Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, December 12, 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, complete with tape around the edges applied by some previous owner. The cover art is by Albin Henning, who appears to have done more interior illustrations for the pulps and the slicks than he did covers. I think this one is okay, but I don’t like it as well as the covers by R.G. Harris and H.W. Scott, who did most of the WILD WEST WEEKLY covers during the Thirties and Forties.

The lead novelette in this issue is “Long-rider’s Loot” by William A. Todd, a house-name used on the Risky McKee series by Norman W. Hay. Hay wrote hundreds of stories for WILD WEST WEEKLY under half a dozen pseudonyms and house-names, including approximately three dozen about a young rancher in Arizona named Risky McKee, who raises and trains horses. This is the first Risky McKee story I’ve read. In it, a drug-addicted outlaw named Hypo Crawley (great name) escapes from prison and tries to recover the loot from a bank robbery he hid several years earlier. Crawley double-crossed his gang and stole the money from them, so they’re after it, too, and hope he’ll lead them to it. Risky finds himself in the middle of all this, assisted by his sidekick Sufferin’ Joe, a hypochondriac old codger always complaining about one ailment or another acting like he has one foot in the grave. This is a pretty decent, if standard plot, and Hay throws in a couple of nice twists in before the end. There’s a great line that put a smile on my face: “He’s so crooked he could hide behind a corkscrew.” Sufferin’ Joe is a good character, too, definitely comedy relief but also tough and competent when he needs to be. The only real problem about this story is Risky himself, who is such a bland and shallow character that he’s barely there on the page. I don’t know if he comes off better in the other stories—I’d certainly read more of them because I like Hay’s writing overall—but he keeps this yarn from being anything more than average.

Hay is also the author of the second story in this issue, a stand-alone called “Six-gun Wages” published under the house-name Philip F. Deere. This is a much better story about a young cowboy who discovers a rustling operation along the border between Arizona and Mexico. It’s a well-written tale and one of the characters who seems like a villain turns out not to be, which is always a nice twist. I enjoyed this one quite a bit. As I said, I like Norman W. Hay’s work. As far as I can tell, he published only a handful of stories under his own name, and maybe that’s the way he wanted it, but I think that’s kind of a shame. I wish he’d written some Western novels.

J. Allan Dunn wrote more than 150 stories about Texas Ranger Bud Jones for WILD WEST WEEKLY. I’ve read only one other one before now, and I liked it fairly well with a few reservations. The Bud Jones yarn in this issue is called “Hide-out” and opens with a gang of desperate outlaws fleeing with the loot from a bank robbery they’ve pulled. Bud is the Ranger who sets out to track them down, but he seems stymied when their trail mysteriously disappears, until he figures out the clever trick they’ve pulled. No reservations on this one. It’s a solid, well-plotted yarn with a great showdown at the end.  By the way, has anyone ever tried to figure out how much Dunn wrote? His total wordage has to be right up there with Frederick Faust, H. Bedford-Jones, and Erle Stanley Gardner.

Lee Bond wrote two long-running series about good guy outlaws and the lawmen who dogged pursue them, the Long Sam Littlejohn series that ran for some 50 stories in TEXAS RANGERS and the Oklahoma Kid series in WILD WEST WEEKLY which was even more popular, lasting for approximately 70 stories. “Boot Hill Gamble” is the Oklahoma Kid novelette in this issue, and it finds the Kid (whose real name is Jack Reese, but that’s hardly ever used) on the trail of some outlaws who held up a stage, murdered the driver and guard, and got away with $30,000 in gold bars. The Kid is blamed for this crime, and the only way to clear his name is to round up the real culprits. This is a very standard plot, as usual for Bond, but he does a good job with it and includes plenty of well-written action, which is his strong suit. I like the Long Sam yarns considerably more than the ones featuring the Oklahoma Kid, but Bond’s work is nearly always worth reading although it seldom rises to the top rank of Western pulp fiction.

Claude Rister wrote more than a hundred stories for the pulps, mostly Westerns but with some detective, adventure, and aviation yarns mixed in. He also wrote a number of Western novels under the pseudonym Buck Billings. His story in this issue, “Outlaw Option”, is about a cowboy who’s had a bit of a shady past coming to the aid of an old-timer who’s about to be finagled out of his ranch by a slick gambler. In order to do that, the protagonist enlists the help of several other former owlhoots. There’s nothing special about the plot in this one, but Rister writes well and isn’t as heavy-handed with the dialect as some Western pulpsters can be. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by him and need to read more.

There’s also a Texas Triggers novelette by Walker A. Tompkins to round out this issue, but that series was fixed up into a novel called TEXAS TRIGGERS, and since I happen to own that book, I didn’t read the novelette. I’ll get to it when I read the book.

Overall, this isn’t a bad issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. All the stories are readable and fairly entertaining. But it’s not an outstanding issue, either. It's about as average as you can get with a Western pulp. Fortunately, with WILD WEST WEEKLY, that means it’s enjoyable enough to be worth reading if you have a copy.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Trails, February 1948

This issue of WESTERN TRAILS features another fine, dramatic cover by Norman Saunders. As usual with the Ace Western pulps, this issue has two stories by J. Edward Leithead, one under his own name and one under his most common pseudonym Wilson L. Covert. I'm a big fan of Leithead's work and there are some other fine authors in this issue, including Walker A. Tompkins, Joseph Chadwick, D.B. Newton, weird fiction icon Kirk Mashburn, Cliff Walters, and Dan Kirby. I don't own this issue and haven't read it, but with that cover and author line-up I have no doubt that it's very good.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, July 18, 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The excellent cover by R.G. Harris illustrates a scene from the lead novelette by Walker A. Tompkins, “Tommy Rockford’s Coffin Clew”.

In this installment of Tompkins’ long-running series about the young railroad detective who carries a pair of gold-plated handcuffs, Rockford arrives in an isolated Arizona settlement on a stormy night in pursuit of a notorious train robber. However, when he gets there he discovers that his quarry has already been brought to justice, drilled in a gunfight with the local sheriff. Then the sheriff himself turns up dead, and Tommy has to solve his murder. This is one of those stories where the big plot twist is pretty obvious, but that doesn’t stop Tompkins from spinning it into a very entertaining yarn with his usual skill. I was a little disappointed in the last Tommy Rockford story I read, but not this one. It’s well-written, atmospheric, and suspenseful. Also, I didn’t figure out the “coffin clew” of the title, so that’s one final surprise Tompkins saves for the story’s last paragraph. Fine work in this one.

Hal Davenport wrote a lot of stories under the various WILD WEST WEEKLY house-names, including more than 20 novelettes in the Billy West and Circle J series as Cleve Endicott. His story in this issue, “Six-guns Say No”, is a stand-alone published under his own name. It’s a range war yarn as a young rancher fights to defend the waterhole on which his spread depends from a bunch of no-good crooks trying to steal it. This story is almost all action, and while there’s nothing in it we haven’t seen many, many times before, Davenport does a good job of storytelling and comes up with an entertaining tale.

Samuel H. Nickels also wrote prolifically under house-names for WILD WEST WEEKLY, but under his own name he authored almost 140 short stories about a pair of young Texas Rangers named “Hungry” Hawkins and “Rusty” Bolivar. In this issue’s Hungry and Rusty yarn, “Rangers’ Rescue”, our intrepid pair set out to find a rancher’s son who’s been kidnapped by outlaws. This is another tale that’s almost all action. This is the first Hungry and Rusty story I’ve read. I enjoyed it and found them a very likable pair of protagonists. Definitely wouldn’t mind reading more of these.

