Saturday Morning Western Pulp: .44 Western Magazine, February 1941

This fine cover by Albin Henning is another prime example of how you couldn't sit down to enjoy a game of poker in the Old West without a gunfight breaking out. The hombre swinging in on a rope with his gun blazing is a nice twist, though. Some good authors are on hand in this issue of .44 WESTERN MAGAZINE: Stone Cody (Thomas E. Mount), John G. Pearsol, Eli Colter, J.E. Grinstead, Ralph Berard (Victor H. White), and the lesser known Archie Giddings and Jay A. Constant, whose story in this issue is his only credit in the Fictionmags Index.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western Magazine, April 1948

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, ragged edges and all. That’s one tough-lookin’ hombre on the cover! I think it was painted by Robert Stanley, but I’m not sure about that.

Walt Coburn leads off the issue, as he so often did, with a novelette called “Law of the Lawless”. The Table of Contents may refer to it as a novel, but it’s about 10,000 words, I’d say. And man, does Coburn pack a lot of back-story in those words, also as usual. Most of the story takes place at the outlaw hideout known as Hole-in-the-Wall, and it consists of tense verbal clashes between two owlhoots who share some history. There’s a neglected wife, a crippled kid, an attempted suicide, hidden loot from a bank robbery, and a sinister bounty hunter who has already wiped out all of the gang led by one of the main characters. Yeah, this is melodramatic stuff, but nobody did it better than Coburn. This suspenseful opening leads up to a couple of fine action scenes that provide a satisfying conclusion. I’ve been told that by this time in his career, the editors at Popular Publications were rewriting Coburn’s stories pretty heavily because his drinking caused him to turn in unpublishable manuscripts, and that may well be true. But the complex plot, the emotional torment some of the characters go through, and the sense of frontier authenticity are pure Coburn, as far as I can tell. It’s not a perfect story—there are a couple of continuity errors that can probably be chalked up to the above-mentioned boozing—but I loved it anyway. It’s just a real gut-punch of a hardboiled Western yarn.

As I mentioned last week, Tom W. Blackburn was a very dependable Western author. His story in this issue, “A Matter of Quick Buryin’”, is about a government investigator trying to break up a ring of thieves that’s been selling stolen horses to the army. Reluctantly, he winds up with a colorful sidekick in a drunken ex-preacher. The ending in this one seems a little rushed to me, but other than that it’s excellent and is still very good overall.

In addition to being a pulp writer, William Chamberlain was in the army and in fact had a long, successful career there, retiring as a general. So it’s not surprising that his numerous Western and adventure yarns for various pulps usually had some sort of military connection. “Mount Up, You Sons of Glory!”, his story in this issue, is a cavalry tale about a campaign against the Sioux in Dakota Territory in the dead of winter. It uses the standard plot of a new, heavy-handed commanding officer ignoring the advice of his more seasoned junior officers, but Chamberlain’s straightforward, effective prose, his sense of realism, and a very poignant ending elevate this to something more than the ordinary.

I’ve come to appreciate C. William Harrison as one of the better Western pulpsters. His short tale in this issue, “Too Tough to Tame”, is about a young man whose father was an outlaw, and when he’s unjustly accused of a crime, he decides he’ll go ahead and follow the owlhoot trail. There are a couple of twists in this one, one that I saw coming and one I didn’t, and that makes for a very good story.

When he wasn’t writing classic comic book scripts in the Forties, Gardner F. Fox was writing Westerns and science fiction stories for the pulps, just as he would soon be turning out dozens of paperback original novels during the Fifties and Sixties while continuing his comics career. “The Town That Bullets Built” in this issue is about a lawman who has retired but keeps getting drawn back into trouble. Fox was a fine storyteller and keeps this one moving along briskly with well-drawn characters until a couple of very good action scenes wrap things up and bring the story to a heartwarming and satisfying conclusion. I haven’t read that many of Fox’s Westerns, but this is certainly a good one.

Peter Dawson was one of the most dependable Western writers of the Twentieth Century. In real life, he was Jonathan Glidden, brother of Frederick Glidden, also known as highly successful Western writer Luke Short. I’d hate to have to pick between the two of them as far as which one was the better writer. The Peter Dawson novella in this issue, “Hell’s Free for Nesters!” is excellent. Against his better judgment, a drifting cowboy helps a nester girl whose wagon is stuck in a river, and that lands him in the middle of a range war, a land swindle, and a murder for which he’s blamed. Just top-notch stuff all the way around, with plenty of action, good characters, and polished writing.

