Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, First October Number 1940

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That's my copy in the scan. I don’t know who did the cover artwork, but I like it. You don’t see too many dogs on Western pulp covers. I’m always glad when one shows up. Most of the issues of RANCH ROMANCES I’ve read have been from later in the run when it was part of the Thrilling Group. I’ve read only a few from the era when it was published by Warner Publications, but they were good issues. The editor on this one was the legendary Fanny Ellsworth.

After all these decades as an avid reader, it’s still nice to discover authors who are new to me that I enjoy. The lead novella in this issue (and it’s almost long enough to be an actual novel) is “Kirby of the Flying K” by Amos Moore. You’d expect that Kirby would be the owner of the Flying K Ranch, wouldn’t you? I did. But I was wrong. The Flying K Ranch was owned by Peter Kilgour, who died recently under somewhat mysterious circumstances and left the spread to his niece, Peg Hampden. Lane Kirby, who the story hints has spent the past few years as a town-taming lawman, has some equally vague connection to the ranch. As far as I could tell, he was friends with the late Peter Kilgour. When he drifts back into the area, the first thing he comes across is an attempted lynching, with Kilgour’s former foreman as the intended victim. Well, Kirby puts a halt to that, of course, befriends the beautiful and plucky Peg Hampden, clashes with some old enemies, and generally stirs things up in a Save The Ranch yarn with plenty of action. This is a fairly standard plot, but the characters are excellent and it doesn’t end exactly how I thought it would, which is always a bonus.

“Amos Moore” contributed a lot of stories to RANCH ROMANCES, but I didn’t know until I read this one and looked “him” up that the name is a pseudonym for the writing team of Lillian Bennet-Thompson and George Hubbard, whose careers go all the way back to the early 1900s. Several silent movies were based on novels they wrote. They did mostly romance and mystery stories until they started publishing Westerns as Amos Moore in 1928. They turned out more than 50 Westerns including a dozen or so novels between then and 1942, when Bennet-Thompson died. Hubbard lived until 1958 but didn’t publish anything after Bennet-Thompson’s death. I don’t know a thing in the world about their personal lives. Were they a couple or just collaborators? Did Bennet-Thompson do most of the writing and Hubbard was the primary plotter? That would explain why he didn’t publish anything else. But I just don’t know. What I’m sure of is that “Kirby of the Flying K” is a really good story, well-written and fast-moving, and I’m going to be keeping my eyes open for the Amos Moore byline. I may even order some of their Western novels, most of which were serialized in RANCH ROMANCES before being published as books.

Elsa Barker was a prolific contributor to RANCH ROMANCES, and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read by her. Her story “Kitchen Courage” in this issue starts out as a fairly standard romance with the heroine in love with a young rancher. She decides to make him some jams and jellies and can some fruit for him while he’s away at the roundup, but while she’s at his ranch, somebody else rides up and the story takes an unexpected turn. This is another very good yarn.

“The Man From Nowhere” is by Paul Evan Lehman, who wrote a lot for the Western pulps but was even more popular as a Western novelist. It’s about a young cowboy who stumbles on a plot by a crooked lawyer to swindle a beautiful young woman out of her ranch. Of course, he has to take a hand and help her, even though he does so in a way that’s bound to cause him trouble. There’s definitely a romance angle in this one, but it's more of a hardboiled crime story and a good one, too.

Marie de Nervaud is another prolific author who published almost exclusively in RANCH ROMANCES. I don’t recall reading anything by her until I came to the novelette “Ransom Range” in this issue. It’s okay, another Save the Ranch story about a cowboy who steps in to help a girl he knew when she was just a kid. Of course, she’s grown up into a beautiful woman. There’s nothing wrong with this story, but with a plot this well-worn, I need good writing to elevate it (as in the Amos Moore story discussed above), and de Nervaud’s prose just never gripped me much. I didn’t dislike it and I would read more by her, but I won’t be especially looking for her stories.