Guy L. Maynard was another regular house-name scribe but also wrote several popular series under his own name, the longest-running of which featured a character called Señor Red Mask. He wrote a dozen stories featuring a redheaded cowboy, trail driver, and adventurer known as Flame Burns. Some legendary historical Old West characters appeared in these as well, much like the Rio Kid series. In this issue’s novelette, “Death Riders of Dodge”, Flame is in Dodge City, having just delivered a herd of cattle he brought up the trail from Texas. He’s set upon by outlaws and robbed of the payoff for that herd, and the rest of the story concerns his efforts to get the money back and avenge the death of a friend in a shootout. He gets some help in this from none other than Calamity Jane, who bears only a passing resemblance to the historical Calamity Jane. There’s one mention of her nursing the sick during an epidemic, and other than that she’s strictly the fictional version that’s shown up in so many movies, TV shows, and novels. This is the first thing I’ve read by Maynard, as far as I know, and when I read it, I wasn’t very impressed by it. It seemed a little too simple and juvenile. It’s sticking with me more than I expected, though. I’ll have to read more by Maynard to form a worthwhile opinion of his work.

“King of Colts” is by Charles M. Martin, who sometimes wrote as Chuck Martin. It’s a vengeance yarn, as a young rancher sets out after the three outlaws responsible for the death of the grandfather who raised him. That’s all there is to it, but Martin writes in a terse style that I enjoy, and since he was an actual cowboy, like Walt Coburn, his work has a strong sense of authenticity. Also like Coburn, Martin wound up taking his own life by hanging, which is a shame. He was a pretty darned good writer.

There are some assorted features and one other piece of fiction in this issue, the novelette “Whizz Fargo Springs a Murder Trap” by George C. Henderson. This is one of six linked novelettes about Whizz Fargo that were fixed up into the novel WHIZZ FARGO, GUNFIGHTER. I happen to own a copy of that novel, so I skipped the story in this issue, preferring to read it in the novel version. Which I’ll get around to soon, I hope. I’ve read some stories by Henderson in the past and enjoyed them, as far as I recall.

Overall, this is a good but not great issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. Tompkins’ Tommy Rockford story is definitely the highlight. The other stories are all perfectly readable and entertaining, but they didn’t really make a strong impression on me. Having said that, I’m glad I read it and believe it’s worth your time if you happen to own a copy of it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, August 27, 1938

I own a couple dozen issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY, but the August 27, 1938 issue isn’t among them. It’s available on the Internet Archive, though, and I picked it to read for a reason which I’ll get around to. The cover is by the legendary Norman Saunders, and it’s a good one illustrating the lead novella, “The Cougar’s Claws”.

That novella features Pete Rice, and that’s the reason I read this one. A little background for those of you unfamiliar with the character: Inspired by the success of THE SHADOW and DOC SAVAGE, in 1933 the good folks at Street & Smith decided to launch a Western hero pulp. The result was PETE RICE MAGAZINE. The title character is the two-fisted, fast-shootin’ sheriff of Trinchera County, Arizona, who's assisted by two deputies, scrawny little Misery Hicks (who does double duty as the barber of Buffalo Gap, the county seat) and Teeny Butler, who, in keeping with the nicknaming tradition of pulp characters, is well over six feet tall and weighs 300 pounds. The gimmick of the series, if you can call it that, is that while it has all the Western trappings, it’s set in the modern day, putting it in firmly in the same camp as the Western B-movies of the times starring Gene Autry and others. These Pete Rice novels, and they were full-length novels, were written by veteran pulpster Ben Conlon under the pseudonym Austin Gridley.

Well, PETE RICE MAGAZINE was not a raging success. It ran for 31 issues, approximately two and a half years. I read one of the novels years ago and don’t remember much about it except that I wasn’t impressed and didn’t seek out any more of the series. But . . . after Pete’s own magazine was cancelled, the character moved to WILD WEST WEEKLY, where he starred in 21 more novellas and novelettes. Or did he? You see, the stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY are no longer set in the modern day but take place in the Old West, which prompted a recent discussion between me and a friend about the idea that the Pete Rice in the WILD WEST WEEKLY stories is actually the father or grandfather of the Pete Rice who starred in his own magazine. That seems feasible, other than the fact that in WILD WEST WEEKLY, Misery and Teeny are still Pete’s deputies, and claiming that those characters are also an earlier generation seems like quite a stretch to me. I suspect that in real life, nobody at Street & Smith ever gave the change in time period a second thought other than maybe instructing Conlon to make the stories actual Westerns in hopes that they would help sell WILD WEST WEEKLY. It’s a safe bet that none of the pulp writers and editors dreamed anybody would still be talking about this stuff nearly a century down the road!

Anyway, another difference in the characters in PETE RICE MAGAZINE and WILD WEST WEEKLY is that in the later incarnation, Austin Gridley became a house-name. Ben Conlon continued to write some of the stories, but other authors contributed Pete Rice yarns, too, including Paul S. Powers, who teamed Pete with his popular character Sonny Tabor, leading to a joint byline of Austin Gridley and Ward Stevens (Powers’ pseudonym); Ronald Oliphant, who penned a crossover between Pete and Billy West of the Circle J, under the names Austin Gridley and Cleve Endicott (the house-name on the Circle J series); Lee Bond; and the extremely prolific Laurence Donovan, who also ghosted some Doc Savage novels for Street & Smith. The Pete Rice story in this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY I just read, “The Cougar’s Claws”, is Donovan’s first Pete Rice story.

And after my lukewarm at best reaction to the other Pete Rice yarn I read, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I really enjoyed this one. The Cougar is the leader of an outlaw gang plaguing Trinchera County and has come up with a really grisly way of disposing of his enemies: he wraps them in green bullhide and then lets the sun dry it out so that it shrinks and crushes the victims to death. Pete and his deputies clash several times with the Cougar and his gang, escape from some death traps, and finally expose the real mastermind behind all the villainy. There are some clever twists and Donovan was always really good with action, of which there is plenty. I found Pete and his deputies likable and had a fine time reading this novella. I’ll be on the lookout for more of the Pete Rice issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY.

I think the novelette “Gunsmoke Tornado” is the earliest story I’ve ever read by Dudley Dean McGaughey, the real name of Dean Owen, who gets the credit for this one. I’ve read quite a few of McGaughey’s pulp novels from the Forties and a bunch of paperbacks from the Fifties and Sixties, but “Gunsmoke Tornado” was only his ninth published story. It’s a good one, too, about a drifting young cowhand who signs on with a ranch crew where he faces some hazing. That might have been a story in itself, but there’s more going on than that, and before you know it, our young hero finds himself in danger up to his neck because of a feud between rival ranches. McGaughey’s work has a nice hardboiled tone to it and this story is no exception.  Plenty of tough action makes this one a winner.

I’m familiar with Lee Bond mostly from the long-running Long Sam Littlejohn series he wrote as backup stories in TEXAS RANGERS, but he did several series for WILD WEST WEEKLY, including one featuring drifting cowpokes Calamity Boggs and Shorty Stevens. Shorty is, well, short and feisty, just as you’d expect. Calamity is tall and husky and full of doom and gloom, an extreme pessimist who always believes the worst is about to happen, which is, I’m sure, how he got his nickname. Bond doesn’t explain that in “Calamity Hubs a Frame-Up” in this issue, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s easy enough to just jump right into this yarn in which our two rambling heroes find a recently abandoned line shack, decide to spend the night there, and wake up the next morning to find themselves the prisoners of a posse out to hang them for murder and rustling. As you might suppose, eventually they sort things out and everything gets resolved in a big gunfight, as things usually do in a Lee Bond story. Bond moves things along well and was always excellent when it comes to the action scenes. This is the third very good story in a row in this issue.