Also on that list of most dependable Western writers of the Twentieth Century is Clifton Adams, who nearly always turned in really fine yarns. As an Oklahoma writer, Adams was very familiar with the oil industry there and wrote a number of stories and novels set in the early days of that business. “Boss of Purgatory’s Pipeline”, Adams’ novelette in this issue, finds a range detective becoming an oilfield detective when his client, the owner of an oil pipeline suffering from sabotage, is murdered before the protagonist even arrives on the scene. The mystery is a good one and fairly complex for a story of this length, and as always, Adams’ writing is very, very good, carrying the reader along at a swift pace. This is a terrific story.

In fact, this is a terrific issue, one of the best Western pulps I’ve ever read. If you own some issues of DIME WESTERN, I’d advise you to check your shelves for this one, because it’s definitely worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dare-Devil Aces, July 1937

Man, Frederick Blakeslee could really pack a lot into an air-war pulp cover! Nine planes (assuming I didn't miss any), plus a bunch of ack-ack bursts in the air and bombs going off on the ground. I think this scene does a great job of conveying the controlled chaos of aerial combat in World War I. Inside, this issue features three authors I associate more with Westerns: Orlando Rigoni, Claude Rister, and William O'Sullivan. Also on hand are aviation pulp stalwarts Robert Sidney Bowen and Darrell Jordan, house-names William Hartley and Larry Jones, and Fred Flabb, which I suspect is this little-published author's real name, because it doesn't sound like what you'd come up with as a pseudonym.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Detective Magazine, July 1936

Walter Baumhofer did some great covers for DIME DETECTIVE during this era, and here's another of 'em. The lineup of authors in this issue is top-notch, as well: Carroll John Daly with a Vee Brown story, T.T. Flynn, Frederick C. Davis, William E. Barrett, and Robert Sidney Bowen. Excellent writers, every one of them. DIME DETECTIVE was a consistently superb pulp during the mid-Thirties. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: 15 Story Detective, April 1950

John D. MacDonald is the biggest name in this issue of 15 STORY DETECTIVE, and of course, he wasn't as big a name in March 1950, when this issue was on the stands, as he soon would be as one of the leading author of paperback original novels from Gold Medal and other publishers. His first novel, THE BRASS CUPCAKE, was also published in 1950, but I don't know what month it came out. MacDonald was a well-regarded pulpster, though. The second biggest name is Norman Saunders, who painted the cover for this one, and as always with Saunders' work, it's eye-catching and crowded with action. The other authors in this issue include J.L. Bouma, best remembered for his Western novels, Ejler Jakobsson, Donn Mullaney, and a bunch of guys I'd never heard of.

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: New Western Magazine, March 1954

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I’m not sure who did the cover. It might be A. Leslie Ross. The hats look like his work, and so does the sketchiness of some of the details. But I’m not completely convinced it’s by Ross. As always, I’d love to hear what some of you think. NEW WESTERN MAGAZINE lasted only two more issues after this one, so it was on its last legs, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t still a good Western pulp.

I’ve come to realize that Roe Richmond was a pretty good hardboiled Western author despite my dislike for his Jim Hatfield novels in TEXAS RANGERS. His novelette “Bullets Speak My Name!” leads off this issue. The first half of this story is mostly domestic drama as Marshal Jim Elrod tries to reform his wastrel best friend Tucker Brody. Jim and Tuck grew up together, but then Tuck married the girl Jim might have. Now Tuck neglects his family to gamble and carouse with the bad element in town. A murder for which Tuck is blamed raises the stakes even more and leads to several gritty action scenes. Richmond keeps things moving along at a reasonably fast clip and wraps things up in a satisfying way. This is a solid story, nothing special but definitely entertaining.

Will Cook has a solid reputation as a Western writer, but I haven’t been impressed by what I’ve read from him. His story “The Devil’s Double” resembles Richmond’s novelette in that it’s mostly domestic drama. Instead of best friends, we have brothers clashing in this yarn. One is stalwart, the other a ne’er-do-well. The action is sparse, nobody in the story is particularly sympathetic, and I didn’t care for it. So it didn’t change my opinion of Will Cook’s work. Maybe the next one I encounter will.

