Saturday Morning Western Pulp Revisited - Frontier Stories, Summer 1950

I’ve featured this pulp before, but now I’ve had a chance to read it, thanks to a good friend who loaned me his copy. That’s it in the scan. The cover is by Allan Anderson, I think. His horses are pretty distinctive.

The issue leads off with the novelette “Tombstones For Gringos” by Les Savage Jr. Brothers Colin and Farris Shane are traveling with their ill and dying mother, looking for a new homestead. They find a good place, but it lies in the shadow of a mountain known as El Renegado because of some tragic events a couple of hundred years earlier. It seems that a Spanish captain (Spain ruled the region then) betrayed his men for the love of a woman, fled to the mountain with her, and the rest of the company was wiped out. Now the basin that lies in the shadow of the peak is cursed. And boy, everything that happens after that seems to bear out the curse. You’ve got family members killing family members (at least three cases of it), gruesome torture, and doomed love.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because Savage’s original version of the tale was published many years later as “The Shadow of Renegade Basin” in the Leisure paperback of the same name, which is still available from Amazon Encore. Fiction House editor Malcolm Reiss bought the manuscript in 1948, probably because Savage was one of Fiction House’s star writers by that time and he bought everything Savage sent him. Reiss must have deemed Savage’s original version unpublishable, because he sat on it for a couple of years, then did some rewrites himself and finally published it in this issue of FRONTIER STORIES.

Since I have the book with Savage’s version in it, I skimmed through it after I’d read the pulp novelette, looking for the changes Reiss made. They’re really not extensive at all. He removed one plot element that he must have felt was too offensive (given the time period, he was right) and rewrote the ending to give it at least a tiny shred of hope, rather than the bleak nihilism of Savage’s version. I hate to side with an editor over an author, but Reiss was right to do what he did. The pulp version is better. I get that Savage was trying to push the boundaries of the genre, and he successfully did so in other novels and stories, but I think this one is a misfire.

Next up is another novelette, “Wheels of Empire” by Alexander Wallace. This one is set during the 1840s, the days of the great immigrant wagon trains, and is about a clerk from Boston who goes west seeking adventure, becomes a frontiersman, and clashes with a crooked trading post owner who swindles the immigrants who visit his fort. It’s a pretty good yarn with some nice action and a thoroughly despicable villain. Wallace was a Canadian author who published several dozen Western and adventure stories in various pulps from the mid-Forties to the mid-Fifties. I’ve read a few stories by him and enjoyed all of them.

Charles Dickson wrote only a few detective and Western stories for the pulps, and I don’t know anything about him. I don’t recall ever reading anything by him until I read his short story in this issue, “Ride the River”. Like most of the stories in this pulp, it’s as much a historical yarn as a traditional Western and is set during the mountain man era. The protagonist is a young fur trapper who sets out to stop a rival from stirring up an Indian war. This is a pretty well-written story, and I enjoyed it.

“Retreat to Glory” by Norman B. Wiltsey is billed as a short story, but it’s actually an article based on history like the dozens of others Wiltsey wrote for various pulps. It’s about a group of Northern Cheyenne jumping the reservation in Indian Territory and heading north toward their homeland. The army pursues them, of course. Wiltsey does an okay job recounting a fairly sad chapter in history.

“Dance of the Grizzly” is Theodore Cutting’s only credit in the Fictionmags Index. The protagonist is a young Indian who has to face a grizzly bear in an ordeal of courage in order to win the girl he loves. Cutting throws in a few decent twists, but overall this story never really engaged my interest.

“Apache Flame” is bylined John Starr, a well-known Fiction House house-name. But there’s more to the background than that. A line on the Table of Contents page states that this novelette and the following one, “The Mountains Said No”, are copyright 1938 by Fiction House. The twist is that no stories by those titles were published in any Fiction House pulp in 1938. I even checked the issues from December 1937 and January 1939 just for the sake of thoroughness. Which leads me to believe that these two stories were published originally under other titles and with other bylines on them. There’s a story called “Apache!” by Ray Nafziger in an issue of FRONTIER STORIES from 1938, which seemed a likely suspect, but the writing in “Apache Flame” doesn’t really strike me as being Nafziger’s work. Of course, I could be wrong about that. Chances are, we’ll never know which “John Starr” actually wrote this story, but it’s a really good one featuring another mountain man protagonist, this one teaming up with some Spanish settlers who hate him in order to rescue some young women kidnapped by vengeful Apaches. It takes place in what will one day be New Mexico, another thing that made me think of Nafziger, who lived there while he was writing for the pulps. No matter who wrote it, “Apache Flame” really races along with good characters and plenty of action. This is a top-notch yarn.