I’ve written here before about how Elmer Kelton and I enjoyed talking about Western pulps whenever we’d get together. I think I may have been the only one of his friends who was a pulp fan. He told me several times that WILD WEST WEEKLY was his favorite pulp when he was a kid growing up on a ranch in West Texas, and Sonny Tabor was his favorite character. Paul S. Powers wrote the Sonny Tabor series under the pseudonym Ward M. Stevens. More than 130 novelettes and novellas between 1930 and 1943 is quite a run. Some of those stories were crossovers featuring Sonny Tabor meeting up with other series characters from WILD WEST WEEKLY, including Kid Wolf (also a Paul S. Powers creation), Pete Rice, and Billy West and the Circle J outfit.

But who was Sonny Tabor? He was a good-guy outlaw, falsely accused of some crime (I don’t know the details) and on the run from the law, blamed for every bit of outlawry that occurs any time he’s around, and sometimes even when he’s not. The novelette in this issue, “A Murder Brand for Sonny Tabor”, is actually the first one I’ve read. The youngest of three brothers who own a ranch together is gunned down, shot in the back, and the name Tabor is carved into his forehead. The dead man’s brothers and the local law blame Sonny, of course, and he has to uncover the real killer to clear his name of this charge, anyway, although he’ll still be wanted for dozens of others. This is a really well-written story and I found myself liking Sonny and rooting for him right away. I have quite a few more issues with Sonny Tabor stories in them and I’m glad of that because I really enjoyed this one.

I was familiar with Allan R. Bosworth as the author of several excellent Western novels, but I’ve discovered in recent years that he also wrote scores of stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY under house-names, as well as contributing to the magazine under his own name. He used it on his long-running series about freight wagon driver Shorty Masters and his sidekick Willie Wetherbee, also known as the gunfightin’ Sonora Kid. In “A Hangin’ on Live Oak Creek”, all Shorty and Willie want to do is run a trotline and catch themselves a mess of catfish for fryin’ up. Instead, they find a fella who’s been lynched, but luckily they come across him before he’s choked to death. Rescuing him puts our heroes smack-dab in the middle of a fight between ranchers and rustlers. There’s a nice twist in this one. I saw it coming, but that didn’t make it any less satisfying. Also, I like the way Shorty names the mules in his team after classical music composers. That’s a nice touch I wasn’t expecting. Another really good story.

One of WILD WEST WEEKLY’s specialties was the series of linked novellas that could then be combined and published as a fix-up novel. Walker A. Tompkins was the master of this format, writing many of them for the pulp. His story in this issue published under the house-name Philip F. Deere, “Death Rides Tombstone Trail”, is the third of six to feature a Wyoming cowboy named Lon Cole who is in Texas working as a trail boss and also getting mixed up in various adventures. In this one, he’s between trail drives and takes a job as a special guard for a stagecoach carrying a shipment of gold. Of course, the stagecoach is held up. Lon is grazed by an outlaw bullet and knocked out so they think he’s dead and ride off leaving him there. He goes after the varmints, of course, and discovers they’re a gang known as the Secret Six and are led by a mysterious mastermind known as The Chief. This is nothing we haven’t all seen before, but Tompkins is good at it. Even though the story has a beginning, middle, and end, it’s weakened slightly by being part of a bigger whole, but I had a good time reading it anyway. The six Lon Cole stories were combined into the novel THUNDERGUST TRAIL, published under Tompkins' real name by Phoenix Press in 1942. I own a copy of that book but haven't read it. When I get around to it, I'll have already read a chunk out of the middle of it, but I don't think that'll bother me too much.

Overall, this is one of the best Western pulps I’ve read in a long time. Every story in this issue is very good to excellent, and several of them really make me want to read more about the characters. If you’ve never read an issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY, it would make a good introduction to the magazine, I think. If you’re a long-time fan like me, it’s well worth downloading and reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Street & Smith's Wild West Weekly, January 8, 1938

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat battered copy in the scan. The cover art is by H.W. Scott, and it’s an excellent depiction of T.W. Ford’s series character Solo Strant, also known as the Silver Kid because of the silver conchos on his shirt and hatband, the silver-inlaid butts of his guns, and the silver death’s-head clasp on his hat's chin strap. Ford was tremendously prolific in several genres—Western, sports, detective, and aviation—as well as working in the pulps as an editor, but the Silver Kid series is probably his magnum opus. He wrote approximately 60 Silver Kid stories, all of them novella length, which is a pretty significant body of work. They appeared in WILD WEST WEEKLY from 1935 to 1941, then in various Columbia Western pulps from 1942 to 1952. Solo Strant is a small but deadly gunfighter/adventurer who’s not above selling his gun skills if he believes it's for a worthy cause.

In this issue’s lead novella, “Traitors Ride the Sundown”, Strant is hired to find out who’s trying to murder a rancher who has a spread in the Sundown Hills. On the way to take the job, he runs into trouble at an outlaw roadhouse in Bad Man’s Pass but is helped out by a friendly old-timer who is headed in the same direction. When Strant reaches his destination, he has to deal with several bushwhackings and murders before he untangles what’s going on. There are a couple of occasions where someone is about to give him some vital information, only to wind up dead. The plot is pretty simple and straightforward and doesn’t contain any surprises, but I really enjoy the way Ford writes. His punchy, action-packed style really races along and Solo Strant is a very likable protagonist. I’ve read several Silver Kid novellas before and always enjoyed them. “Traitors Ride the Sundown” is also quite entertaining. If somebody were to reprint this series, I’d certainly be a customer for it. Until then, I’ll read ’em where I find ’em.

Ben Conlon is best remembered for writing the Pete Rice stories, which appeared in the character’s own magazine and also in WILD WEST WEEKLY, under the pseudonym Austin Gridley, but he wrote a couple of hundred Western, sports, and adventure yarns for various pulps and under various pen-names over the years. He has a stand-alone story, “Texas Blood”, in this issue under his own name. It’s about a young former Texas Ranger starting a ranch in New Mexico and running into rustling trouble. The stereotypical pulp Western dialect is really thick in this one. Everybody talks that way. My Mangy Polecat Threshold is higher than most people’s, but Conlon overdoes it to the point that I almost gave up. I’m glad I didn’t because, other than the dialogue, his writing is pretty clean and swift and vivid, and the plot has some clever twists leading to a smashing climax. I wound up enjoying the story quite a bit.

J. Allan Dunn wrote approximately 160 stories for WILD WEST WEEKLY about a young Texas Ranger named Bud Jones. This issue’s yarn is called “Buckshot and Bullets” and finds Bud trying to head off a war between Texas cattlemen and Mexican sheepherders. I nearly always enjoy Dunn’s work, but a couple of things about this one bothered me, the most troublesome that he seems to think Houston is the capital of Texas, not Austin. Also, he has all the Texans referring to the Mexicans as “Mexies”, a term I don’t think I’ve ever heard. That said, this is a pretty well-written, exciting tale with some nice action. Bud Jones is a very likable protagonist, too.

The most prolific series of all in WILD WEST WEEKLY starred Billy West, the young owner of the Circle J ranch in Montana, and his two friends who work for him, feisty, redheaded Joe Scott and cantankerous old codger Buck Foster, along with Sing Lo, the ranch’s Chinese cook. Upwards of 450 novelettes starring this bunch were published between 1927 and 1941, written by half a dozen different authors under the house-name Cleve Endicott. I’d read a few of them before and enjoyed them. The story in this issue, “Gun-Fight Valley”, is by Norman L. Hay, who probably wrote more Circle  J novelettes than anyone else. Our heroes are in Arizona on a cattle-buying trip when they get drawn into the mystery of a missing wagon train. What they find turns out to be somewhat unexpected. This is a nicely plotted yarn with plenty of excellent action. Billy, Joe, and Buck are standard characters but are handled well and I enjoy reading about their exploits. I’d love to see some of this series reprinted someday.

