Saturday, September 22, 2012

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Stories and Complete Novel Magazine, July 1936


WILD WEST STORIES AND COMPLETE NOVEL MAGAZINE was never one of the leading Western pulps, as far as I know, and this is probably the most famous issue of its run. There are only two stories in it, one of them an entry in the Flash Steele series by Lawrence A. Keating, a dependable and fairly prolific pulp author who never cracked the top ranks. It's the second story that earned this issue some notoriety: "One Hopped-up Cowboy" by Charles H. Snow, which features as its hero The Marijuana Kid. I've never read this story so I don't really know much about it, but just going by that title and the character's name, it's one of the more oddball stories ever published in the Western pulps. Maybe somebody will reprint it one of these days.

Correction: I was 'way off in last Saturday's post about THE PECOS KID WESTERN. There were five issues, not four, and the final story is in the issue pictured. There isn't a phantom Pecos Kid story in another pulp after all, although such things did happen when a magazine was cancelled without much, or any, warning.

1 comment:

Walker Martin said...

This is another title where we are not certain of the total number of issues. According to reference books this started off as COMPLETE NOVEL MAGAZINE in the 1920's and then in 1928 changed to WILD WEST STORIES and COMPLETE NOVEL MAGAZINE. It lasted through the 1930's but is not widely collected.