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, May 1952

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The cover art is by Sam Cherry. The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue has some historical significance in the series as it’s the first one attributed to Peter B. Germano (best remembered for his novels under the pseudonym Barry Cord). Germano would go on to be one of the primary authors of the series during the Fifties, contributing 16 Hatfield novels, behind only Walker A. Tompkins (24 Hatfields during the Fifties, 28 overall) and Roe Richmond (22 Hatfields).

In “Secret of Dry Valley”, the plot finds Hatfield traveling to the Texas Panhandle in answer to a summons for help from an old friend of his boss, Captain Bill McDowell. When he gets there, he finds that the old friend (and former Ranger) has disappeared, and there’s a war brewing between the local cattle baron and a saloon owner who carry old grudges against each other. Working undercover, Hatfield survives a couple of bushwhackings, a pair of fistfights, and showdowns against fast on the draw gunslicks. Along the way to figuring out what’s really going on, he rescues a beautiful young woman (yes, she’s the cattle baron’s daughter) from quicksand. (In the immortal words of Bill Crider, quicksand makes any story better.) Hatfield triumphs in the end, of course, after some nice action scenes.

“Secret of Dry Valley” reads in some ways like an author’s first novel in an established series. It seems to me to be influenced by the work of the series’ two primary authors before this point, Leslie Scott and Tom Curry, and it’s likely that Germano read at least a few of their entries before tackling a Hatfield novel of his own. There’s a proxy hero whose job is to help Hatfield and wind up with the girl, a character type who shows up in nearly all of Curry’s Hatfield novels. The main plot point revolves around geography and an engineering problem, as in many of Scott’s Hatfield novels. There’s no mention of Hatfield’s engineering training in college before he became a Ranger, but he demonstrates such knowledge in solving the mystery.

At the same time, indications that this yarn is by a new author show up here and there. Hatfield is often referred to the narrative as “Jim”, something the other authors hardly ever do. He’s dressed in a suit, white shirt, and string tie throughout the novel, very different from the range clothes he usually wears. I can see doing that if there’s a good reason for it in the plot, but there’s not. He’s supposed to be working undercover, and yet he gives his real name to everybody he encounters. Eventually, some of the other characters remember there’s a famous Texas Ranger known as the Lone Wolf whose name is Jim Hatfield, but it takes a long time.

Despite those quibbles, “Secret of Dry Valley” is a pretty entertaining story. It has a little of the terse yet poetic, hardboiled prose that will become more common in Germano’s later entries in the series. The action is good, the settings are rendered fairly vividly, and there are a few small but effective plot twists. Germano’s Hatfield novels got better as he went along, but “Secret of Dry Valley” is a good solid start and well worth reading.

“El Soldado” is a short story by the always reliable Gordon D. Shirreffs. It's a Civil War tale set in New Mexico, in which a lone Union soldier tries to prevent a gang of Confederate irregulars from making off with a bunch of vital supplies. Shirreffs wrote several novels about the Civil War in the West, and while the plot in this story is a little thin because of its length, the writing is excellent.

The novelette “The Unholy Grail” is a Prodigal Son story by Roe Richmond. After his older brother is gunned down, Mike Grail, a fast gun and hellraising drifter dubbed by his father The Unholy Grail, returns home to help his family survive a feud with some old enemies. This is also a Romeo and Juliet story since Mike is in love with the daughter of his father’s arch-nemesis, and one of the sons from the rival family is in love with Mike’s sister. Richmond’s work is usually hit-or-miss with me, but this one lands squarely in the middle. The characters are interesting and there are some good action scenes, but the writing often seems rushed. I think this story might have been better as a novella or even a novel. It needed more room to develop.

“William and the Contract Buck” by Jim Kjelgaard is a bit of an oddity, a short story about some city slickers trying to put one over on a dumb hillbilly—but is he? This is well-written, as Kjelgaard’s stories always are, but there’s really not much to it and it’s out of place in a Western pulp. I think it must have been aimed at the slicks, or possibly at ADVENTURE, and sold to the Thrilling Group when it was rejected elsewhere. But that’s just a guess on my part.