Evidently, “Burro Bait” by Phil Squires is part of a humorous series about a young man from Missouri called Hinges Hollister who goes west to become a cowboy. The story is told in the form of letters between Hinges and his mother and girlfriend back home. The dialect is so thick as to be almost indecipherable, and the humor falls flat. Not to my taste at all, and I didn’t finish it.

The issue wraps up with “Tommy Rockford Bucks the Nevada Wolves” by one of my favorite Western writers, Walker A. Tompkins. By WILD WEST WEEKLY standards, the Tommy Rockford series wasn’t that prolific: approximately 50 stories in a dozen years, 1931-43. But it’s a good one, and Tommy Rockford is one of my favorite characters from this pulp known for its series characters. He’s a young railroad detective, and if they had ever made any Tommy Rockford movies, Roy Rogers would have been perfect to play him. In this yarn, which takes place in Arizona and Mexico, despite the title, Tommy takes on an outlaw gang that has traveled from Nevada to Arizona to visit another gang and see their hideout. This leads to a stagecoach holdup, an attempted bank robbery, and Tommy being captured by the outlaws. I found this one to be something of a disappointment because, despite all those plot elements, it never comes together as a very compelling story. It’s more a case of just throwing things in the pot until there are enough pages. Even worse, Tommy does something that’s so out of character, it just about ruined the story for me, and it wasn’t even necessary to make the plot work. I think it would have been more effective handling things a different way. The story is readable enough because Tompkins’ prose is always smooth and just races right along, but this is easily the worst of the Tommy Rockford series I’ve read so far.

So what you have in this issue is definitely a mixed bag. The cover is excellent, the Silver Kid and Circle J stories are both very good, the Bud Jones story is flawed but entertaining, the Tommy Rockford story definitely sub-par, the Ben Conlon story okay but with overdone dialect, and the Hinges Hollister story not for me at all. I still like WILD WEST WEEKLY, but this is far from my favorite issue. It does make me want to read more Silver Kid and Circle J stories, though.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, February 1952

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, complete with a good Sam Cherry cover as usual for this era.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue, “Panhandle Freight”, is an interesting one for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, though, it’s a good solid story that finds Hatfield getting mixed up in a war between two freighting companies in the Texas Panhandle. Settling that trouble isn’t actually his assignment, as it usually is when he wades into a case. Instead, he’s on the trail of an outlaw he’s followed across Texas, and that hardcase has gone to work for the villainous freight line owner who plans to wipe out his competition. That’s what draws Hatfield into the trouble, and when he finds out a young woman has been kidnapped, he’s not going to stop until he puts things right. There’s no mystery in this one about who the main bad guy is—the reader knows right away. But that doesn’t detract from the enjoyment as we get a shootout at a waterhole, assorted bushwhackings and fistfights, a big fire, a stagecoach holdup, and a final showdown in which Hatfield and a young freighter who serves as sort of a proxy hero take on the whole gang. It’s traditional stuff, but done very well.

For a long time, this novel was attributed to D.B. Newton. I forget why Newton’s name was attached to it, possibly because of payment records from the August Lenniger Literary Agency. Newton is listed as the author of four Hatfield novels in the Fictionmags Index, including this one. But the manuscript of it is known to be in the collection of Tompkins’ papers at the University of California-Santa Barbara, so it seems pretty safe to say that he wrote it. Having read it now, I’m even more confident of Tompkins’ authorship. It reads just like his work with plenty of well-done action scenes and an abundance of hyphenated words, his most distinctive stylistic tag. Establishing that it is Tompkins’ work and not Newton’s is one of the reasons I find it interesting.

The other is that I was reading along in it and suddenly Anita Robertson shows up! Anita Robertson, for those of you not familiar with her, is a beautiful young woman who lives in Austin with her teenage brother Buck. She was added to the series in the mid-Forties presumably in response to the numerous letters to the editor asking that “Jackson Cole” give Hatfield a steady girlfriend. Anita and Buck appear in a dozen or so novels written by Tom Curry. Usually, Anita is in the story only very briefly, just there long enough for a quick kiss and a paragraph about how Hatfield can’t marry her until he gives up his dangerous work as a Ranger. Then Buck tags along with Hatfield as a sidekick on his latest case. The readers apparently didn’t like them, although the editors printed a few letters in support of them, but they vanished after a few years and nobody seemed to mind.

I’d read that Tom Curry was the only Hatfield author to use the characters, except for one appearance in a story by D.B. Newton. This must be the story, except it’s not by Newton. And while Buck is mentioned, he doesn’t appear. Surprisingly, Anita actually has something to do. She teams up with Hatfield to help him break the case open, and—this really surprised me—I liked her! Tompkins handles the character much better and she’s more believable. It’s kind of a shame she didn’t appear in more of the Hatfield novels by Tompkins, but getting rid of Buck is an acceptable trade-off.

This issue of TEXAS RANGERS was on the stands in January 1952 (the cover dates on pulps were off-sale dates), but it has a Christmas story in it, “Double Dick Follows a Star” by Lee Priestly, who was really Opal Shore Priestly. It’s the third in a series of four stories about a colorful old prospector named Double Dick Richards. I read another in the series a while back and found it readable and mildly amusing. I found this one to be neither of those things. I bailed after a page or so. Probably more to do with my mood than the story itself, although I wouldn’t swear to that.

“Dead Man’s Boots” is a novelette also by Walker A. Tompkins, but it has his name on it, and reading it so soon after “Panhandle Freight” just convinced me that Tompkins did author that Hatfield novel. The styles are identical. The novelette is a good one using the “outlaw masquerades as a lawman” plot. In this case, escaped convict Rand Weston, sent to Yuma Prison for a murder he didn’t commit, winds up assuming the identity of a murdered range detective who was supposed to investigate the murder of a beautiful young woman’s rancher father. That’s a lot of murders there, but Tompkins untangles things with his usual skill. This one starts off especially well but eventually feels a little rushed. It probably would have worked better at novella length. But it’s still a very enjoyable yarn and well worth reading.

“Fiddle and Fight” by Cy Kees is another humorous story, this time about a fiddling contest. The Devil does not show up, which is kind of a shame because it might have made this one better. This is another story I didn’t like and didn’t finish. Man, I really must have been in a grumpy mood when I read this issue!

On the other hand, I thought “Haggerty’s Valley” by Francis H. Ames was pretty good. Ames published about 80 stories in various Western pulps in the decade between the late Forties and the late Fifties. If I’ve ever read anything by him before, I don’t remember it. This one uses the old amnesia plot, as our protagonist wakes up wounded and not knowing who he is, being tended to by a beautiful girl who tells him he’s a deputy and has to rescue her from a gang of vicious outlaws who are after her. I kept waiting for one more twist in this story that never materialized, but it's well-written, moves along nicely, and had plenty of action.

You know anything by Clifton Adams will be well-written. “The First of May”, his short story in this issue, certainly is. It’s about a young man who wants to avenge the death of his brother, but he has to wait for his twenty-first birthday to do so because of a promise he made. This is more of a psychological Western than anything else, and because of that I found it a little unsatisfying overall. I don’t think it’s one of Adams’ better stories, but it might hit the target for other readers.