“Death Rides My Guns!” is the cover story by Richard Ferber. It’s almost entirely very gritty action as a young man fights to reclaim the ranch that’s been stolen from him by his three half-brothers. I’m not sure if it was intentional, but this is the second story in a row in this issue in which the conflict is between brothers. I liked Ferber’s story considerably more than Will Cook’s.

H.A. DeRosso is well-known for the emotional, and sometimes physical, torment he heaps on his characters. In “Two Bullets to Hell”, railroad troubleshooter Sam Lane returns to his home to seek revenge on the man he blames for the murder of his brother-in-law, while at the same time keeping the ranch going that his widowed sister now owns. It’s a very well-written yarn, as you’d expect from DeRosso, and has several twists and turns in the plot. The only real problem with it is that none of the characters are the least bit likable, even the ones you’d think would be sympathetic. It’s a bleak, bitter story. I admire the writing, but I didn’t find it particularly enjoyable.

William Heuman is one of my favorite Western authors, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a cavalry vs. Indians story by him. He generally wrote about lawmen, outlaws, and gunfighters. His story in this issue, “Dead Man’s Pass”, is a cavalry story with a slight twist. It’s set in Oregon instead of somewhere in the Southwest, as such stories usually are, and the Indians are Modocs, not Apaches or Comanches. A group of cavalrymen are pinned down and outnumbered, and the only way for them to escape involves a daring plan almost certain to result in the death of the officer who leads it. However, one of the lieutenants who would normally lead such a breakout is the son of the major in command of the troops. It’s a compelling moral dilemma, and Heuman comes up with an interesting way to solve it. The writing is excellent. I thought the ending might have been a bit too abrupt, but overall “Dead Man’s Pass” is a very good story.

Stone Cody’s novelette “The Kid From Hell” was published originally under the title “The Lost Gunman” in the November 1937 issue of STAR WESTERN. Cody was actually Thomas E. Mount, who also wrote under the pseudonym Oliver King. Mount is one of my favorite Western pulpsters and was also a pretty interesting character in real life. You can read more about his background here in my review of his novel THE GUN WITH THE WAITING NOTCH. “The Kid From Hell” is an amnesia story, something that you come across now and then in the pulps. Young Dave Walker and the old-timer who raised him are gunned down by hired killers working for the range hog who wants their ranch. The old-timer is killed, and Dave is thrown into an empty boxcar on a passing train. The gunmen figure he’ll be dead by the time he’s found. But he survives, of course, except he doesn’t remember who he is or how he got shot. And when he recovers, he falls in with a gang of outlaws . . .

Mount packs enough plot into this novelette for a novella or possibly even a novel. In fact, I think it would have been even better at a longer length since he has to cover quite a bit of ground in a hurry at times. But it’s still a very, very good yarn. I really like the way Mount writes. The characters are interesting, the dialogue is good, the action is plentiful, and even his shorter stories have an epic feel to them. I definitely intend to read more by him.

The stories by Mount and Heuman are certainly the highlights of this issue, but Richmond and Ferber turn in pretty good stories, too. The DeRosso was slightly disappointing but still readable, and the one by Will Cook was the only story I didn’t like. So I’d say this is a good issue of NEW WESTERN MAGAZINE, worth reading if you have it on your shelves.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Action Stories, October 1936

This Popular Publications detective pulp was never very successful, having two short runs during the Thirties. This issue is from the second incarnation of DETECTIVE ACTION STORIES. The cover, which admittedly is pretty striking, is credited to someone named A. Nelson. This is the only listing in the Fictionmags Index for whoever that was. As for the authors inside, Ray Cummings is probably the biggest name, although Walter Ripperger was fairly prolific and popular, too. Also, one of the authors, William Moulton Marston, went on to create the iconic comic book character Wonder Woman a few years later. Other authors on hand are Victor Maxwell, Arthur V. Chester, William Corcoran, and Richard L. Hobart. Chester's story is featured on the cover despite the fact that he sold only five stories to the pulps and couldn't have been considered a big name. But the story inspired a good cover.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Rangeland Sweethearts, October 1940

RANGELAND SWEETHEARTS was a short-lived (three issues) Western romance pulp from Popular Publications. This is the first issue. I don't know who painted the cover. As usual with the Western romance pulps, most of the authors are men who wrote traditional Western pulp yarns, too: Art Lawson, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Lee Floren, Rolland Lynch, and John Paul Jones. Not familiar with that last one other than the historical figure of the same name, but this one wrote quite a bit for the Western pulps from the Twenties to the Fifties. Of course, there are some female authors on hand, too: the very prolific Isobel Stewart Way, Leta Zoe Adams, and Myrtle Juliette Corey. I don't own this issue, but with those authors, I imagine it's pretty good. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Adventure Magazine, December 1935