Another Fiction House house-name, Wilton Hazzard, is the byline on the novelette “The Mountains Said No”, which wraps up this issue. The mountain man protagonist of this one comes across a wagon train under attack by a Pawnee war party and helps the immigrants run off the Indians, only to find that the wagons are being guided by an old enemy of his. Our hero and his crusty old sidekick wind up joining the wagon train, of course, to try to get them through safely to the gold fields in California. This is an excellent story, really well-written and with plenty of action. There’s a theory that a well-known science fiction author is behind the house-name on this one, but I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that “The Mountains Said No” is a fine yarn and I really enjoyed it.

Overall, this is a good issue of FRONTIER STORIES with a few disappointments mixed in, but I like that the emphasis is on buckskin-era stories rather than traditional Westerns. I haven’t read many issues of FRONTIER STORIES, but I think I’m going to have to hunt up more of them.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, August 1934

(I came across this post from January 26, 2008, several years before I started the Saturday Morning Western Pulp series, so I thought I might as well get some more use out of it, modified slightly and with some comments added.)

Since I had this pulp out a couple of weeks ago to look something up, I decided to go ahead and read it. I believe it’s the first issue of LARIAT STORY that I’ve read; I own only another issue or two of this particular pulp.

It doesn’t start off particularly well. The lead “novel” (actually more of a novella) is “The Ranch of Hidden Men” by John Starr. Originally, John Starr was the pseudonym of Jack Byrne, who was the editor of LARIAT STORY at the time this issue was published. At some point, though, it became a house name, probably a year or so later when Byrne left Fiction House (the publisher of LARIAT STORY) to become an editor at ARGOSY. Byrne may be the author of “The Ranch of Hidden Men”, or he may not. Either way, it’s not a very good story. It’s the old “drifter saves the ranch from the bad guys” plot, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s so stereotypical that a story using it needs either an unexpected twist, good writing, or both. This one has neither. It has a very tired, by-the-numbers feel to it, with a lot of florid writing that just pads the word count. Even that sort of prose can be effective (see the work of A. Leslie Scott, for example), but I don’t think it works here.

The novelette that follows, “Red Chaps” by Walter Clare Martin, is even worse, a humorous Western that’s not funny at all. I have a low tolerance for humorous Westerns; I like those by W.C. Tuttle (and Robert E. Howard), but that’s about it.

Things pick up, though, with “Whispering Knives” by C.K. Shaw, a novelette with another old plot, the hunt for the pieces of a treasure map that was split up among the prospectors who discovered a mother lode of gold, but Shaw has a nice hardboiled style that makes it a readable yarn. (C.K. Shaw was actually Chloe Kathleen Shaw, one of the most successful female Western pulpsters. I need to read more of her work.) 

The four short stories that follow are even better: “Old Renegade” by Earl C. McCain concerns the hunt for a wild, killer bull in the South Texas brush country, with some rustling thrown in for good measure; “The Six-Gun Payoff” by the always-dependable Gunnison Steele (really Bennie Gardner, father of the late Barry Gardner, who was known to many of you) is an effective short-short about the redemption of an old outlaw; “Snake Sign” by Walt Coburn (one of my favorite Western pulp authors) is a murder mystery, not too hard to figure out but fun; and “The Water Cure” by E.B. Brunt is a fairly realistic cattle baron vs. small ranchers yarn set in the 1920s.

The issue is wrapped up by another “novel”, “The Fifth Horseman” by James P. Olsen. Olsen, under the name James Lawson, wrote spicy, hardboiled detective yarns about Dallas Duane, a PI who works in the Western oilfields, and I really like the stories I’ve read from that series. (I wound up reading all the Dallas Duane stories and writing the introduction for a collection of them called DYING COMES HARD, published by Black Dog Books and still available.) “The Fifth Horseman” is a little more serious. Again, the plot is one that had whiskers even in 1934: a gang of old outlaws get together again to help an old friend from the owlhoot trail who has reformed and settled down. The hero is a young outlaw who had fallen in with them. Anybody who has read very many Westerns will know how this one is going to play out, but Olsen spins his tale with such enthusiasm, including a number of over-the-top action scenes, that I found it pretty entertaining. This is the first Western story I’ve read by him, but I wouldn’t hesitate to read more.

My copy of the pulp is coverless and I can't find a picture of it on-line, so I can’t post a cover scan. (The Fictionmags Index has that cover scan now. You can see it above.) It came from the collection of Barry Gardner, who’s mentioned above. Barry collected hundreds of pulps that contained his dad’s stories, but he didn’t care that much about the condition, so many of them are brittle and coverless, like this issue. I don’t really care, either, as long as I can read them and enjoy the stories, and I have to say that despite a couple of clunkers, the August 1934 issue of LARIAT STORY is pretty darned good.