The issue wraps up with Lee Bond’s “Long Sam Pays a Visit”, and it’s a momentous entry in the long-running series that debuted in the very first issue of TEXAS RANGERS along with the Jim Hatfield novels. This is the final Long Sam Littlejohn story. Appropriately, it finds the heroic outlaw returning to the small settlement in the Piney Woods of East Texas where he grew up. The visit doesn’t go as planned, though, because Sam has to deal with an old acquaintance who has turned into a vicious owlhoot. This is a good story with plenty of drama and action and a nice plot twist near the end. Long Sam’s constant nemesis, Deputy U.S. Marshal Joe Fry is mentioned but doesn’t appear, for a change. While it isn’t exactly a series finale as we think of them now, this story does end with at least a hint that life may be about to change for the better for Long Sam Littlejohn. I’ve been reading these stories for so long that Sam seems like an old friend now, so I hope things worked out for him. And I’m glad there are still plenty of earlier stories in the series that I haven’t read yet.

Despite the fact that I didn’t finish a couple of the stories and the one by Clifton Adams was slightly disappointing, I think that overall this is a pretty issue of TEXAS RANGERS. The Hatfield novel and the novelette by Tompkins are both very entertaining, the Long Sam yarn is one of the better ones in the series, and the Ames story was a pleasant surprise since I didn’t know what to expect from that one. I’m also happy to have confirmed that the Hatfield story is by Tompkins. If you happen to have a copy of this one, it’s well worth reading, and who knows, you might enjoy those humorous yarns more than I did.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 5 Western Novels Magazine, June 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. My copy isn’t in the greatest shape, but that’s it in the scan, featuring a nice, evocative cover by Clarence Doore. You can feel the sweltering heat just looking at it, can’t you? One oddity of note is that it’s 5 WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE on the cover and the masthead on the title page, but FIVE WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE on the spine, the indicia, and the page headers. I’m going to make the arbitrary decision to use the version with the number when I refer to it in this post.

Calling this 5 WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE was something of an exaggeration, of course. The contents actually consist of three novellas, two novelettes, and a bonus short story. This title was, for the most part, a reprint pulp. There’s only one original story in this issue, and that’s the novella that leads things off, “Pistol Partners” by Lee Floren.

Now, Lee Floren has never been one of my favorite Western authors, but I’m coming to enjoy his work more over time. Also, this story features his longest-running series characters, Buckshot McKee and Tortilla Joe, a couple of drifting cowpokes who always manage to wind up in the middle of dangerous situations and sinister mysteries. I’ve read several novels starring Buck and Joe and enjoyed them. In “Pistol Partners”, they’ve come to New Mexico to answer a call for help from an old friend who is sick and has to go to the hospital. He wants Buck and Joe to take care of his pet cat for him.

That cat turns out to be a tame mountain lion named Madagascar Jones. The “hospital” in which the old friend is holed up is a boarding house run by a beautiful former madam, and all the boarders are beautiful saloon girls, one of whom is the unlikely bride of the old codger who summoned Buck and Joe. A ruthless cattle baron wants the old-timer’s land, several men have been killed, supposedly by the mountain lion Madagascar Jones, and Buck and Joe get shot at several times. This is the goofiest Lee Floren story I’ve read, rivaling W.C. Tuttle’s Sheriff Henry yarns in places. But it’s also full of action, well-plotted, and a lot of fun. There are a few examples of the slapdash writing common in Floren’s work—a guy rides up on horseback, for example, and in the very next paragraph he came up on foot and his horse is hidden in the brush—but if you can forgive that, and I can, “Pistol Partners” is pretty darned enjoyable.

William Hopson’s novelette “Trail Drive Boss” first appeared in the September 1945 issue of POPULAR WESTERN. As you can tell from the title, it’s a trail drive yarn in which a young cattleman butts heads with a crooked town boss who controls the only water in the area and uses exorbitant prices to steal herds. There’s also a beautiful woman involved, of course, and not everything is as it seems at first. Hopson was inconsistent but mostly very good, and this is an excellent tale that I enjoyed.

“Sixgun Sweepstakes”, a novella by Walker A. Tompkins, is a reprint from the June 1948 issue of POPULAR WESTERN. Tompkins is a long-time favorite of mine, and he doesn’t disappoint in this story about a town-taming lawman from Texas who’s the marshal of a town in Washington state. He throws in an intriguing angle about the friction between ranchers and wheat farmers but never really does anything with that plot element. Instead, this is a Fourth of July story with a rodeo and a big celebration highlighted by a stagecoach race. One of the marshal’s old enemies shows up in town before the shindig begins, and the romantic triangle between the two of them and the beautiful daughter of a state senator complicates matters before the villain’s true plan is revealed.

Tompkins is in good form in this story. There’s plenty of action, a fight on a train, the stagecoach race, and a few plot twists. It would have been better if the fight had been on top of the train (anybody who’s read much of my work knows I love those scenes), and a running shootout during the stagecoach race would have been nice. But that’s just me. “Sixgun Sweepstakes” is a solid yarn that would have made a good 1950s Western movie.

The novella “Dead Man’s Gold” by Larry A. Harris first appeared in the June 1948 issue of THRILLING WESTERN. A young man’s search for a fortune in gold supposedly hidden by his crazy uncle in the Devil’s River country of Texas puts him in conflict with a crooked banker and a corrupt lawman. The story moves right along and there’s plenty of action, but the writing is pretty flat and bland and the protagonist is so stupid that it stretches the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief too far. He does one dumb thing after another just to keep the plot going. Harris wrote hundreds of stories for the pulps but only a few novels, all of them featuring the Masked Rider. One of those was reprinted in paperback, Harris’s only book publication that I know of. I’ve read a few things by him in the past and found them okay at best. This one is a clear misfire.

The short story “Reunion at Amigo” is by veteran Western writer Allan K. Echols and originally appeared in the June 1948 issue of MASKED RIDER WESTERN. It’s about an old outlaw who has escaped from prison and is searching for his son. It’s pretty well-written overall, but the final twist is so obvious that it detracts quite a bit from the story’s appeal.

This issue wraps up with “The Necktie Party”, a novelette by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson from the July 1948 issue of EXCITING WESTERN. At first glance, this is a cavalry vs. the Apaches yarn, but as it turns out, there’s more to it than that as a young lieutenant tries to save a civilian scout from being lynched, prevent a new Indian war, and round up the bad guys, all at the same time. As always, Wheeler-Nicholson brings an undeniable air of authenticity to a story with a military background. This is an enjoyable tale weakened by an ending that’s not very dramatic and resolves things too easily.

As far as I remember, this is the first issue of 5 WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE, so I don’t have any basis to compare and say how it stacks up against the others in the series. Just as a Western pulp, though, I think it’s a little below average. I was surprised at how good the Floren story is, and there’s nothing wrong with the Hopson tale, but the entries by Tompkins, Wheeler-Nicholson, and Echols were good but could have been better, and the one by Harris just isn’t very good. I really like the cover by Clarence Doore, though. Overall, probably worth reading, but don’t rush to your shelves to see if you have a copy.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, July 1955

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with a cover by Sam Cherry, as usual. This one doesn’t depict an actual scene in the story, as some do.

The Lone Wolf has a partner in this issue’s Jim Hatfield novel, “Ranger Law for Ladrones”. Thankfully, it’s not one of the numerous sidekicks Roe Richmond saddled Hatfield with in his entries in the series. This time it’s a young Ranger on his first assignment. Al Rich is pretty full of himself and not very bright, but Hatfield thinks he might have the makings of a decent Ranger eventually—if he lives long enough. That’s in doubt because Al’s big mouth tips off the bad guys that he and Hatfield are in the West Texas town of Ladrones to investigate a robbery of the local Western Union office in which a $50,000 payroll was stolen. That loot is still missing because one of the robbers was killed after he buried the money, and nobody knows where it is. Hatfield and Al are captured by the villains, but they escape and round up the varmints about halfway through the story.