I can’t find much on-line about Lucretia Whitehead Payne, just enough to think that she may have been married to Western author Stephen Payne, but that’s mostly speculation on my part and if anyone can confirm or deny it, I’d be most appreciative. She published about two dozen stories, mostly in RANCH ROMANCES but a few in other Western romance pulps. Her story “There’s Always a Crowd” is pure rom-com at first, with a young cattleman trying to court the pretty young cook even though the colorful ranch crew is always around, but then there’s a nice burst of action and a little crime element at the end. I would have said this isn’t really my kind of story, but I surprised myself by liking it a lot.

Kingsley Moses wrote several hundred stories for the pulps. Traditional Westerns, Western romances, sports, detective, aviation, adventure, he hit most of the genres at one time or another and was also one of the crew of house-name writers at WILD WEST WEEKLY. With a resumé like that, it’s hard to say whether I’ve read anything by him or not. His story in this issue, “Aunt Azalea Gentles ’Em” is also something of a romantic comedy as the gun-toting Aunt Azalea has to help a young lawman deal with some horse thieves and keep the ex-convict father of the girl he loves from being sent back to prison. Not a great story, but it’s reasonably entertaining and had a pretty satisfying ending.

There’s also a serial installment (5^th of 6) of “Rangeland Rebels” by Robert Dale Denver, who was really Ray Nafziger. I’m not sure why more of Nafziger’s RANCH ROMANCES serials weren’t published as novels. He did at least a dozen of them that could have been done as books, and some of his novellas probably could have been, too. As far as I know, though, only one of them, “Guns of Salvation Valley” (serialized in RANCH ROMANCES as by Robert Dale Denver in 1934) was published as a book of the same name, also in 1934, as by Grant Taylor. Anyway, I didn’t read this installment of “Rangeland Rebels”—I might have if it had been the concluding episode—but it looks good, as usual with Nafziger’s work. Like Harry Olmsted, he ought to be better remembered than he is.

The usual assortment of columns and features round out this issue. I hope some of the people who wrote in to “Our Air Mail” got good pen pals out of the deal. When I was about halfway through reading this one, I thought it might turn out to be one of the best Western pulps I’ve read, based on the stories by Moore, Barker, and Lehman. The others didn’t come up to that standard, but they’re all okay to good. Overall, this issue of RANCH ROMANCES is worth reading, and I’m glad I did. 

Happy Fourth of July!

 

The art on this cover is by Robert Gibson Jones, who did a bunch of covers, most of them excellent, for FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. William Brengle, author of the lead novella, is a house-name, and the actual author behind this one is Howard Browne. Also on hand in this issue are William P. McGivern, Robert Bloch (twice, once as himself and once as Tarleton Fiske), Don Wilcox, Harold Lawlor, and Leroy Yerxa. That's a pretty good line-up. I don't own this issue, but you can find a PDF of it here, along with a bunch of other issues of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. In the meantime, Happy Fourth of July to everyone reading this in the United States, and I hope it's a great day for you and everyone elsewhere in the world, too.

Review: Gangland's Doom: The Shadow of the Pulps (50th Anniversary Edition) - Frank Eisgruber Jr.

I’ve been hearing about GANGLAND’S DOOM, the ground-breaking study of The Shadow by Frank Eisgruber Jr., for many years. By the time I got into pulp fandom in the early Eighties, the book’s original edition, published by Robert Weinberg, had been out for several years. It was reprinted later by Starmont House and Altus Press, but I never got around to picking up a copy and reading it.

When the fine folks at The Shadowed Circle decided to do a special 50^th Anniversary Edition, I got on board right away, knowing the quality of the work they do. And they certainly didn’t disappoint. I’ve just read the new edition of GANGLAND’S DOOM, and it’s fantastic.

This was one of the very first books of pulp scholarship. Eisgruber takes a good look at The Shadow’s true identity, the various false identities he employed in his war against crime, the many agents and helpers who also enlisted in that war, the great villains against whom The Shadow and his organization battled, and the multitude of settings used in the almost 400 novels in the pulp series. He covers as well the three main authors of the saga, Walter B. Gibson, Theodore Tinsley, and Bruce Elliott, and this new edition provides several appendixes, correspondence between Eisgruber and fellow Shadow expert Will Murray, and an interview with him.