Jim O’Mara was the pseudonym of Vernon Fluharty, who also wrote Westerns under the name Michael Carder. His story in this issue, “When the Sun Goes Down”, is about a looming showdown between a brutal town-taming lawman and a young former outlaw who’s trying to go straight. There’s some very nice action in this story, but it doesn’t come until after Fluharty has explored the complex personalities of several well-rounded characters. This is a superb story, extremely well-written, and it comes to a very satisfying conclusion. Fluharty is another writer who’s pretty inconsistent, in my opinion, but he really nailed this one. I loved it.

The issue wraps up with “Riddle of the Wastelands” by A. Leslie, who was really our old friend Alexander Leslie Scott, of course. This tale is about a young cowboy trying to figure out how the cattle stolen by rustlers are mysteriously disappearing. He does so, of course, and sets a trap for the wideloopers that results in a big gun battle. It’s the sort of thing Scott did countless times, but he does it very well in this one and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Overall, I’d say this is an average issue of TEXAS RANGERS, but you have to remember, “average” for this pulp is pretty darned good. The Hatfield novel is enjoyable, although Germano did better work later on in the series culminating in “Rendezvous at Quito” in the next-to-the-last issue, January 1958, which is one of my all-time favorite Hatfield yarns. The stories by Shirreffs and Scott are dependably good, the ones by Richmond and Kjelgaard somewhat disappointing. But I had a good time reading this one and look forward to reading another issue of TEXAS RANGERS in the near future.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, October 1952

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, featuring the usual excellent cover by Sam Cherry. That guy must have been tireless. He turned out a ton of pulp and paperback covers, all of them fine work.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue of TEXAS RANGERS has been attributed to Joseph Chadwick. It begins with Hatfield receiving a mysterious assignment from not only his regular Ranger boss, Cap’n Bill McDowell, but also from the governor of Texas his own self. In a clandestine meeting at the Capitol in Austin, the governor tells Hatfield to go to Fort Worth, check into a hotel there, and wait for someone to contact him and use the code word “Alamo”. It’s an intriguing opening.

Before you know it, there’s a beautiful girl involved, too, and Hatfield finds himself on a vast ranch in the Texas Panhandle impersonating the grandson of the owner and trying to get to the bottom of a deadly plot against the old-timer.

Having read a number of Chadwick’s non-series stories, I can easily believe that he wrote this Jim Hatfield novel. The story is extremely violent and hardboiled, and Hatfield comes in for a considerable amount of punishment, both physical and emotional. Chadwick always put his protagonists through the wringer, so this fits right in with his work. With a different character, this would have been a terrific novel.

But as a Jim Hatfield novel, it’s terrible. Chadwick’s grasp of the character and the series is fine up to a certain point: there are appearances by Cap’n Bill and Hatfield’s horse Goldy, and he refers to Hatfield as the Lone Wolf fairly often. But again and again, especially in the second half of the story, Chadwick has Hatfield doing things that he just doesn’t do in the stories by most of the other authors who wrote as Jackson Cole. He’s slow on the draw, he gets beaten up too easily, he gets too involved with the girl in the story, and he even talks about maneuvering one of the bad guys into a position where it’ll be easy to kill him. Quite a few years ago, I read another of Chadwick’s Hatfield yarns, “Death Rides the Star Route”, and while I don’t recall the details, I remember being displeased with it, too. I suspect it was for the same reasons. I believe he wrote only one other Hatfield novel, and I have a hunch I won’t be reading it any time soon, if ever.

“Spring Storm” is a short story by the prolific pulpster Giff Cheshire. I haven’t read a great deal by him, but I’ve found his work to be a little inconsistent, with a lot of it on the bland side. This yarn about a cattleman trying to drive off a nester fits that description, despite the fact that there’s some action. One of the supporting characters, an old cowboy, is very well-written and also redeems the story to a certain extent.

“The Sheriff Buys a Ring” is by Julian Hammer, one of only two stories credited to him in the Fictionmags Index. The title makes it sound like a comedy, but it’s actually a fairly hardboiled tale about a secret in a lawman’s past coming back to haunt him. It’s no lost classic, but it’s not bad.