Popular Publications had big successes with DIME DETECTIVE and DIME WESTERN, but DIME ADVENTURE MAGAZINE doesn't seem to have done nearly as well. Maybe the competition from ADVENTURE, ARGOSY, BLUE BOOK, and SHORT STORIES was just too much. But DIME ADVENTURE had some good covers, like this one (pith helmet alert!) by Hubert Rogers, and good authors, as well, such as Luke Short, Carl Jacobi, Samuel W. Taylor, and L. Ron Hubbard in this issue. Also on hand were lesser-known authors Alexander Key, John Amid, Donald S. Aitken, Gerald V. Stamm, and Arnold Jeffers. Admittedly, out of those last five guys I only vaguely remember seeing the names of Key and Aitken on pulp TOCs, and I don't think I've read anything by them. Looking at the listings of the other issues in the Fictionmags Index, that seems to be a trend: two or three well-known authors and half a dozen from the lower ranks of pulpsters. That may well explain why DIME ADVENTURE MAGAZINE didn't run as long as its fellow magazines from Popular Publications.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western Magazine, February 15, 1935

The wounded hombre on this cover doesn't appear to be an Old Geezer, but we have two-thirds of our iconic trio, the Stalwart Cowboy and the Angry, Gun-Totin' Redhead. Great work on this cover by Walter Baumhofer, one of my favorite pulp cover artists. And inside, we have stories by Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, Bart Cassiday (also Harry F. Olmsted), Oliver King (actually Thomas E. Mount, who was better known under his pseudonym Stone Cody), John G. Pearsol, and John Colohan. That's a fantastic line-up of authors, but it was just another issue of DIME WESTERN MAGAZINE. I don't own this issue so I haven't read it, but I'm confident that it's a great one.

Operator 5 #5: Cavern of the Damned - Curtis Steele (Frederick C. Davis)

The temple of a sinister cult hidden in the middle of Manhattan! A vicious Tibetan prince whipping a beautiful girl almost to death! Influential figures falling under the sway of plotters who want to take over the country! Who can possibly deal with this terrible menace? You know the answer to that as well as I do: Jimmy Christoper, also known as Operator 5, the ace of the American Intelligence Service. Only Operator 5 can possibly thwart this impending catastrophe aimed at the destruction of all regular religions and the takeover of the United States.

But what’s that? Operator 5 is accused of treason and stripped of his standing in the Intelligence Service. All the other operators are tasked with finding and arresting him, and if he puts up a fight, Jimmy Christopher will be gunned down like any other criminal!

Yep, things look pretty bad in “Cavern of the Damned”, the fifth Operator 5 novel that was published originally in the August 1934 issue of the iconic pulp OPERATOR #5. Every issue, author Frederick C. Davis, writing under the house-name Curtis Steele, came up with a new menace to threaten the entire country that only Operator 5 could defeat. This time, the threat posed by the Cult of Zavaa has definite Weird Menace overtones with its hidden temples, robed and turbaned priests and acolytes, and brutal whippings. Davis wrote for numerous different pulps, including the Weird Menace titles, so he certainly knew his way around that genre and utilizes those elements to good effect in this novel.

All the other trademarks of the Operator 5 series are here: Jimmy Christopher has an able assistant in the stalwart Irish lad Tim Donovan. He even takes a break to demonstrate a magic trick for Tim, as he usually does. Beautiful reporter Diane Elliott gets captured by the villains. Jimmy Christopher’s beautiful twin sister Nan is on hand but doesn’t have much to do in this one. Jimmy Christopher’s semi-invalid, retired intelligence agent father lends him a hand, too. The climaxes of Davis’s Operator 5 novels often border on the apocalyptic, and while he reins in that tendency a little this time, the final showdown features plenty of blood and thunder (and lepers).

I love this series because Davis was a fine writer and usually followed my motto when writing about Jimmy Christopher’s adventures: “If you’re going over the top anyway, you might as well go ‘way over.” That said, while I had a very good time reading this novel, I didn’t find it quite as appealing as some of the others in the series. I think I prefer the ones where there’s some sort of super-scientific weapon and a hidden mastermind threatening the nation, rather than a bunch of mostly nameless, faceless guys in robes and turbans who slink around getting folks hooked on hashish, which Davis nearly always refers to as “bhang!”, with the exclamation mark. After a while, I was glad I wasn’t playing a drinking game that involved references to bhang! I’d have been drunk for sure.