Will long-time Shadow fans learn much that’s new in this volume? Well, probably not much. Numerous other books have been published that delve deeply into the history of the character, not to mention the many articles from the journal THE SHADOWED CIRCLE and earlier pulp fanzines. But is GANGLAND’S DOOM well-written, informative, and highly entertaining? It absolutely is. I don’t know of any Shadow fan who wouldn’t greatly enjoy this affectionate look at a favorite character.

And I did come across one idea I’d never encountered before, at least as far as I recall. Eisgruber discusses—and rightfully dismisses—Philip José Farmer’s speculation that the flying spy G-8, The Spider, and The Shadow were all the same man. I don’t buy that for a second, but Eisgruber mentions an alternate possibility, that following World War I, G-8 became the detective and master of disguise Secret Agent X, and I can believe that. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it seems feasible to me. (Using the word “true” loosely, of course, since we are talking about pulp characters . . .)

As for the book itself, it’s beautifully produced. You’d expect no less from editor/publisher Steve Donoso and his associates. I was a Kickstarter backer and got my copy that way, but it’s available on Amazon in a hardcover edition with a cover and illustrations by Joseph Booth (the edition I read) and a paperback with a cover by Marcin Nowacki. There’s also a Kindle edition. You can also buy the print editions and plenty of other great Shadow material directly from the publisher, which is always an excellent option. If you’re a fan of The Shadow, I can’t recommend this one highly enough. It’s a great book and one of the best I’ve read so far this year.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Colette (2018)

It’ll come as no surprise to any of you that I haven’t read anything by the famous French author Colette, and I knew very little about her life. But I enjoy period dramas and I like Keira Knightley okay, so we watched COLETTE, a biopic with Knightley playing the title role. I was a little surprised by it, too, and wound up enjoying it more than I expected for one reason: it’s about ghostwriting.

You see, I had no idea that Colette’s first novels were actually ghost jobs published under her husband’s name, or rather, his pen-name Willy. As the character (played by Dominic West) says several times during the film, Willy is a brand, and it doesn’t matter who actually writes the books as long as they get written. That line really resonates with me, of course, as do the bits about trying to wrestle money that’s due out of publishers and obsessing over the number of pages and the time spent writing. I’m here to tell you, all that stuff really rings true in this movie. I’ve been in those positions many times.

Over and above that, COLETTE is a well-made, well-acted movie that’s long and leisurely but never seemed to drag much. I have no idea how historically accurate it is. I was curious enough after watching it to look up the real Colette and was surprised to find that she didn’t die until 1954, which means I was alive at the same time as her. Things like that always interest me, like knowing that when my parents were born, both Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were still alive. In some ways, history is more recent than we think.

Review: Run of the Brush - William MacLeod Raine

Young cowboy Jim Delaney finds himself falling in with some bad company in the brush country between San Antonio and the Rio Grande. He’s not exactly an owlhoot and a rustler yet, but he’s drifting in that direction. Then he rides into San Antonio to see the elephant (a cowboy term for having some new experiences, for those of you unfamiliar with the term) and winds up rescuing a beautiful girl from the clutches of an evil gambler and saloonkeeper. This lands Jim right in the middle of a deadly feud between the Gliddens, an outlaw family, and upstanding cattleman Pike Corcoran and his family and friends. Jim will have to figure out which side of the trail he’s going to ride.

That pretty much sums up the plot of RUN OF THE BRUSH, a 1936 Western novel by William MacLeod Raine, one of the early stars in the genre who continued writing Westerns until his death in 1954. This novel was serialized in SHORT STORIES in January and February 1936 before being published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin. That's my copy of the Seventies paperback and the edition I read in the scan above.

Born in England but raised from the age of 10 in the western United States, Raine published more than 80 novels, most of them Westerns with a few historical and contemporary novels mixed in. I’ve read maybe half a dozen of his books and enjoyed them, although with some reservations. RUN OF THE BRUSH, from just past the halfway point in his career, continues that streak.

