Review: Sixgun Vixens of the Terror Trail - Fred Blosser

I’m not sure how I missed this one when it came out last fall. Fred Blosser is an old friend, a fan and scholar of Robert E. Howard, and a fine writer. And that title! Well, that’s just pure pulp goodness and I am always the target audience for that.

Howard’s novella “The Vultures of Wahpeton” is one of my top three favorite stories by him. (The other two are “Beyond the Black River” and “Wild Water”, in case anyone is interested.) The protagonist of “The Vultures of Wahpeton” is gunfighting Texan Steve Corcoran. The protagonist of “Sixgun Vixens of the Terror Trail” is gunfighting Texan Steve Cochran. At least one of the characters in this story believes them to be one and the same, that Cochran is simply the notorious Steve Corcoran going by another name. Blosser doesn’t resolve that one way or the other, but I’d say the evidence is pretty strong that Cochran is really Corcoran.

But it doesn’t really matter. Cochran and a companion, a Papago Indian, set out into the harsh landscape of Arizona in search of a fortune in silver that’s supposed to be hidden in a lost and abandoned mission where a massacre took place a couple of hundred years earlier. They run into trouble almost right away, an ambush that proves deadly. Then things are complicated by the arrival of two beautiful young women who hate each other but are attracted to Cochran—or maybe they just want to get their hands on that silver, too.

Pursued by Apaches and bandits, Cochran finally arrives at the so-called Black Mission, only to discover another surprise waiting for him there, and this is the most dangerous and strangest of all. It’s fitting that a story written mostly in homage to Robert E. Howard would have a little H.P. Lovecraft influence, too.

Blosser really nails the pulpish tone of this story with its fast pace, frequent gritty action, and a few spicy scenes with the so-called sixgun vixens. It’s just great fun from start to finish. Then, as a bonus for REH fans, Blosser wraps things up with an entertaining essay about Howard’s Western fiction. If you’re a Howard fan or just enjoy a fine Western adventure yarn, I give “Sixgun Vixens of the Terror Trail” a high recommendation. It’s available on Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Come As You Are - Mindi Abair

Mindi Abair is one of my favorite musicians, and I really like the easy-going vibe of this song. Sometimes, especially in the middle of the night, you want to wallow in melancholy, but sometimes you want something to lift your spirits. This song does that for me.

Review: A Gambling Man - David Baldacci

Let me start with the obligatory complaint about the length of this book: David Baldacci’s A GAMBLING MAN, like most mysteries and thrillers from the tradional publishers these days, is just too blasted long. I’ll have more to say about that later on.

For now, let’s establish that this is the second novel featuring Aloysius Archer, World War II vet, ex-con (he was sent to prison for a crime he only kinda, sorta committed, and then only for good reasons), currently on his way to Bay Town, California, to become an apprentice private detective. I read the first book, ONE GOOD DEED, last year, and although it was, yes, too long, I found enough in it to like that I wanted to give this second novel in the series a try.

As I said, Archer is on his way to California, but he stops first in Reno, Nevada, where, through some perilous circumstances, he acquires a fancy foreign car and a friend in beautiful singer/dancer/would-be movie starlet Liberty Callahan. Except for these two bits of set-up, the first fourth of the book is filler. Entertaining, well-written filler, mind you, but still . . .

Liberty accompanies Archer to California, where he goes to work for a private detective named Willie Dash, an old friend of the cop Archer helped out in the previous book. They’re hired to find out who’s blackmailing a candidate for mayor of Bay Town. The politician is rich and has a beautiful wife, whose father is the local tycoon and far richer than anybody else in the area. The guy has fingers in all sorts of pies, too, including some that may or may not be quite on the up and up.

Well, of course, somebody involved in the investigation gets murdered, although it takes Baldacci almost to the halfway point of the book to get there. Archer gets beaten up by thugs. Somebody else gets murdered. Archer meets a few beautiful dames. Turns out there were more murders nobody even knew about until Archer and Willie Dash start uncovering connections. The plot gets pretty complicated but makes sense in the end, which is relatively satisfying. There’s enough story here for a nice, tight, 160-page paperback.

A GAMBLING MAN, in its original edition, is a 438-page hardback.

But don’t take that to mean I’m giving it a bad review. There’s actually quite a bit I liked about it. The book is set in 1949, and by and large, it reads like it. There’s only one bothersome anachronism I spotted: a woman is referred to by the title Ms. Technically, the word came into existence in the early 20^th Century, but I don’t believe it was in common usage until the Seventies. Seeing somebody use it in a book set in 1949 was jarring, at least to me. But the rest of the dialogue and the attitudes of the characters ring true to me. So I guess one misstep in 438 pages isn’t too bad. (Yeah, I’m harping on the number of pages.)

The main plot is solid, too. Nothing we haven’t seen before, but well put together. I don’t know how well-read Baldacci is when it comes to classic private eye fiction, but I got the feeling that CHINATOWN must be one of his favorite movies. Nothing wrong with that. It’s one of my favorite movies, too. And I think I picked up some Raymond Chandler influence, even though the book is written in third person. Archer’s banter is reminiscent of Philip Marlowe’s, and I have to wonder if Bay Town is a nod to Chandler’s Bay City.