If you’ve never tried this series, “Cavern of the Damned” probably isn’t one you’d want to start with. If you’re already an Operator 5 fan and haven’t read this one, don’t let anything I’ve said here influence you not to read it. It’s great fun. Doing Operator 5 as a Weird Menace yarn is just a slight misstep, that’s all. It’s been reprinted several times over the years and is available currently in a very nice trade paperback edition from Altus Press.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: New Detective Magazine, February 1951

Despite the name of this pulp, the February 1951 issue of NEW DETECTIVE MAGAZINE is almost all reprint. There are two new things about it: the logo (which must not have been popular, because three issues later they went back to the original logo) and a novella by "Daniel Winters", actually a house-name and the author of this one is unknown. The reprints are by Norbert Davis (a Doan and Carstairs story), Leigh Brackett, Joel Townsley Rogers, C. William Harrison, H.H. Matteson, and John D. Fitzgerald, all from various 1940s issues of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY and FLYNN'S DETECTIVE FICTION. Most issues of NEW DETECTIVE from this era included a reprint or two, but this one is top-heavy with them. On the other hand, if you haven't read a story, it's new to you and doesn't matter if it's a reprint, does it? And I'll bet these were all pretty good stories. I don't own a copy, but if you want to check it out, the whole issue is available on the Internet Archive. By the way, I don't know who did the cover on this issue, but the guy in the background looks a little like Humphrey Bogart, and the blonde definitely reminds me of Marlene Dietrich.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, January 1946

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover art is by Robert Stanley. I’m so used to seeing his work on mystery and Western pulps and paperbacks, I’m not sure I would have recognized it in a pure adventure setting like this. But it’s a good cover and I like it.

If you’re like me, you saw “One For France and One For Me” by Georges Surdez and thought, “Ah, a French Foreign Legion yarn!” Surdez was famous for them. But no, this novella (and it’s almost long enough to be an actual novel) takes place entirely in France. Captain Norman Kenton, an American pilot who was shot down over France during the war, returns several months after V-E Day to look up the members of the Resistance who helped him avoid capture by the Nazis. It’s not just gratitude that motivates Kenton. One of those Resistance members was a beautiful young woman.

But he runs into more trouble than he expects and finds himself involved in black marketeering, a vengeance quest against people who collaborated with the Germans, murder, espionage, and tragedy. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Well, it’s actually just okay, because the plot pokes along at an exasperating pace, and a lengthy flashback in the middle of the story derails things even farther. I generally like Surdez’s work, and the final scene of this one, which takes place in a courtroom, is pretty good, but things just take too long to get there. Good plot, good characters, not so good execution.

The next story, “Un-Reversible Error” by Wallis Reef, also involves a court case, as you might guess from the title. It’s a contemporary (for the time the pulp was published) Western mystery with the protagonist being an old sheriff. The tone is a little light without the story being an actual comedy. The plot involves a hoodlum who looks like he’s going to get away with murder until the sheriff comes up with a surprise. Not an outstanding yarn, but fairly entertaining.

Stuart Cloete’s name is familiar to me. I think I may even own a few of his novels set in Africa. His short story in this issue, “A Death in the Family”, is a grim tale about two twin brothers discussing a family tragedy that took place in the trenches of World War I. The whole thing is a little slow and bland until Cloete springs a wry, triple-twist ending that took me by surprise and redeems the story for the most part.

“The Peacekeeper” by Hugh Fullerton is a short bit of folklore/tall tale about Finn McCool. Or something. I can’t be more precise than that because I didn’t read much of the story before saying, “Nope, not for me.” Something about Fullerton’s style just grated on me.

“Blood and Guts” by William Langer is much better. It’s a well-written, character-driven story about an Army medic seeing his first action during an assault on a Japanese-held island in the Pacific.

“You Ain’t Gonna Believe This” is a Runyonesque tale about a prizefighter with four arms. Lawton Ford’s story evokes a few smiles, but no outright chuckles.

“The Shadow of a Mountain” by William Arthur Breyfogle is set in an unnamed Central American country where the German general who’s in command of the army stirs up a war with a neighboring country. There’s also a volcano that’s about to erupt. This starts out like it’s going to be a comedy but turns pretty grim before it’s over. Not a bad story, but decidedly odd.

