Saturday, August 31, 2013

Saturday Morning Bonus Pulp: Star Western, July 1949


STAR WESTERN was still turning out some excellent issues in the late Forties. This one has a good cover and features stories by top-notch authors Harry F. Olmsted, E. Hoffmann Price, Talmage Powell, Jim O'Mara, Arthur Lawson, and John Jo Carpenter.

7 comments:

Jerry House said...

A very low wagon or a very tall horse.

Oscar Case said...

Girl for a Gunsmoke Texan! Nice title for a story.

James Reasoner said...

Jerry,
Yeah, that perspective is a little off, isn't it? I never noticed that.

Oscar,
I love the story titles in Popular Publications pulps. Wish I could get away with using titles like that today.

Unknown said...

Could the horse be rearing in the face of incoming gunfire?

I agree with you, James, about those marvelous pulp titles. Nothing is more uninviting than the "Vengeance Trail," "Gun Justice" style of titling favored in later years by book publishers. I once wrote in a Black Horse Extra editorial: "Old pulp magazine story titles from the 1940s, like 'The Devil Sent His Gun Angels!' or 'Brand of the Mustang Queen' or 'Mortgaged to the Dark Trail,' might be over-the-top, melodramatic and invite dismissal as 'garish' trash. But like the alluring cover paintings they graced, they do catch the eye and suggest excitement and colorful characters. Escapism!"

The closest I've managed to get into print is probably "Misfit Lil Cheats the Hangrope."

James Reasoner said...

Okay, I really want to read "The Devil Sent His Gun Angels!" I looked it up on the FMI and see that it's a Walt Coburn story from the October '47 issue of STAR WESTERN. Don't know if I have that one or not, but I'll have to check. I have a Western novella I want to write that will have a suitably garish title, as soon as I can find the time.

Shay said...

Chap -- that's actually one of the reasons I decided to read "MisfLil," the pulpish title.

Unknown said...

I hope you enjoyed that book, Shay. Resourceful Lil did her cheating of the hangrope by dint of her knowledge of native American medicine. The flip side of a good many of the more lurid pulp titles is, of course, that they eventually turn out to be cheating of another, not so admirable kind. I've just read a novelette by the excellent Gordon D. Shirreffs which had been given the title "Last of Damnation's Legion!" It was about a US marshal's tracking-down of a four-man gang of murderous payroll robbers. Whatever justified calling the bunch (a haplesss lot) a "legion" I never figured out.