(Now, here's the gut punch from the past. Three days after I posted this, a wildfire burned down our house and my studio and destroyed this pulp along with all my others, except for a lone issue of ARGOSY that survived somehow, as well as 40 years' accumulation of books and comics. Some of you probably remember that. Definitely a low point. However, we rebuilt a bigger and better house on the same property, I have more books and pulps, by far, than I'll ever get around to reading, and my writing career has rolled along. I still miss the cats who died in that fire, but our two dogs survived and lived another six years after that. Somebody once told me that you never really get over the things you love and lose, but you learn how to get along with that loss. Lot of truth in that. Meanwhile I think that's a pretty good cover by Fred Craft, and I'm glad to be able to bring it to you today.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, April 1935

This issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE sports a nice dramatic cover by Emery Clarke (who also did a bunch of Doc Savage covers in the late Thirties and early Forties) and a really strong group of authors inside. There are stories by Walt Coburn, Eugene Cunningham, James P. Olsen, Bennett Foster, Richard Wormser, Ralph Condon, house-name John Starr, and Fred J. Jackson, unknown to me but who wrote hundreds of stories in a career that lasted from 1906 to 1937. That's a good long run! Coburn, Cunningham, and Olsen are favorites of mine and Foster and Wormser were dependable pulpsters, as well. Plenty of good reading in this issue, I'll bet.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: All-Adventure Action Novels, Spring 1939

ALL-ADVENTURE ACTION NOVELS was a Fiction House pulp and ran for only three issues in 1937, ’38, and ’39, not finding success even though it had good covers and some fine authors appeared in its pages. I don’t own any of the issues and have never even seen any copies, but I do own the Adventure House facsimile reprint of the third and final issue from Spring 1939. I read that reprint recently and really enjoyed it.

Although all five stories in this issue are listed as novels in the Table of Contents, we know what that means. They’re actually novelettes and novellas. The first one is “Drums of the Desert” by Thomas J. Cooke. It’s about an American adventurer in Egypt who has gotten his hands on the sacred flag of the Mahdi, which is worth a fortune. A schemer who knows about the flag forces a beautiful French girl to lure the hero into a trap, which winds up with him being the prisoner of a Taureg band. A deserter from the French Foreign Legion figures in the plot, too. It’s a well-written yarn with enough action to be satisfying. I don’t know anything about Cooke, except that he wrote eight stories which appeared in various Fiction House pulps. I have a hunch it might have been a pseudonym, but I have nothing on which to base that except a gut feeling.

A couple of brief discussions here on the blog and on Facebook made me realize I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by George Bruce, even though he was a major pulp author for a long time. He’s best remembered as a writer of aviation and air war yarns. His novella in this issue, “The Iron Man of Devil’s Island”, has an aviation element to its plot, but it’s also a prison tale, as you’d expect from the title. The two storylines—an American airliner forced by bad weather to land in the South American jungle and a former French flying ace from World War I escaping from Devil’s Island—run in parallel for a while before coming together. When they merge, it’s with a predictable twist that’s still very effective. Not as effective as the ending, though, which, as Maynard G. Krebs used to say, made me get all misty-eyed. It took me a little while to warm up to this story. Bruce’s style isn’t exactly long-winded, but he does tend to go on, and while I think a lot of modern writers take the whole “show, don’t tell” thing too far, Bruce goes to the other extreme at times. Overall, though, I really enjoyed “The Iron Man of Devil’s Island”. It drew me in and had me turning the pages and makes me look forward to reading something else by George Bruce.

Albert Richard Wetjen wrote South Seas stories about several different characters including Stinger Seave (who I teamed with G-Man Dan Fowler for a story in a recent anthology, DOUBLE TROUBLE), Shark Gotch (one of the great names of pulp fiction, as far as I’m concerned), and Typhoon Bradley. “Red Typhoon”, the Wetjen novelette in this issue, is actually an unacknowledged reprint of the first story in the series, “Captain Typhoon”, which appeared originally in the September 1931 issue of ACTION STORIES. It reads like the first story in a series, too, introducing us to Captain Typhoon Bradley, his brother Bob, and their search for a mysterious island that’s not on any of the charts. They have to team up with some shady characters in order to find what they’re looking for, and of course double crosses and action ensue. Bradley gets his ”Typhoon” nickname, another indication this is actually the first story in the series. One thing I really like about Wetjen’s work is that all his series are connected. Supporting characters from one, and even sometimes protagonists, will show up in a different series. He never seems to have done much with the concept, but it’s still a nice touch.

John Starr was a Fiction House house name. He’s credited with the French Foreign Legion yarn, “Riders of the Burning Sands”, in this issue. Based on the idea that a house name was often used to keep an author from having two stories in the same issue, I’d say the most likely suspect in this case is Victor Rousseau. George Bruce was a big name; you wouldn’t waste one of his stories by putting a house name on it. The Wetjen story is a reprint. Cooke is a possibility, too. But having read “Riders of the Burning Sands”, I’m convinced it’s by Rousseau. Stylistically, it reads just like him. It’s a good story, too, about an American who winds up in the Foreign Legion because of a misunderstanding and a murder, and how he has to survive not only a brutal sergeant but an attack by natives as well. Lots of good action in this one and a satisfying resolution.