“Double Dick and the Widow Woman” also sounds like a comedy, and it is. The author is Lee Priestly, and it’s the fourth and final story in a short series about old prospector Double Dick Richards, who roams around his with burro and pet cat getting into various scrapes. This one features a young cowboy who trades in his horse for a motorcycle and an attractive widow woman who owns a ranch plagued by rustlers. Hijinks, romantic and otherwise, ensue. This story isn’t particularly funny, although it’s supposed to be, but it’s mildly amusing in places and a lot more readable than some Western pulp humor I’ve encountered.

Not surprisingly, the best story in this issue is by Gordon D. Shirreffs. His novelette “Apache Ambush” is set in New Mexico and Arizona during the Civil War and finds a young Union army lieutenant battling Confederate spies and marauding Apaches. There’s a beautiful young woman to rescue and a massacre of Union troops to prevent. A colorful old-timer who is a civilian scout is on hand to help out, too. Shirreffs keeps things racing along with plenty of gritty action scenes and does his usual excellent job with the southwestern setting. This is a suspenseful, thoroughly entertaining yarn.

Charles A. Stearns wrote mostly science fiction for the pulps and digests in the Fifties, but he turned out a few Western stories as well. “Duel at Sundown” in this issue is a short but well-written story about a young man, the son of a legendary lawman, trying to work up the courage to face his first gunfight. It’s an effective tale with a twist ending that I didn’t see coming.

Finally, “Men of Steel” is a late pulp story from the prolific A. Leslie Scott, writing here as A. Leslie. He had already started writing paperbacks and would concentrate on that for the next two decades. In this one, set on the Texas coast along Matagorda Bay, the hero is Sheriff Neale Ross, who is trying to track down a gang of sheep rustlers believed by the local Mexican herders to be ghosts because they wear Conquistador armor. It’s a similar plot to ones that Scott used many times, but the descriptive writing is vivid and the action scenes are great. It’s a minor but very enjoyable yarn. And it got a new life when Scott rewrote it as the first chapter and a half of his Walt Slade novel BULLETS FOR A RANGER, published by Pyramid Books in 1963. The hero in that version is Texas Ranger Walt Slade, of course, with Sheriff Ross becoming a supporting character. I own that novel but I don’t think I’ve ever read it. Maybe now I should.

I’d say that, judged as a whole, this is a below-average issue of TEXAS RANGERS because the Jim Hatfield novel just doesn’t work very well, and only the stories by Shirreffs and Scott are really outstanding among the backup stories. As always, I’m glad to have read it, but I hope the next issue I pick up off the shelves will be better.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, April 1954

This is a pulp I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with the usual excellent, evocative cover by Sam Cherry.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue is “The Seventh Bullet”, written by Walker A. Tompkins under the Jackson Cole house name. Tompkins was the third-most prolific author of Hatfield novels after Leslie Scott (who created the series) and Tom Curry, who between them wrote a little more than half the series’ entire run. Tompkins wrote a bunch of them, though, and the ones I’ve read have ranged from very good to excellent.

By the Fifties, the Hatfield stories were a little grittier and more realistic than the ones from the Thirties and Forties, and “The Seventh Bullet” is no exception. As it opens, Hatfield is in a West Texas cowtown to pick up a prisoner: a member of a counterfeiting/smuggling ring that has been flooding the country with fake ten-dollar gold pieces. The prisoner also murdered the local sheriff, leaving the lawman’s beautiful blond daughter to pin on the badge and take the varmint into custody.

Hatfield’s mission seems simple: deliver the prisoner to Austin. But of course, things don’t work out that way. The prisoner is rescued by a shadowy gunman wielding a six-shooter that somehow fires seven bullets instead of the usual six. Naturally, Hatfield’s not going to let a prisoner get away, and in the process of going after him, the Ranger sets out to bust up the counterfeiting ring and discover the mastermind behind it.