Of course, there’s more to it than that, as they soon discover. But the real mystery is who wrote this one. The Fictionmags Index attributes it to Walker A. Tompkins, and there are places where it reads like Tompkins’ work. But there are also places where it doesn’t. For much of the story, it’s pretty talky and light on action, although the big gun battle at the end between Hatfield and the villains is excellent. That part really does read like Tompkins. My thinking is that maybe some other author wrote and turned in a draft of this one, and then the editor, seeing that it wasn’t very good, sent it to Tompkins to rewrite and salvage it. We’ll almost certainly never know if that’s what happened, but it seems feasible to me.

George H. Roulston is an author who’s new to me. He published only half a dozen Western pulp stories in the mid-Fifties. His story “The Fighting Tinhorn” fits its title. It’s about a drifting gambler who’s always been on the shady side, until he has to step up and stop a gun-running scheme that will plunge the Arizona frontier into bloody chaos. This is a well-written, suspenseful story that I enjoyed quite a bit.

Ray G. Ellis wrote several dozen stories for various Western pulps in the Fifties and Sixties. His story in this issue, “A Long Ride to Santa Fe”, is a stagecoach yarn in which a deputy U.S. marshal tries to deliver three desperate outlaw prisoners to the authorities in Santa Fe, a job that’s complicated by a beautiful female passenger from back east who sympathizes with the owlhoots because she doesn’t know any better. And there’s a blizzard, too. Ellis does a good job with a very traditional Western story.

Eric Allen specialized in stories set mostly in Arkansas, Missouri, and Indian Territory. His novelette in this issue, “Ambush”, finds a former Confederate guerrilla returning to his old stomping grounds in Arkansas only to find that a vicious gang of carpetbaggers led by an old enemy of his is terrorizing the people in the area. I had a little trouble warming up to this one at first, but it won me over and I wound up enjoying it quite a bit. Its biggest problem is that the main villain doesn’t show up until very late in the story. Still, it’s the sort of yarn that would have made a good 1950s movie.

Ed Montgomery published about twenty stories split evenly between the Western pulps and the slicks, mostly THE SATURDAY EVENING POST. “A Girl Named Mike” is a range war story featuring a rather lighthearted romance between a roguish rustler and a rancher’s beautiful tomboy daughter. It reads to me like it was probably aimed at the POST, but Montgomery sold it to the Thrilling Group Western line when it failed to click elsewhere. Which is not to criticize it. It’s an entertaining if very lightweight story.

The final story in the issue, “Blood on His Star”, is by-lined L.J. Searles, but that’s Lin Searles, of course, who wrote a few pulp stories but is better remembered as a Western novelist from the Sixties. The protagonist of this one, a former town-taming lawman, is clearly based on Wild Bill Hickok, right down to accidentally killing a deputy during a shootout. It has a nice hardboiled tone to it and some good action, but I wasn’t overly impressed by it.

That pretty much sums up my impression of the entire issue. None of the stories are bad. They’re all entertaining, some more than others. But none of them reach any special heights, either. This is a below-average issue of TEXAS RANGERS. I’m still glad I read it, of course, but I hope the next one I pull off the shelf will be better.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, October 1954

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The art is by Sam Cherry, as usual during this era of TEXAS RANGERS. What’s a little unusual is that it depicts a scene in the issue’s lead novel, which didn’t happen often on the covers of Western pulps. I don’t know if Cherry actually read this issue’s Jim Hatfield novel or the editor or art director told him about the scene, but either way, it’s quite effective.

That lead novel, “The Deepest Grave”, is a good one, too. Texas Ranger Jim Hatfield is sent to the Big Bend area of Texas to investigate the disappearance of a young Ranger assigned to uncover the thieves behind a high-grading scheme at a gold mine. The trail leads Hatfield to the mining boomtown of LaPlata, but only after he’s ambushed and suffers an arm wound, an injury that bothers him for the remainder of this novel, which is also an unusual touch. The story barrels along with almost non-stop action and features some suspenseful scenes in a mine shaft hundreds of feet under the ground. According to the Fictionmags Index, the author of this yarn is Walker A. Tompkins, and while it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the Hatfield novels by Tompkins and the ones penned by Peter Germano, I agree that this one certainly reads like Tompkins’ work. It’s a really solid, enjoyable Jim Hatfield novel.

“Half a Solid Gold Mountain” isn’t exactly a comedy, but the first-person narration has a bit of a lighthearted touch about it that works pretty well. This tale of the dangerous encounter between a prospector and a gang of Mexican bandits along the border is by Frank Scott York. I don’t know anything about the author except that he wrote about three dozen Western and detective yarns for the pulps during the mid-Fifties. This one isn’t a lost gem, but it’s enjoyable.

I don’t know anything about H.G. Ashburn, either, except that he published about a dozen stories in various Western pulps during a short career in the mid-Fifties. His story “The Last Attack” in this issue is the first of those yarns. It’s a good story about a fast gun with a bad ticker and an unusual resolution to a gunfight. I liked it.

I’ve mentioned many times that I don’t care for the Jim Hatfield novels that Roe Richmond wrote under the Jackson Cole house-name. But in recent years, I’ve come to enjoy his stand-alone Western stories under his own name. His novelette in this issue, “Pretty Devil”, is really good. Two former Confederate officers, Sid Conister and Rip Razee, left homeless and broke by the war and Reconstruction, head west to Arizona Territory so Conister can claim part-ownership in a ranch, an interest he inherited from his late wife. When they get there, they find themselves immersed in troubles right out of a Southern Gothic: lurid secrets, hidden crimes, rampaging emotions. Richmond packs enough back-story and plot into this one that it could have been a full-length novel. And actually, it might have been better at that length with more room to develop the complicated story. As is, it’s still great fun to read, and I’ll definitely be on the lookout for more stories by Richmond.

“Fight or Drift” by Giles A. Lutz is a short story about a fiddle-playing drifter with a secret. Lutz was a consistently good writer and this excellent yarn manages to be both gritty and heartwarming.

I’ve also made a number of negative comments about the work of Ben Frank. I generally find his humorous Westerns, including his long-running Doc Swap series, rather unfunny. Even so, I always give his stories a try, and in “Not the Marrying Kind”, his contribution to this issue, he proves that he can write a lightweight but fairly straightforward Western yarn. It's the tale of a young rancher who has to contend not only with a pretty blonde who has her sights set on marrying him but also an escaped outlaw who blames our protagonist for him being captured and sent to prison in the first place. It’s cleverly plotted with Frank planting some stuff early in the story that pays off later and may well be the best thing I’ve read by Ben Frank.

Overall, this is an outstanding issue of TEXAS RANGERS with not a bad story in the bunch and a good Sam Cherry cover, to boot. If you have a copy on your shelves, it’s well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, Second July Number, 1955

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know the artist. I’ve said before that RANCH ROMANCES was a good Western pulp during the Fifties, and this issue is no exception. It leads off with “Stampede Valley”, a novella by J.L. Bouma, a prolific author of Western pulp stories and novels. Bouma used very traditional plots but handled them well. This one has a powerful rancher trying to crowd out the smaller outfits in the valley. The protagonist is a young cowboy who works for the cattle baron but comes to realize he’s on the wrong side. This is a well-written, enjoyable tale that seems a little rushed at the end, its only real drawback.

Bill Burchardt’s stories and novels are often set in Indian Territory. “The Deputy’s Daughter” finds one of Judge Parker’s deputy marshals using his own daughter as bait to catch an owlhoot. It’s not a terrible story, but the writing never really caught my interest and there’s not much of a payoff. I’ve enjoyed other Burchardt stories more in the past.