It's not surprising that my favorite story in the issue is by Day Keene, who had a good career in the pulps before becoming one of the top paperback authors of the Fifties and Sixties. “In the Halls of Montezuma” is a crime yarn that also has a military angle, as a prizefighter-turned-gangster sets out getting his revenge on the guy who caused his fall from grace. The big twist at the end is completely predictable, but Keene was such a good storyteller that it doesn’t matter.

The final story in the issue, “The Mule That Loined Brooklyn” by Nick Boddie Williams, is similar in one way to Surdez’s “One For France and One For Me”. It’s about a downed pilot trying to escape from the enemy in World War II, only Williams’ story is set in Burma, the enemies are the Japanese, and the story is more of a farce than anything else. It’s okay, but lightweight enough to float off.

With that lineup of stories, this issue never rises above the merely okay level and flirts with below average. Day Keene’s story is good but definitely a minor entry in his body of work, and it’s the highlight. Langer’s story about the Army medic is also worth reading. There are some good issues of ADVENTURE from this era, but this one is pretty forgettable.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Mystery Magazine, January 1945

This issue of DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE came long after its heyday as a Weird Menace pulp, but judging by the line-up of authors inside, it was still a pretty darned good detective pulp: Fredric Brown, Day Keene, William R. Cox, Robert Turner, Cyril Plunkett, Larry Sternig, and a couple I'm not familiar with, Steve Herrick and Ken Lewis. That's a pretty good cover by Gloria Stoll, too. Cox's story features his series character Tom Kincaid. He expanded some of these stories into full-length novels, but I don't know if this was one of them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Detective Magazine, August 1936

Yikes! What a disturbing cover by Walter Baumhofer for this issue of DIME DETECTIVE. I'm sure there are quite a few jolts in the stories, too. Authors in this issue include Fred MacIsaac (with a Rambler story), William E. Barrett (with a Needle Mike story), John K. Butler (with a "Tricky" Enright story--I'm not familiar with that character at all), Leslie T. White (with a Duke and Phyllis Martendel story--nope, don't know them, either), and forgotten pulpster Denslow M. Dade.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Star Western, April 1936

A dramatic cover by Walter Baumhofer graces this issue of STAR WESTERN, my favorite Western pulp published by Popular Publications. A look at the authors inside will tell you why I feel that way: T.T. Flynn, Ray Nafziger, Luke Short, W. Ryerson Johnson, Robert E. Mahaffey (twice, with a short story and a novelette), William F. Bragg, and Foster-Harris. I also like STAR WESTERN because it ran more novellas and novelettes than short stories. I like short stories just fine, but I think the novella is just about the perfect length for all types of genre fiction.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Detective Magazine, November 1945

I love Sam Cherry's Western pulp covers--and he did a lot of 'em!--but he painted quite a few non-Western covers, too, and they're all very good like this one on an issue of DIME DETECTIVE MAGAZINE. That fellow looks a lot like Boris Karloff to me. The group of authors inside is a strong one, too, with T.T. Flynn, D.L. Champion, and G.T. Fleming-Roberts leading the way, plus a couple of lesser-known authors in Fergus Truslow (a distinctive name, but not anyone whose work I've ever read as far as I recall) and Jean Prentice (her only credit in the Fictionmags Index). Flynn, Champion, Fleming-Roberts, and Cherry are plenty to make this issue noteworthy.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fifteen Western Tales, April 1948

There's a lot going on in this cover by Sam Cherry, more than you might realize at first glance. We have our stalwart hero in a red shirt . . . or is he a hero? He's clearly been wearing the mask that just fell down around his neck, and there's a bag of stolen bank loot lying beside him. He's been lassoed, his horse is running away in the background, and there's a guy on the porch behind him probably shooting at him. He must have been trying to make his getaway after robbing the bank when somebody dabbed a loop on him. But that's a Lone Ranger/Masked Rider type of mask, not a bank robber mask. So I don't really know what's going on, but it's a good cover anyway, as you'd expect from Sam Cherry. Inside this issue of FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES are stories by Wayne D. Overholser, Clifton Adams, Barry Cord (Peter Germano), Talmage Powell, Joe Archibald, Thomas Calvert McClary, Kenneth Fowler, Wallace Umphrey, and the obscure Ruland Waltner. FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES included features and articles in that count, so there are actually only nine pieces of fiction in this issue, but they look like pretty good stories.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western, September 1948

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat tattered copy in the scan. I’m not sure of the cover artist. Might be Robert Stanley, who did a lot of Western pulp covers for Popular Publications during this time period. But it might not be.