Tompkins keeps things moving along at a brisk pace with plenty of action, and as usual, he throws in some clever plot twists, too, such as the method the villains use to smuggle the phony coins into the country. “The Seventh Bullet” isn’t in the top rank of Tompkins’ Hatfield novels, but it’s a solid, very entertaining yarn.

Moving on to the backup stories, first up is a short story entitled “The Brass Ring”, by an author whose work I’m not very fond of, Ben Frank. This is a stand-alone, not part of Frank’s two series featuring Doc Swap and Deputy Booboo Bounce. It’s a mild little comedy, the sort of thing Frank specialized in, featuring a good-hearted rancher who’s too much of an easy touch for hard-luck stories and is always broke because of it. It’s really predictable but pleasant enough that I read the whole thing.

“Ride to Tucson” by W.J. Reynolds couldn’t be more of a contrast. This is a grim, violent, suspenseful yarn about a man and woman trying to escape from a band of marauding Apaches in Arizona Territory. I’ve read several stories by W.J. Reynolds and been impressed by them. This is another good one. I don’t know anything about Reynolds except that between the mid-Forties and the early Seventies, he wrote about 120 Western and crime stories for assorted pulps, digests, and men’s magazines. I’m always glad to see his name in a Table of Contents.

George Kilrain was a pseudonym used by one of my favorite Western writers, William Heuman, for approximately 30 stories in various Western and sports pulps in the decade between the mid-Forties and the mid-Fifties. The Kilrain novelette in this issue, “Too Tough”, is, in fact, the final story to be published under that name. And it features one of the most unusual protagonists I’ve come across in Western pulps: a two-fisted, fast-shootin’ ventriloquist. Sad Sam Bones is a vaudeville performer, a comedian and song-and-dance-man as well as a ventriloquist, who travels the West performing with different theatrical troupes and also righting wrongs. In this tale, he helps out a theater owner in a mining boomtown whose shows keep getting sabotaged. This results in a number of fistfights and shootouts in which Sad Sam’s enemies keep underestimating him because, going by his description, he looks a lot like Don Knotts. And how I would have loved to see Don play the part on TV! Anyway, the ending of this story really makes it seem like Heuman intended it to be the first of a series, but as far as I know, it’s Sad Sam’s only appearance. That’s a shame, because this is a great story and I really enjoyed it. (Heuman also used the Kilrain name on two novels, SOUTH TO SANTA FE and MAVERICK WITH A STAR, both published as halves of Ace Doubles.)

You know Gordon D. Shirreffs’ work is nearly always good. He rounds out this issue with the short story “The Hollow Hero”, about a deputy marshal’s clash with a notorious gunman recently released from a 20-year stretch in Yuma Prison. The man claims he wants to go straight and even opens a law office, but are his old killer instincts still there just waiting to be unleashed? This one has a decent plot, some nice action, and a clever resolution. It’s minor Shirreffs, but that’s still pretty darned good.

Overall, this is an exceptional issue of TEXAS RANGERS with a good Jim Hatfield novel, a terrific story by William Heuman, and solid yarns by Gordon D. Shirreffs and W.J. Reynolds. Even the Ben Frank story is inoffensive and mildly entertaining. If you’re a TEXAS RANGERS fan and have this one on your shelves, it’s well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Action-Packed Western, September 1954

Action-packed, indeed. ACTION-PACKED WESTERN was one of the Columbia Publications pulps edited by Robert A.W. Lowndes on a very low budget. But he always got good writers despite the pay rates. This issue includes stories by Gordon D. Shirreffs, Seven Anderton, A.A. Baker, Gene Rodgers, and Lowndes himself writing under the name John Lackland. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Frontier Stories, Spring 1951

I don't know who did the dynamic cover on this issue of FRONTIER STORIES. Possibly Allan Anderson, based on the way the horse looks. The group of authors inside is certainly a good one, though: Gordon D. Shirreffs, William R. Cox, Frank Castle, Bennett Foster, John Jo Carpenter (John Reese), and a couple of lesser-known authors, Gene L. Henderson and Walter Hutchings. The Cox and Foster stories are reprints from the Summer 1943 issue of FRONTIER STORIES. It's good to be starting another year of these posts.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Story Roundup, October 1955