Raine’s novels often contain characters and incidents loosely based on history. The reformed outlaw King Cooper in this novel is pretty clearly based on the historical character King Fisher, but Cooper’s involvement in the plot is strictly fictional. The notion of a feud with numerous deaths on both sides is common in Texas history, of course. I don’t know if the conflict between the Gliddens and Corcorans in this book is based on a specific feud, but it certainly has an air of authenticity about it, as do the ways Raine’s characters speak and act. The man knew the West, there’s no doubt about that.

However, despite the fact that there are some great action scenes in this book (the final battle verges on epic but doesn’t quite get there), there are long stretches that are very leisurely paced. Well-written, amusing at times, with good characters, but slow to get through. There’s also a romantic triangle, and I’ll just go ahead and say it, Jim Delaney picks the wrong girl. Another thing that bothered me is that Jim is also known as Slim, and one of the main villains is named Sim. That’s not very good character-naming.

So overall, there’s enough to like about this novel that I’m glad I read it, and if you don’t mind a Western yarn that takes its time about getting where it’s going, I’d recommend it and anything else written by William MacLeod Raine. I’ll probably continue reading one of his books every now and then. I don’t think he’ll ever be one of my favorite Western authors, though.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ten Detective Aces, May 1941

Of course it's a clown causing trouble on the cover of this issue of TEN DETECTIVE ACES. You can't trust those guys! Or maybe he's actually the hero, although I wouldn't bet on that. But you can bet that any cover by Norman Saunders will be dramatic and/or action-packed, and this one certainly is. You've got knives, bullets, and blackjacks! (Hmm, "Knives, Bullets, and Blackjacks!" That wouldn't be a bad title.) Anyway, I don't own this issue, but I'm sure that inside its pages, a reader could find plenty of action. Authors include Emile C. Tepperman (twice, with a Marty Quade story under his own name and a story as by Anthony Clemens), Harold Q. Masur (also twice, once as himself and once as Hal Quincy), G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Cyril Plunkett, Joe Archibald, and several authors unfamiliar to me, James A. Kirch, Arthur T. Harris, Clark Frost, and H.F. Sorensen. I really should have read more from TEN DETECTIVE ACES over the years. It looks like a really good detective pulp.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, November 1931

Although not as common as the iconic trio of stalwart cowboy, gun-totin' redhead, and wounded geezer, or the poker game that erupts in gunplay, or the shootout that takes place inside or in front of a barber shop, there's a scene that shows up on Western pulp covers from time to time featuring some gun-hung hombre standing in front of a wanted poster bearing his name and likeness. The November 1931 issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE features one such cover. I don't know who did the artwork. I tend to prefer the later issues of LARIAT STORY, but these early issues have some good authors in their pages, too. This issue includes stories by Harry F. Olmsted, Stephen Payne, John G. Pearsol, Ray Humphreys, Dabney Otis Collins, and Frank Carl Young. Miles Overholt is mentioned on the cover, but isn't actually in this one, according to the Fictionmags Index. I don't own this issue, but Olmsted, Pearsol, and Payne are always worth reading.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Twice Murdered - Laurence Donovan

TWICE MURDERED is another in the outstanding series of pulp reprint collections coming out from Black Dog Books. Laurence Donovan is probably best known for the house-name novels he wrote starring Doc Savage, The Phantom Detective, The Skipper, and The Whisperer, but he also had a long and prolific career producing detective and Western yarns for a variety of pulps. This volume collects a dozen stories published in the Thirties and Forties in the pulps PRIVATE DETECTIVE, SPICY DETECTIVE, HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE, BLACK BOOK DETECTIVE, and SUPER DETECTIVE, under Donovan’s name and his pseudonym Larry Dunn.

Donovan had three main strengths as a writer: he was able to come up with complex plots, he used interesting settings, and he wrote fast-moving, effective action scenes. Most of the protagonists in these stories are private eyes, and like Roger Torrey’s private eye characters, they share a lot of similarities despite having different names. I think Donovan’s shamuses come across a little more as individuals, though.

