Saturday, May 21, 2011

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Hopalong Cassidy's Western Magazine, Winter 1951

We now know, of course, that the four Hopalong Cassidy novels published in this short-lived pulp under the pseudonym "Tex Burns" were actually the work of Louis L'Amour, which isn't surprising considering that during the late Forties and early Fifties L'Amour was a prolific contributor to all the Western pulps in the Thrilling Group and was a favorite of editorial director Leo Margulies. I'm not the biggest L'Amour fan in the world (although there was a time when I was), but I've read his Hopalong novels and they're pretty good balancing acts between Clarence E. Mulford's original character (which was the way L'Amour wanted to write them) and the movie version of Hoppy popularized by William Boyd (which was what Margulies wanted). And this is a nice cover featuring Boyd-as-Hoppy by George Rozen.
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13 comments:

Walker Martin said...

Some of these short run titles starring western characters are worth more than the usual pulp. The Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy are two examples that often bring surprising amounts at auction. Of course condition is a big factor.

As a kid I loved Hoppy but now I find his movies difficult to enjoy.

8:32 AM, May 21, 2011
Ed Gorman said...

I always liked Hoppy movies and TV. He had a sense of humor and unlike all other cowboy movie heroes struck me as an adult. The early Hoppy movie were lavished with the kind of production that few Bs ever got and it showed. I've never been much of a L'Amour fan except for two or three novels and a handful of stories. But his success was amazng

8:38 AM, May 21, 2011
James Reasoner said...

Ed,
I feel the same way about L'Amour. There are a handful of novels I really like (TO TAME A LAND, FLINT, THE DAYBREAKERS, and HIGH LONESOME come to mind), and I think he was a pretty good short story writer, but other than that I don't care much for his work. When I first discovered his novels in high school, though, I was a huge fan and read as many of them as I could get my hands on.

9:07 AM, May 21, 2011
pattinase (abbott) said...

My mother never read westerns but she watched them every Saturday on TV. She loved all the western shows in the fifties. I guess Saturday will always seem a bit like western day to me.

10:10 AM, May 21, 2011
Charles Gramlich said...

To Tame a Land is my favorite L'Amour, but I do like most of his stuff. he did some good short stories too.

10:21 AM, May 21, 2011
Prashant C. Trikannad said...

Flint, To Tame a Land and High Lonesome are nearly everyone's favourite Louis Lamour novels. I'll add one more: Guns of the Timberlands. I never cared much for the Sackett series. For some reason Lamour is very popular in India. That may be because you rarely found anything more than Lamour and J.T. Edson in Indian book stores. Among the scores of Western novelists, I like Zane Grey, George G. Gilman, Frank C. Robertson and, of course, Oliver Strange. Nobody romanticised his hero as much as Strange did. He wrote ten novels and no more, though writer Frederick Nolan did a decent job with the five he wrote under the pseudonym Frederick H. Christian.

12:42 PM, May 21, 2011
James Reasoner said...

I read GUNS OF THE TIMBERLANDS back when I was racing through as many L'Amour novels as I could find, but I remember liking it. As I recall, it's one of several L'Amour novels that climaxes with a marathon fistfight, rather than a gunfight. I did the same thing in a novel Livia and I did called THE HUNTED (which will be available for the Kindle eventually). I liked some of the Sackett books -- THE DAYBREAKERS, MUSTANG MAN, and MOJAVE CROSSING come to mind -- but I got burned out on them before I read all of them.

I have another Oliver Strange book I need to get to. I enjoyed the first one I read.

1:30 PM, May 21, 2011
Prashant C. Trikannad said...

True, Guns of the Timberlands ends with a fistfight instead of a gunfight. It was one of two Lamour books i really liked, the other being Flint. The other reason I liked the novel was the cover art, like a painting that you could frame and hang up on your wall. But then the covers of most early Western novels were striking. By the way Strange novels have all but disappeared from my side of the world; the few ones you get in secondhand book stores are selling at obscene prices. Corgi should reprint. Are they still around?

1:51 PM, May 21, 2011
Walker Martin said...

Prashant mentions Frank C. Robertson as one of his favorite western writers. This is the first time I've come across another reader who likes Robertson, who did his best work in the 1920's in novelet form for such top pulps as ADVENTURE, WEST, SHORT STORIES.

4:01 PM, May 21, 2011
Cap'n Bob said...

I just finished watching the 15th Hoppy movie from my Netflix queue, and have another disc of five to go. They're all enjoyable in various ways, and tried to go beyond the typical B Western of the day, at least sometimes. The one I saw yesterday had Jane Clayton, who dropped the "e" from her first name and became Jan Clayton of LASSIE TV fame. A quartet of singers that appeared in a couple of films had who appeared to be a very young Pat Hingle. Those singers, by the way, were outlaws in one movie, lustily crooning away as they loaded their stolen gold ingots onto pack horses. Hoppy could project humor or toughness with ease, and Boyd played him as a thinking man more than a fighter. As for his famous all-black outfit, I don't think he wore it in more than three of the movies I watched. He even went around without his guns sometimes. I'm really enjoying revisiting this icon from my youth.

4:44 PM, May 21, 2011
Suresh Ramasubramanian said...

The L'Amours weren't bad for one reason and only one reason.

Not tight prose - elmore leonard was probably by far the best in that area (and I have a 'complete western stories of elmore leonard' that I got off amazon).

Not humor - usually heavy handed when he did try his hand at it. Not action - plenty of others far more fast paced.

Where he scored was that he had a great touch for atmosphere, and created some truly memorable characters that stuck in your mind far more than the average cowboy hero type. Will Reilly in Reilly's Luck for example.

His Hopalong Cassidy books were.. well, I'd say he hated writing them, merely from his writing style. I've never seen a character he wrote that was as two dimensional as the Hoppy he wrote, as two dimensional and distorted as the William Boyd that was seen on an old TV's CRT screen.

btw - prashant, hi, nice to see another indian with a taste for the more 'obscure' westerns (though I do have lots of Louis L'Amours with me, and have read and discarded more than my fair share of JT Edsons, kept only a few)

9:52 PM, May 22, 2011
Prashant C. Trikannad said...

Hi Suresh, I don't think I have read more than five J.T. Edsons till date. I am half way through my first Elmore Leonard novel, Pagan Babies, and I haven't formed an opinion yet. If anything, he's offbeat, like the character of Fr Terry Dunn in this book.

5:00 AM, May 23, 2011
Suresh Ramasubramanian said...

Elmore Leonard's westerns (like 3:10 to yuma) weren't really offbeat. Hard edged, very nice ones.

Where are you based by the way? [email me on my gmail account I'm posting from]

8:33 PM, May 23, 2011

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