In 1955, the long-running pulp RANGELAND ROMANCES changed its name to WESTERN STORY ROUNDUP and eked out three more issues, of which this is the second. It has a nice cover by Ernest Chiriacka, a couple of top-notch Western authors in Gordon D. Shirreffs and Steve Frazee, the dependable Thomas Calvert McClary (writing as T. Calvert), and stories by Rod Lengel and Frazier Hunt (no, I've never heard of them, either). The story titles don't sound like Western romances, so I suspect they were just stories in inventory in Popular Publications' files, and those three issues of WESTERN STORY ROUNDUP were just a way of burning them off. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western, December 1954

I've always sort of felt that a magazine called REAL WESTERN should have been non-fiction, like TRUE WEST or FRONTIER TIMES. But no, although it published a few articles and features like most Western pulps, REAL WESTERN was almost entirely fictional. And despite coming from bottom-rung publisher Columbia, it had some good covers, like this one, and plenty of good authors in its pages. For example, in this issue, Gordon D. Shirreffs, Lauren Paine, Lon Williams (with one of his supernatural-themed Deputy Lee Winters yarns), Zachary Strong (probably E.B. Mann), and house-name Mat Rand. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Action, March 1957

For some reason, I've always liked the scene in Western movies where the hero goes diving across the screen with a gun in each fist, blasting away. Here we have the pulp cover equivalent of that scene, and not surprisingly, I like it, too. Gordon D. Shirreffs is the top author in this issue of WESTERN ACTION, but there are also stories by Lon Willliams, A.A. Baker (never read his work, that I recall, but he was prolific), E.E. Clement (who was actually editor Robert W. Lowndes), and someone named Warner Austin, who I never heard of. By 1957, WESTERN ACTION was one of the few Western pulps left. I would have read it. (I was around then, but I hadn't learned to read yet.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fifteen Western Tales, July 1954

This guy's hat is okay, but I'm afraid his cigar is done for. Those hombres shooting at him will pay for that, I'll bet. This issue of FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES has some pretty good writers in its pages: Gordon D. Shirreffs, Norman A. Fox, Frank Castle, George C. Appell, J.L. Bouma, Rolland Lynch, Robert E. Mahaffey, Richard H. Nelson (actually William Hamling, better known as an editor and publisher of SF magazines and softcore paperbacks), Richard Ferber, and house-names David Crewe and Dave Sands. Shirreffs and Fox are reason enough to read an issue of a Western pulp, and I'll bet most of the other stories are pretty good, too.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, November 1952

This is a pulp I own and read recently. The scan is from my copy. The cover is by Sam Cherry, but it’s not one of his better ones. I picked up this issue to read because it contains stories by a couple of my favorite Western authors, Walker A. Tompkins and Gordon D. Shirreffs. In addition to that, THRILLING WESTERN was a consistently good pulp for all of its long run, so I knew the chances were good I’d be entertained.

I usually talk about the stories as I come to them in an issue, but this time I’m going to change things around and take a look at the short stories first, then the longer ones.

“That Missouri Sodbuster” is by an author I hadn’t heard of, L. Kenneth Brent. As you might expect from the title, it’s a cattle baron vs. sodbuster tale, but unlike most such tales, this one take a slyly humorous approach. It’s entertaining for the most part, although I was waiting for one more twist that never showed up.

“Bluffing Ain’t Easy” by Francis H. Ames is more of an action yarn as a rancher and his future son-in-law, an Eastern dude his daughter brought back with her from college, run across a gang of rustlers at work and have to deal with them. There’s nothing you won’t see coming, but the characters are likable and Ames writes well, providing some nice action scenes.

“The Beautiful Guardian” by Gene Austin, an author who wrote several dozen stories for assorted Western pulps, none of which I recall reading until this one. It’s a pleasant enough yarn about a young cowboy, a trio of trouble-making brothers he’s feuding with, and two beautiful young women, one of whom he wants to marry and the other who wants to marry him. This seems like it should have appeared in RANCH ROMANCES in an earlier era, but it’s probably not hardboiled enough for the Fifties version of that magazine.

