Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Red Seal Western, August 1937

RED SEAL WESTERN is a little-remembered Western pulp these days, but it had some good covers and good authors, too. I think this cover is by Tom Lovell. The cowboy looks like his work, and so does the redhead. Inside this issue are stories by Harry Sinclair Drago, Claude Rister, Dean Owens (almost certainly a typo for Dean Owen/Dudley Dean McGaughey), Cibolo Ford (with his name misspelled on the table of contents), Mel Pitzer, and Wilfred McCormick, one of my favorite authors as a kid for his juvenile sports novels and dog stories. This certainly looks like an enjoyable Western pulp to me.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Pete Rice Magazine, August 1934

I don't normally associate beautiful women with Walter Baumhofer's pulp covers, like I do with, say, Allen Anderson or Earle Bergey, but the blonde on this issue of PETE RICE MAGAZINE proves that he could paint one when he wanted to. The Pete Rice series is an odd one. Created by Street & Smith to try to recreate the success of DOC SAVAGE, it featured the heroic Pete Rice as an Arizona sheriff with a group of colorful assistants. The pulp ran for 32 issues and almost three years, with most of the novels being written by Ben Conlon under the house-name Austin Gridley. Then, after Pete's own magazine was cancelled, he appeared in 20 more adventures in WILD WEST WEEKLY, still under the Gridley name but written by Conlon, Laurence Donovan, Lee Bond, Paul S. Powers, and Ronald Oliphant. Despite all that material, few, if any, of the Pete Rice stories have ever been reprinted. I read one issue of the pulp many years ago with a Conlon novel in it, and I recall not liking it much. Even so, I'd be interested in reading more of them. Sometimes my first impression of a series doesn't hold up. At any rate, I like this Baumhofer cover, and the other authors in this issue are Harold A. Davis (who would go on to ghost some of the Doc Savage novels), Wilfred McCormick (whose juvenile sports novels were favorites of mine when I was a kid), and George Allan Moffett, who was really prolific pulpster Edwin V. Burkholder.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Cowboy Stories, June 1935

Well, this cowpoke has all kinds of problems, what with being thrown off that horse and having a rattlesnake waiting for him on the ground. I don't know the artist, but he's painted a scene I wouldn't want to find myself in. Inside this issue of COWBOY STORIES are yarns by plenty of good writers, though, including James P. Olsen, W. Ryerson Johnson, Wilfred McCormick, S. Omar Barker, Carmony Gove, and Galen C. Colin. COWBOY STORIES was a long-running Street & Smith pulp, never as popular as WESTERN STORY or WILD WEST WEEKLY but with consistently good covers and authors. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Top-Notch, July 1936

I've noticed that Tommy guns seem to show up fairly often on the covers of TOP-NOTCH. I'm not sure who painted this cover. Tom Lovell, maybe. There's no doubt some good authors contributed stories to this issue, however: Harry F. Olmsted, Carl H. Rathjen, Wilfred McCormick (author of a bunch of young adult sports novels I read as a kid), Hapsburg Liebe, Samuel Taylor, and Jack Sterrett. I'm familiar with TOP-NOTCH mostly because that's where Robert E. Howard's El Borak stories were first published, but they put out plenty of other good adventure yarns, too.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Aces, December 1940

Another fine-looking issue of WESTERN ACES, with a good cover and stories by L.P. Holmes, Walker A. Tompkins, Gunnison Steele, Barry Cord, Wilfred McCormick, and WESTERN ACES perennial J. Edward Leithead. Four of those authors, Leithead, Tompkins, Steele (Bennie Gardner), and Cord (Peter Germano) also wrote Jim Hatfield novels for TEXAS RANGERS as Jackson Cole.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Story, January 20, 1940

We start the year off right with another cover from the longest-running Western pulp of all, and a nice action scene to boot. Good contents inside, too, with stories by T.T. Flynn, Harry F. Olmsted, Norman A. Fox, Wilfred McCormick, and Frank Richardson Pierce writing as Seth Ranger. This was a great era for WESTERN STORY.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Story, March 23, 1940

That's a pretty violent cover by H.W. Scott on this issue of WESTERN STORY. The stories inside are probably pretty hardboiled, too, with authors such as Ray Nafziger, Harry F. Olmsted, and Frank Richardson Pierce writing as Seth Ranger. There's also a story by Wilfred McCormick, famous to me as the author of the Bronc Burnett boy's sports novels that I read avidly as a kid. I had no idea at the time that he started out in the pulps.