Victor Rousseau appears under his own name with “Ruby of Revolt”, a story of political intrigue set in India. Rousseau, one of the early practitioners of science fiction before it was even called that, wrote tons of adventure stories for the Spicy pulps under several different names, and he was a top-notch storyteller. This involves an American working for the British Secret Service in India, trying to track down a magnificent ruby known as the Eye of Kali, which will determine who rules one of the country’s provinces and whether or not there’s a bloody uprising. There’s a beautiful, mysterious dancer involved, too. I don’t know if Rousseau ever read Talbot Mundy or Robert E. Howard, but starting out, this story reminded me of Jimgrim and El Borak. Then, halfway through, it takes a sudden, bizarre twist that brings in a science fiction/horror angle to the plot. It’s goofy, but Rosseau makes it work, probably because the whole thing races along at such a fast pace. Rousseau was no Mundy or REH, but this is a very entertaining story.

In fact, every story in this issue is entertaining, either very good or excellent, and I was impressed with ALL-ADVENTURE ACTION NOVELS. The reprint is still available on Amazon if you’re a fan of pulp adventure fiction and want to check it out.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, December 1934

I'm not a big fan of artist Fred Craft, but I'll admit that his cover for this early issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE is pretty dynamic. And the line-up of authors in this issue can't be beat: Walt Coburn, Eugene Cunningham, Tom Roan, Richard Wormser, James P. Olsen, C.K. Shaw, Archie Joscelyn, and house-name John Starr. Lots of good reading there, I'll bet.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, May 1940

The cover on this issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE has a lot going on, and I like it. I don't know the artist, but if I had to venture a guess, I'd say A. Leslie Ross or H.W. Scott. But I could be completely wrong about that. I know I'm right about there being some good authors in this issue, starting with Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, James P. Olsen, and Art Lawson. There's a Bart Cassidy story, and that's probably Olmsted, too, as well as one by house-name John Starr, who could be almost anybody. Frank H. Richey, who has one of the cover-featured stories, wrote only half a dozen stories in the late Thirties and into 1940; this appears to be his last one. I don't know anything about him. The other story in this issue is by the more prolific but equally obscure Don Stuart. All I know about him is that he's not "Don A. Stuart", the pseudonym of legendary science fiction editor/author John W. Campbell.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, May 1944

As usual with a Fiction House pulp, the cover of this issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE features both exciting action and a pretty girl. I don't know who the artist was, but I think he did a good job. Inside are stories by top Western pulpsters Wayne D. Overholster, J.E. Grinstead, M. Howard Lane, and Curtis Bishop, as well as house-name John Starr (if I had to guess, I'd say Bishop, but that's purely a guess) and much-better-known-for-his-science-fiction Clifford D. Simak. I've read a few of Simak's Western stories and found them to be very good. I like the title of that John Starr yarn: "Six Sins in My Holster". The editor must not have been quite at the top of his game, though. That title really needs an exclamation mark at the end of it.

UPDATE: The cover art is by Norman Saunders, used originally on the October 1937 issue of ACTION STORIES. Thanks to Sheila Vanderbeek for the info!

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Frontier Stories, Summer 1950

I'm not really sure what's happening on this cover, but I like it quite a bit anyway. As with many other Fiction House covers, it makes me want to write a story based on it. Les Savage Jr. is the only well-known author in this issue, although there's no telling who's behind the house-names John Starr and Wilton Hazzard. Others contributing stories are Norman B. Wiltsey, Alexander Wallace, Charles Dickson, and Theodore Cutting. I think I've seen Wiltsey's name before on other pulp TOCs, but the rest are new to me. Even so, I probably would have bought this issue for the cover alone.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: North-West Romances, Fall 1941

That's another action-packed Norman Saunders cover on this issue of NORTH-WEST ROMANCES. Some good story titles, too. I'm especially fond of "The Gun-Vulture of Caribou Lode". No telling who wrote it, since John Starr was a Fiction House house-name. The other authors in this issue include long-time pulpster Victor Rousseau, "Northern" specialist Dan O'Rourke, A. deHerries Smith, Sewell Peaslee Wright, and a few others I've never heard of.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: North-West Romances, Summer 1946

I like the George Gross cover on this issue of NORTH-WEST ROMANCES. Inside are stories by Dan Cushman, one of the stars of the Fiction House line, Tom O'Neill, who wrote some other stories I liked, long-time Western pulpster and paperbacker Lee Floren, the prolific house-name John Starr, and a couple of authors I'm not familiar with, Curtis Bishop and Stuart Friedman. Just another day in Canada, obviously.