The last of the short stories is “The Devil’s Swampers” by Bill Burchardt, an author who started in the pulps and went on to write a number of Western novels for Doubleday’s Double D line and other publishers. This is a hardboiled tale of a small-time outlaw’s robbery of a cattle buyer’s office and the obstacles he encounters as he tries to make his getaway. I don’t recall reading anything else by Burchardt, but this is a tough, well-written story and I’ll be on the lookout for his name in other pulps.

“Frontier Signaler” is a novelette by Gordon D. Shirreffs, and not surprisingly, it’s an excellent story. It’s about a young soldier assigned to a heliograph detail in Arizona Territory. The Apaches are on the warpath and getting repeating rifles from some mysterious source, the cavalry keeps getting tricked into looking for them in the wrong places, and our young hero winds up tracking down the gunrunners and exposing the villains. The plot may not be all that original, but Shirreffs’ writing is top-notch and really captures the setting. Plus the whole tone of the story is very tough and the action scenes are great. I’ve never read a bad book or story by Shirreffs, and this yarn continues that streak.

Finally, “Saddle Gun” by Walker A. Tompkins is the lead story in this issue and is billed as a complete, full-length novel. At 60 pages of double-columned text, it actually is a full-length novel. Well, as long as many of the Ace Doubles, anyway. And as usual with Tompkins, it’s a fine story with a mystery element to go along with plenty of Western action. The protagonist, Lex Holt, returns to his home town carrying a Winchester ’73 in a fancy case, a rifle sent to him with a note saying that it was used to ambush and murder Holt’s brother. Everybody in the area believes the younger Holt was drowned in a flood. But Lex, who left years earlier because he didn’t get along with his stepfather, knows different, and when he starts to investigate, it’s not long before there are attempts on his life and then another murder, this time one for which Lex is framed. Jailed and well on his way to being lynched, Lex has to escape, elude the law, and root out the real killer.

The plot may not be all that hard to figure out, but it’s still a lot of fun. There are several colorful old geezers as supporting characters, as well as a beautiful girl who figures into the plot but doesn’t really have a lot to do. Mostly it’s Lex Holt getting himself into and out of dangerous jams, because Tompkins was one of those authors who liked to keep piling more and more troubles on his protagonists until it seemed like there was no way for them to set things right. As you can tell, I really like the way Tompkins plots and paces his yarns. “Saddle Gun” isn’t in the top rank of his efforts, but it’s still very good. I’m a little surprised it was never reprinted as a paperback.

So the overall verdict on this issue of THRILLING WESTERN is pretty favorable. The short stories are okay, nothing special but perfectly readable, while the longer stories by Tompkins and Shirreffs are top-notch, just as I expected.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: West, January 1953

I'm not really an art guy, but I like the composition on this cover. I have no idea who did the art. Inside are some good authors, including Gordon D. Shirreffs, Ray Townsend, and Ross Rocklynne. I think of Rocklynne as a science fiction writer and didn't know he had done any Westerns. Turns out he wrote a few over the years.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Max Brand's Western Magazine, September 1953

That's a nice atmospheric cover by H.W. Scott on this issue of MAX BRAND'S WESTERN MAGAZINE, and only the Max Brand story appears to be a reprint (from the January 2, 1937 issue of ARGOSY). The other authors in this issue include H.A. DeRosso, George C. Appell, Gordon D. Shirreffs, Fred Grove, and the house-name Bart Cassidy. That's a good bunch of writers.

Forgotten Books: The Proud Gun - Gordon D. Shirreffs

Les Gunnell was once the town-taming marshal of the lawless settlement known as Sundown in New Mexico Territory. He left the marshal's badge to his friend Will Ripley, who also married the woman Gunnell loved, then rode away and took up ranching. Now Ripley is dead, murdered by a shotgun blast, his stepson is wounded, and the buzzards are gathering again around Sundown, in the persons of the vicious outlaw gang the Chacon Boys and ruthless cattle baron Matt Horan. Gunnell doesn't want to go back and take on these killers again, but he feels he has no choice, even though it will almost certainly mean disaster and death.