The novelette “Renegade’s Girl” finds two lawmen transporting a convicted killer by train over a snowy Montana landscape to the town here he’ll be hanged. The outlaw’s victim was the twin brother of one of the lawmen. This is an excellent set-up, and since the author is Walker A. Tompkins, one of my favorites, it’s no surprise that this is a taut, suspenseful yarn. Tompkins is always good, and he’s at the top of his game in this one.

There are three more short stories in this issue. “Sinner Man” by Talmage Powell is about a traveling preacher, his beautiful daughter, and a vengeance-seeking gunfighter. “Woman for a Hoeman” is a terrible title for a cattlemen-vs.-sodbusters story by Ed La Vanway. “To Brand a Maverick” is a rare Western by Milton Lesser/Stephen Marlowe under his Adam Chase pseudonym that’s about the son of an outlaw deciding whether to go straight or follow in his father’s footsteps. All are well-written, and all have rather limp endings that really dilute their effectiveness. But they’re all readable.

There are also some assorted features and short fact articles I didn’t read, as usual, as well as the third of four serial installments of THE VENGEANCE RIDERS, a novel by Joseph Chadwick under his pseudonym Jack Barton. I didn’t read the serial, either, but I have the Popular Library edition of the novel and I might get around to reading it one of these days. Chadwick is usually good. And this is a good issue of RANCH ROMANCES based on the stories by Tompkins and Bouma, even though the rest of the fiction is pretty forgettable. It also has some nice interior art by Everett Raymond Kinstler.

UPDATE: Here's the paperback edition of THE VENGEANCE RIDERS.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Aces, June 1942

This is kind of an unusual issue of WESTERN ACES because it doesn't have a story by J. Edward Leithead in it. His yarns appeared in almost every issue of WESTERN ACES during the Forties, sometimes several in an issue under his real name and pseudonyms. It seemed that way, anyway, which is okay with me because I really like his work. But even though there's no Leithead, this issue does have a good cover by Norman Saunders and a lead story by one of my other favorite Western authors, Walker A. Tompkins. Also on hand are Tom J. Hopkins, Stephen Payne, Orlando Rigoni, R.S. Lerch, and a handful of lesser-known pulpsters. I've enjoyed every issue of WESTERN ACES I've ever read and I'm sure this one is entertaining, as well.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ten Detective Aces, November 1942

For some reason, I've always liked those TEN DETECTIVE ACES covers with the red borders around them. It's a nice distinctive look. And I always love Norman Saunders covers. This one is no exception. Great action and details and that's a really good-looking woman. The stories inside are by some authors who ain't half-bad, either: Frederick C. Davis, Walker A. Tompkins, Norman A. Daniels, Harold Q. Masur, Joe Archibald, Lee E. Well, Stuart Friedman, plus a couple I hadn't heard of, Ken Kessler and Jimmy O'Brien, plus house name Guy Fleming. A couple of those authors, Tompkins and Wells, are best known as Western writers, but Davis and Archibald wrote quite a few Westerns, too, and Daniels did a few.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, 2nd August Number, 1955

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with an excellent Kirk Wilson cover. I wasn’t familiar with Wilson’s work until the past few years, but I really like his covers, especially the ones he did for RANCH ROMANCES.

Walker A. Tompkins wrote some of the Jim Hatfield novels in TEXAS RANGERS that were reprinted in paperback by Popular Library during the Sixties. At that point, I had no idea who was behind the house name Jackson Cole or even that it was a house name, but as it turns out, some of the books I liked the most back then were actually written by Tompkins. So I’ve been reading and enjoying his work for close to 60 years now. He leads off this issue of RANCH ROMANCES with the novella “Land-Grabber Law”. Val Shannon, a troubleshooter for a large land and cattle combine, is sent to Arizona to arrest a ranch foreman who’s been rustling from the spread he works for. (Like Steve Reese in RANGE RIDERS, Shannon is also a deputy U.S. marshal, so he can go where he wants to and arrest people.) When he gets there, though, he interrupts some wedding plans and discovers that the situation isn’t as straightforward as he thought. It also involves a romantic triangle and a land grab, hence the title, and Shannon winds up riding deep into Mexico on the trail of a runaway groom and his new bride. There are only a few action scenes in this one, but they’re well-done and the story has a nice, complex plot. Tompkins wrote quite a few of the Steve Reese novels, and I have to wonder if this story is based on an unused outline he wrote for that series. Impossible to know at this late date, and it doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that in “Land-Grabber Law”, Tompkins delivers another well-written, entertaining traditional Western yarn.

Kenneth L. Sinclair is a familiar name from Western pulps. I don’t recall if I’ve read any of his work before. His story “Badman From Funnybone” is lightweight, as you’d expect from the title, but it’s not really an out-and-out comedy. A practical-joking cowboy accused of a bank robbery he didn’t commit runs into a beautiful female peddler on a one-way trail and winds up getting caught by the law because of it. The woman sets out to clear his name. As you’d expect, everything works out in the end, but the story flows along at a nice pace and the romance angle is well-handled.

Theodore J. Roemer wrote a couple of hundred Western and sports stories for various pulps from the mid-Thirties through the late Fifties. Despite him being fairly prolific, I don’t think I’ve read anything by him until now. His novelette in this issue, “Three Loves to Oregon” has a sappy title but is an excellent story. It’s about a saloon singer who wants to escape her past and does so by joining a wagon train bound for Oregon. The gambler who got her into that life comes after her, but by the time he catches up, the girl is already in a low-key romantic triangle with the wagonmaster and one of the farmers bound for a new life. With all that romance going on, there’s barely time to worry about the Pawnee war party that attacks the wagon train . . . Roemer does a great job with this setup and keeps things from bogging down in angst, which they easily could have. And not everything plays out the way I expected, which is always a bonus.

It's always nice to run into a story in a pulp by an author I’ve met. Jeanne Williams was still writing highly regarded historical novels in the Eighties and Nineties and I met her at several Western Writers of America conventions. Her story in this issue, “Rails Into Santos”, is about the clash between the construction boss and a female doctor during the construction of a railroad line in South Texas. There’s no real action, but the emotional stakes are high and the story is very well-written and satisfying.

“The Lonely Dusk” is by Donald Bayne Hobart, a long-time stalwart of the Western pulps, especially those in the Thrilling Group. He’s probably best remembered for his Masked Rider novels, a number of which were reprinted in paperback during the Sixties and Seventies. This short tale about a ranch widow and a former suitor who rides back to see her is another one that doesn’t have any real action, but again it’s well-written and the emotions of the characters are handled very well. It’s a little unusual for Hobart, but he does a good job of it.

“Galahad in Levis” is by Will Cotton, who published a couple of dozen Western and detective yarns during the Fifties. That seems to be the extent of his work. This one starts out as a lightweight tale about a hapless cowboy and a mail-order bride mix-up, but then it turns a lot darker and winds up with a surprising and very effective twist.

There’s also an installment of “Longhorn Stampede” by Philip Ketchum, which I didn’t read. This was published as a novel under the same title by Popular Library in 1956 with a cover by A. Leslie Ross. I don’t know if I have this one on my shelves or not, but Ketchum is always worth reading.

Then there are the usual features on pen pals, astrology, and movies, plus a poem and cartoon or two. Also as usual, I just glanced at those.