All of the stories included here are good solid pulp tales, consistently entertaining. Some of them are stand-outs, though. “Death Dances on Dimes” is set in a dime-a-dance joint, and it’s unusual in that it has a female narrator. There’s something else about her that’s unusual for the pulps, too, but you’ll have to read the story to find out what it is. “The Man Who Came to Die” is about an insurance racket and manages to be pretty creepy while at the same time packing enough plot and action for a full-length novel into a novelette. “The Greyhound Murders” is another complicated murder mystery with an interesting setting (a dog racing track) and a high body count. “Footprint of Destiny” is about the movie business and features the sort of plot that Dan Turner is usually untangling. I guess Dan was out of town that week.

In addition to the stories, editor/publisher Tom Roberts provides a fine introduction that includes more biographical information about Donovan than I’ve seen anywhere else, as well as an extensive bibliography of Donovan’s work. TWICE MURDERED is an excellent addition to the Black Dog Books line, and if you’re a pulp fan, I highly recommend it.

(This post originally appeared on June 14, 2010. And even though more than 15 years have passed since then, TWICE MURDERED is still available in both e-book and paperback editions, and my high recommendation of it stands.)

Review: Swords of Plunder - Fred Blosser

Fred Blosser is one of my favorite scholars of Robert E. Howard’s life and work. I’ve been enjoying his informative and entertaining articles about REH for decades. As it turns out, when it comes to writing fiction, he’s pretty darned good at spinning yarns himself. The latest thing I’ve read by him is a sword and sorcery novella called SWORDS OF PLUNDER, which is available on Amazon in paperback and e-book editions.

This story finds a barbarian warrior from the north, who’s in command of a pirate ship, coming across two old rivals, a beautiful blond female pirate and a red-bearded brigand who has come close to crossing swords with our hero several times in the past. The barbarian pulls the two of them from the sea, where they’re clinging to some wreckage from a sunken ship. They have an intriguing tale to tell, too, about a fabulous treasure hidden on a lost island, and only the blonde knows how to get there. So the three of them form an uneasy partnership to go after the loot, but of course, when they reach their destination they find more danger waiting for them than they expected.

The barbarian’s name is Cronn, by the way, and I know what you’re thinking. I would have been, too, if I hadn’t happened to know that SWORDS OF PLUNDER is based on unused parts of an outline Blosser wrote for THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN many years ago, during the era in which I first encountered his work. As he explains in a very entertaining and informative afterword to this story, he was writing articles about Robert E. Howard for SSOC when editor Roy Thomas asked him to plot some of the new stories featuring the Cimmerian. This story grew out of one of those outlines, with the serial numbers filed off, as they say.

And it’s a really good yarn, too, no matter what the protagonist is called. Well-written, fast-moving, with plenty of action and some genuinely creepy scenes where our heroes have to face deadly perils in a cave on a lost island. This is pure pulp done the way I like it. I give SWORDS OF PLUNDER a high recommendation and plan to read more by Fred Blosser very soon.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Cocktail (1988)

There’s no point in talking too much about the plot in this movie since all of you probably saw it more than 35 years ago. But I never did until now, so to sum up very briefly: Tom Cruise plays an ambitious young man who wants to make a million dollars in business but instead winds up a hotshot bartender in New York City. Romance and drama ensue.

A few things struck me about this one. Looking at Tom Cruise in 1988 and looking at him now, it’s obvious he ages at about one-third the rate of a normal human being. Elizabeth Shue sure was cute, even with that big Eighties hair. There’s not a cell phone in sight nor a mention of the Internet, and other than a little nudity and language, this movie could have been made in 1938 instead of 1988. All it would take is a little tweaking of Heywood Gould’s screenplay. And speaking of that screenplay, it has a great line spoken by Bryan Brown, who plays Cruise’s bartending mentor: “All things end badly, otherwise they wouldn’t end.” That’s a pretty noirish line.

Overall, I enjoyed COCKTAIL quite a bit. It’s old-fashioned, just a story meant to entertain and hold your interest without much, if any, message. And I was entertained.