That's the set-up of THE PROUD GUN, a 1961 Western novel by Gordon D. Shirreffs published by Avon Books. Shirreffs was one of the best authors of hardboiled Westerns from his era, and this is a good novel with a large cast of characters and a fairly complex plot, especially considering that he packs it all into about 40,000 words, I'd estimate. It's a book without many sympathetic characters. Les Gunnell is the protagonist, but he's not a particularly likable guy. Other characters you might expect to survive don't, and it all builds to a pretty bleak climax that, frankly, left me wanting a little bit more. That's my only complaint about THE PROUD GUN, though. As always, Shirreffs vividly renders the southwestern landscape and provides plenty of tough, gritty action. Even second-tier Shirreffs is better than a lot of Westerns. I don't think this novel belongs in the top rank of his books, but it's certainly worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Triple Western, December 1952

I’ve grown increasingly fond of novellas and short novels as I get older (the result of less time to read and a dwindling attention span, I suspect), so it makes sense I’d like TRIPLE WESTERN, a pulp devoted to them. Recently I pulled the December 1952 issue off my shelves and read it, and as expected, I had a fine time doing so. The scan, as usual, is from the copy I read.

The issue leads off with Frank Castle’s “Brothers in Blood”, which is really the only story long enough to be called a novel. I estimate it’s around 40,000 words. It starts off as a standard range war plot, with the villain out to take over the ranch owned by brothers Saul and Hal Baxter. Saul and Hal really don’t get along that well, but they share a determination to hang on to their spread.

From that typical opening, Castle brings in some surprises, including some long-buried family secrets reminiscent of Ross Macdonald and a pair of overlapping romantic triangles. His distinctive style, which is really dominant in the Lassiter novels he wrote as Jack Slade, is already somewhat on display with its missing verbs, odd tenses, and abundance of commas. Castle makes it work, though, and the story just races along in very entertaining fashion. I enjoyed this one a lot.

Steuart Emery had a long and prolific career in the pulps, dating back to 1919, although he seems to be mostly forgotten today. For the first three decades of his career, he produced primarily war and aviation stories, with a few detective yarns thrown in. By the Fifties, though, he was writing mostly cavalry stories for various Western pulps in the Thrilling Group, like this issue’s novella “Apache Dawn”. I’d read some of Emery’s stories in TEXAS RANGERS and recall liking them, so it’s no surprise I enjoyed this one, too.

Emery is a very traditional plotter, so don’t look for many surprises in his stories. “Apache Dawn” makes use of the old “frontier-seasoned officer vs. by-the-book officer from back east” plot, with a romantic triangle thrown in as well. It plays out just about as you’d expect, but Emery writes so well the predictability doesn’t matter much. The numerous battle scenes are excellent, and the beleaguered hero is very likable. There’s a surprisingly good heroine in this story, too, who definitely doesn’t fade into the background as sometimes happens in Western pulp yarns. Overall, “Apache Dawn” is a suspenseful and very effective tale. I was impressed enough I ordered a copy of one of Emery’s air war novels, since I’ve never read anything except his Westerns.

About thirty years ago I went on a Luke Short binge, reading a couple dozen of his novels in fairly short order. These days I still read one now and then, or one of his pulp novellas like “Lead Won’t Lie” in this issue. It’s a reprint from the September 9, 1939 issue of WESTERN STORY. Short, whose real name was Frederick Glidden, usually had a hardboiled tone to his stories, and this one is no different. Jim Hutchins is the only survivor of a violent frontier feud, and when he drifts to a different part of the country and starts a ranch in partnership with another man, trouble soon crops up again when Jim’s partner is murdered and he’s framed for the killing.

As it turns out, that’s not the last murder Jim is framed for, as the plot of “Lead Won’t Lie” becomes pretty complicated. Not Erle Stanley Gardner-complicated, mind you, but still pretty complex for a traditional action Western. Glidden does a good job with that action, too, as Jim Hutchins has to unravel the scheme and expose the real killers in order to save his own hide.