This issue is heavier on the romance than is common during this era of the magazine's run. Despite the title, many of the stories in RANCH ROMANCES during the Fifties were just traditional Western yarns with little or no romantic element. But romance plays a major part in every story in this issue. It’s also a really top-notch issue with the stories ranging from very good to excellent. This is one of the best pulps I’ve read in a while, and if you happen to own a copy, it’s well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, November 7, 1942

I feel like I should know who painted this cover. Tom Lovell? R.G. Harris? Maybe someone who's better than me at artist IDs can give us a definitive answer. But one thing I do know is that WILD WEST WEEKLY was almost always fun to read, and this issue doesn't look like any exception. Walker A. Tompkins has two stories in this one, a Tommy Rockford yarn under his own name and a stand-alone story under the house-name Andrew A. Griffin. House-names William A. Todd and Nelse Anderson are in this issue, as well; Norman W. Hay wrote the Risky McKee story as by Todd, and Bennie Gardner wrote the stand-alone Anderson. Also on hand are C. William Harrison, S. Omar Barker, and James P. Webb. A very solid line-up and a good cover, typical of WILD WEST WEEKLY.

Update: The cover artist has been confirmed as R.G. Harris.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, June 1945

This is a pulp I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat beat-up copy in the scan, with a rather whimsical cover by the incredibly prolific Sam Cherry.

The lead feature in EXCITING WESTERN for most of its run was the Tombstone and Speedy series by one of my favorite Western authors, W.C. Tuttle. Like Tuttle’s justly more famous Hashknife Hartley and Sleepy Stevens, Tombstone Jones and Speedy Smith are range detectives working for the Cattleman’s Association. They’re generally thought of as being pretty dumb and usually solve their cases through pure luck, with considerable snappy banter and some slapstick humor along the way. From time to time, though, Tuttle drops hints that the two of them aren’t nearly as dumb as they act. In fact, in this issue’s novelette, “Gunsmoke in Oro Rojo”, they unravel a fairly complicated mystery involving rustled beef and high-graded ore and seem to be fully aware of what they’re doing as they “bumble” their way to a solution and justice for the bad guys. This is a very good entry in a consistently entertaining series.

The Navajo Tom Raine, Arizona Ranger series ran in EXCITING WESTERN for several dozen stories, always by-lined with the house name Jackson Cole except for one story published under the name C. William Harrison, the real name of an author who may well have written some of the other stories, too. But prolific Western pulpster Lee Bond has also been linked to the series. “Indian Killer”, the Navajo Tom Raine story in this issue, reads to me like it might be Bond’s work. Raine, a white man raised by the Navajo after his lawman father was murdered, is sent to quell an uprising by the Papago tribe, which is being blamed for a series of stagecoach and freight wagon holdups. Raine quickly figures out that the Indians are being framed and uncovers the real culprit. The blurb on the first page of the story gives this away, so it’s not much of a spoiler. I think most Western pulp readers would know what was going on anyway. Despite the very predictable plot, Raine is an appealing protagonist and the writing is smooth and fast-paced, leading to a satisfactory conclusion. I’ve never read a Navajo Raine story that was great, but I’ve never read one that failed to entertain me, either.

Writer/editor T.W. Ford was another very prolific pulpster, mostly in the Western and sports pulps. I’ve found his work to be inconsistent but generally pretty good. His novelette “Lead for a Donovan” in this issue is a Romeo and Juliet yarn, with a young couple from two feuding families running off to get married and the lengths to which the patriarchs of those families will go to prevent the wedding. Everything plays out about like you’d expect, but there’s plenty of action along the way and I found this to be a very enjoyable story.

In something of a rarity for a Western pulp, the cover painting from this issue is redone as a black and white interior illustration for the short story “Lynching Lawman” by an author I’m not familiar with, Bud Wilks. He published only eight stories, five in 1945 and three in 1948, all in Thrilling Group Western pulps. I have a hunch that was the author’s real name, but who knows? Might have been a house name. “Lynching Lawman” is a short but effective tale of two lawmen who have a falling out, and then one tries to frame the other for horse stealing and murder. I thought it was pretty good. Another unusual aspect is that the cover and interior illo accurately illustrate a scene from the story, meaning that artist Sam Cherry either read it or (more likely) the editor told him what to paint.

Another long-running series in the pages of EXCITING WESTERN featured the adventures of Alamo Paige, Pony Express rider. These were published under the house name Reeve Walker. Walker A. Tompkins, Charles N. Heckelmann, and Chuck Martin have all been linked to this series, and other authors may have contributed to it as well. I don’t know who wrote “Ten Days to California”, the Alamo Paige story in this issue, but it’s a good one in which Paige pursues a wanted outlaw and killer who tries to escape justice by riding the Pony Express route and stealing fresh mounts at each way station. That’s really all there is to the plot, but the story moves right along and has some nice action scenes.

That wraps it up for the June 1945 issue of this pulp, and it’s a really solid one with the five stories ranging from good to excellent. If you have this issue of EXCITING WESTERN and haven’t read it, I think it’s well worth pulling down from the shelf.

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: Wild West Weekly, September 21, 1940

I haven't posted a WILD WEST WEEKLY cover for a while and figured it was time. This painting by Duncan Coburn features an old codger, one of my favorite types of Western supporting character. Inside are some fine authors, including a Tommy Rockford story by Walker A. Tompkins (a series that really needs to be reprinted) and yarns by Chuck Martin, C. William Harrison, and Hapsburg Liebe writing under the house-name Philip F. Deere. The lead novella is by Shoshone Gwinn, actually William R. Gwinn, an author I'm not familiar with. But a while back I read and reviewed an early Gold Medal novel called DEATH LIES DEEP by William Guinn, evidently the only thing he ever wrote. I wonder if that could be the same guy despite the slight difference in spelling in the last name. We'll probably never know, but such speculation interests me. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Top-Notch, April 1933

I really like this cover by Karl Godwin. It fairly shouts "Adventure!" at a potential reader. TOP-NOTCH is a pulp you don't hear much about anymore, but it had some good stories, most notably several by Robert E. Howard and the Ozar the Aztec series by Walker A. Tompkins writing as Valentine Wood. This issue has an Ozar story in it, as well as a novella by the always dependable J. Allan Dunn, a Western by Lee Bond writing as Tex Bradley, and several stories by authors I'm not familiar with: F.N. Litten, James Edward Hungerford, Paul H. Salomon, Erik W. Modean, and Alan Grey Mayne. They must have been decent writers to sell to Street & Smith.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Range Riders Western, Fall 1942

Another action-packed scene involving a stagecoach on this issue of RANGE RIDERS WESTERN. I don't know the artist. For those of you not familiar with this pulp, it featured a lead novel in every issue starring a trio of range detectives, Steve Reese (the leader) and his two sidekicks Hank Ball and Dusty Trail. It's a time-honored setup (think of all the trio B-Western movies that were made during the same era) and RANGE RIDERS WESTERN delivered consistently good stories, many of them by Walker A. Tompkins, the author of this issue's lead novel. I've never understood why the stories from this pulp weren't reprinted in paperback during the Sixties and Seventies the way the stories from TEXAS RANGERS, RIO KID WESTERN, and MASKED RIDER WESTERN were. I think they would have done well. This particular issue also has some back-up stories by Allan K. Echols, Eugene A. Clancy, Clinton Dangerfield, and Ralph Yergen, not big names but steady producers in the Western pulps. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fifteen Western Tales, June 1947

We can add another category to the things we see on Western pulp covers: Injury to a Saddle. This is a really nice, dynamic cover on this issue of FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES. And as was common with the Popular Publications Western pulps, a strong group of authors with stories inside, as well. In this case, Peter Dawson (Jonathan Glidden), William Heuman, Walker A. Tompkins, William R. Cox (twice, once as himself and once as house-name David Crewe), Joe Archibald, Barry Cord (Peter Germano), T.C. McClary, the mysterious Frank Morris, Wallace Umphrey, James Shaffer, and house-name Lance Kermit. A very entertaining issue, I suspect.