DIME WESTERN, like the other Popular Publications Western pulps, always had good authors, but there’s a particularly strong lineup in this issue, leading off with a surprisingly good Walt Coburn novella, considering how late this story came in his career. “Shoot or Git Shot!” is a son-of-an-outlaw yarn, where a widowed rustler leaves his six-year-old son with the father of his late wife. The old-timer raises the boy to be a good man, rather than an owlhoot. But as usual in a Coburn story, there’s a lot of back-story and not everything is as it appears to be at first. There’s nothing in this one you won’t see coming, but it’s well-written and has a nice epic feel to it for a novella. Plus there’s a great, brutal fistfight and a spectacular shootout to wrap things up. Coburn was inconsistent by this point, but “Shoot or Git Shot!” is as good as most of his stories from ten or twenty years earlier.

Frank Bonham probably would be annoyed that one of the main things he's remembered for these days is his slightly embittered essay “Tarzana Nights” about his time spent ghostwriting Western pulp stories for Ed Earl Repp. But he was an excellent writer and that’s on display in “Good Squatters Are Dead Squatters”, his short story in this issue. It’s a big rancher vs. small rancher story, but it’s very well-written and does a fine job of capturing the Texas Panhandle country. The resolution is maybe a little hard to swallow, but this is still a good story from a consistently good writer.

Clifton Adams was one of the best of the hardboiled Western writers who broke into the pulps in the late Forties and then went on to write dozens of excellent novels during the Fifties and Sixties. His story in this issue is a novelette about a wounded outlaw on the run called “There’s Hell in His Holster!” It’s a good story in its own right, but it has some historical significance, too. I believe it’s the first appearance of Tall Cameron, who, a couple of years later, would be the protagonist of Adams’ iconic Gold Medal novels THE DESPERADO and A NOOSE FOR THE DESPERADO. Neither of the novels is an expansion of this story, which is sort of an alternate universe take on the character, but Adams took a lot of Tall Cameron’s history from this tale.

Wilbur S. Peacock was a pulp editor as well as a writer. He turned out scores of Western, detective, and science fiction yarns and appears in this issue of DIME WESTERN with a short-short called “Reward of Merit”, about an old sheriff who’s been pushed out of his job in favor of a younger man. It’s well-written but the ending falls flat as far as I’m concerned. I generally like Peacock’s work but think this one was a misfire.

I’ve read good things about George C. Appell’s stories but don’t recall if I’ve ever read anything by him before. His short story “The Search” relies on a gimmick: not revealing one character’s true identity until the very end of the story. That’s kind of interesting, and the search of the title, a hunt for hidden loot, has promise, but overall the plot is muddled enough that it’s hard to follow and I didn’t care much for this story, either.

Peter Dawson, actually Jonathan Glidden, brother of Frederick “Luke Short” Glidden, was always dependable, and he comes through in this issue with the novelette “It’s Your Town—Die in It!” The story concerns a new marshal who believes he’s been roped into a town-taming job under false pretenses. He wants to abandon the job and leave town, but a beautiful new seamstress just arrived in the settlement, so maybe she’ll provide a reason for him to stay and have a showdown with the local hardcases. There’s really not a lot to this story, but it’s well-written and entertaining.

This issue wraps up with a novella by an author I’ve read quite a bit by lately, E. Hoffmann Price (although he’s credited incorrectly as E. Hoffman Price on the cover, TOC, and the story itself). “The Cowman Who Damned His Brand” has a very intriguing twist: the protagonist, a prospector who enjoys hunting for gold, falls in love with a woman who wants him to buy a ranch and settle down. So he buys a spread and inserts himself into the middle of a range war, fully intending to be a failure so he can convince the girl he needs to go back to prospecting. Of course, things don’t work out as he planned. This offbeat plot and Price’s talent for storytelling combine to make this a very good yarn.

This is a solid issue of DIME WESTERN with top-notch stories by Coburn, Bonham, Dawson, and Price, and the stories I didn’t much care for are readable and might be more to someone else’s taste. If you have a copy of it, it’s well worth pulling down from the shelf and reading.