This issue wraps up with an 8-page short story by another master of the genre, Gordon D. Shirreffs. “Gun Runners of the Gila” is a fairly early effort from Shirreffs, but it has the great hardboiled action scenes he’s famous for. The plot concerns a man who’s trying to find out who’s responsible for a wagon train massacre in which his brother died. The story feels a little rushed—there’s enough plot to have supported a novelette—but it’s still quite enjoyable.

From start to finish, this is a fine issue of TRIPLE WESTERN. If you own a copy or happen to run across one, it’s well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western Stories, December 1954

The Columbia Western pulps, including REAL WESTERN, are regarded as bottom-rung publications, but hey, this issue has a pretty nice cover and there's a Gordon D. Shirreffs novella in it, as well as a Lee Winters story by Lon Williams. Admittedly, I don't recognize the names of any of the other authors except Mat Rand, which was a house-name and could have been anybody. But this still looks like an issue worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Action-Packed Western, September 1954

That's a decent cover on this issue of ACTION-PACKED WESTERN, and you know any story by Gordon D. Shirreffs is going to be worth reading. Seven Anderton is supposed to be pretty good, too (he's one of the authors I have to get around to reading), and there are short stories by veteran Western writer A.A. Baker and editor Robert A.W. Lowndes under his John Lackland pseudonym.

Forgotten Books: Shadow of a Gunman - Gordon D. Shirreffs

As this 1959 Ace Double Western opens, seventeen-year-old Thorp Barrett is already a member of the outlaw gang led by his brother Travis. When the gang is trapped by a posse led by U.S. Marshal Doug Scott, Thorp winds up as the only survivor, thanks to his brother who gives up his life to help Thorp escape. Thorp goes on the run, flees across the Rio Grande into Mexico, and vows to turn himself into as deadly a gunman as his brother was, so he can kill Marshal Scott and avenge Travis's death.

From that point, Shirreffs follows Thorp's life for the next several years as he falls in with smugglers and bandidos and becomes an accomplished outlaw and gunfighter. Unfortunately, his quest to kill Marshal Scott becomes complicated when he meets and falls in love with the lawman's beautiful stepdaughter. On the run from a murder charge because he shot down another marshal, it looks like there's no way for Thorp to wind up other than dancing at the end of a hangrope or filled with lead by lawmen...

As always, Shirreffs is one of the most consistently entertaining Western writers, spinning a fine, hardboiled yarn that has an epic feel to it despite being only around 35,000 words. His action scenes are as gritty and effective as ever, and he springs some nice plot twists on the reader as well. SHADOW OF A GUNMAN is fast-paced, pure enjoyment for fans of the classic traditional Western. They really don't write 'em like this anymore—although some of us are still trying.

By the way, that cover scan is from the copy I read. The line about this being the first book publication makes me think the novel is probably an expansion of a pulp story, but if that's the case, I don't know where and when that story appeared. The other side of the double volume is LAST CHANCE AT DEVIL'S CANYON by Barry Cord (Peter Germano). Don't be surprised if you see a post about it in the reasonably near future.

Forgotten Books: The Lonely Gun - Gordon D. Shirreffs

Case Hardesty is in a tough spot. On the run from the law after a bank robbery, his partners double-cross him and try to kill him, but he winds up with the loot. His former partners are still after him, though, and so is a posse led by a relentless lawman. To reach safety he has to cross a stretch of brutal desert along the border between Arizona and Mexico. While trying to do that he runs into a man and a couple of beautiful women who are being pursued by a deadly gunfighter. All of them converge on an old abandoned mission that's rumored to be haunted, and if that's true there'll be more ghosts there before this showdown is over.

Is that a great set-up for a hardboiled Western novel or what? In the hands of one of the all-time masters of that genre, Gordon D. Shirreffs, THE LONELY GUN is a fast-paced, highly entertaining yarn with a lot of gritty action that leads up to a memorable and unusual climax. Originally published as a paperback original by Avon in 1959 and reprinted several times since, it's now available in an e-book version from Prologue Books. I had a fine time reading THE LONELY GUN, and if you like traditional Westerns I give it a high recommendation.

And isn't Case Hardesty a perfect name for a Western hero?