As for the characters, Archer is a tough, smart, likable protagonist, while still being fallible and human. I think I liked him even more in this book than I did in the previous one. Willie Dash and Liberty Callahan are both excellent supporting characters. The villains are suitably despicable.

Now, to get back to the length of this book (you knew I would), the way Baldacci turns what could have been a reasonably short paperback into a fat hardback, other than the filler in the first part of the book, is by describing everything. Archer can’t enter a room without Baldacci giving us a rundown on everything that’s in it. Everybody he meets gets a thorough description. You might think this would bother me, but even I was surprised by the fact that it didn’t, much. I think that’s because even though he describes lots of things, he doesn’t dwell on any one of them for too long. He gives the reader a few details and moves on. In a way, this book reminds me of the work of Leslie Scott: it’s vividly descriptive, but yet it moves at a fairly brisk pace. (Baldacci isn’t as brisk as Scott, but then, who is?)

Also, reading this book made me realize something: I’d rather read stuff like this than a lot of modern thrillers whose authors like to talk about how they never describe anything, never use an adverb, and never, ever use a speech tag other than “said”. That’s fine if that’s how you like to write, and a lot of successful writers do, but all too often, to me that approach produces prose that’s flat and bland and boring. I was never bored reading A GAMBLING MAN, even though it took me longer than most books do.

So overall, I liked this book, and I enjoyed it enough I plan to read the third and apparently final book in the series. Not right away, but I expect I’ll get to it fairly soon. I might even move on from there and try some of Baldacci’s other books. The guy can tell a story, even if it is in sort of a long-winded way sometimes. In the meantime, this one is available in the usual e-book, hardback, paperback, and audio editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sky Fighters, July 1937

I said a while back that I ought to read some issues of the air war pulp SKY FIGHTERS. Well, I don’t actually own any. But I do own the Adventure House reprint of the July 1937 issue, so I read it. The cover is by Eugene Frandzen, who painted a bunch of them for SKY FIGHTERS.

This issue leads off with the novella “North Sea Nightmare” by George Bruce. I read another novella by Bruce last year and really enjoyed it. This one is set during World War I and centers around two young Navy pilots known as Goldilocks (because he’s small and blond) and the Bear (because he’s big and burly). Goldilocks is the pilot and the Bear is the observer/gunner in a flying boat that does reconnaissance patrols over the North Sea, looking for German ships and submarines. They come up with a daring plan for a raid on the bay where most of the German navy is based. That raid provokes an even more epic battle that may change the course of the war. I like the way Bruce writes, and there’s plenty of good action in this one. Goldilocks and the Bear are good characters, too. But I never found the plot as compelling as in the other story by Bruce that I read, and I didn’t like the ending. So while I still consider this a good story, I found it somewhat disappointing. I definitely want to read more by George Bruce, though.

Over the years, I’ve read quite a few of the pulp novels featuring the Lone Eagle, an American pilot/intelligence agent named John Masters whose adventures appeared in the pulp THE LONE EAGLE (later renamed THE AMERICAN EAGLE and AMERICAN EAGLES). The stories appeared under the house-name Lt. Scott Morgan but were written by several different authors, most notably F.E. Rechnitzer, who created the series. I always enjoyed the Lone Eagle stories because Masters was just as much of a spy as he was a pilot, and most of the novels had him operating extensively behind enemy lines as well as engaging in aerial dogfights. He often crossed paths with the mysterious and dangerous R-47, a seductive female German agent who became a recurring villainess. The first two novels in the series are reprinted in a very nice double volume from Black Dog Books called WINGS OF WAR, which is still available on Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions.

I said all that to say this: this issue of SKY FIGHTERS features a Lone Eagle novelette, also called “Wings of War”, and it’s the only time a story about the character appeared anywhere other than in his own pulp. I don’t know what brought that about. It’s possible one of the Lone Eagle authors turned in a manuscript that was too short and the editors at the Thrilling Group just decided to run it in SKY FIGHTERS rather than asking the author to expand it. Or maybe the story was written to order at novelette length in order to publicize the Lone Eagle’s own pulp—although that seems an odd thing to do several years into a magazine’s run. (THE LONE EAGLE debuted in 1933.) Regardless of its origins, “Wings of War” is a good story, with Masters going undercover as a German soldier returned in a prisoner exchange so that he try to find out why the Germans seemingly have abandoned a vital area along the front. Masters suspects the wily Huns are just setting a trap for the Allies. He’s right, of course, but he discovers what’s really going on only after another encounter with R-47, and as usual, their meeting almost proves fatal for Masters. There’s plenty of action, a plausible if far-fetched scheme by the Germans, and a smashing climax. I enjoyed this story, and it reminded me that it’s been too long since I read one of the full-length Lone Eagle novels.

“Luck of the Damned” is John Scott Douglas, a versatile and prolific pulpster who wrote scores of aviation, adventure, Western, and sports stories in a career that lasted from the mid-Twenties to the early Fifties. It’s about a young pilot who’s convinced he’s jinxed, especially on his birthday. So when his commanding officer orders him to fly a dangerous mission on that particular day, he has to battle not only the enemy but also his own superstition. This is an entertaining story that I thought wasn’t quite as strong as it might have been with a different twist, but it’s still worth reading.

Robert Sidney Bowen is one of the big names in aviation and air war pulp. He wrote a lot of other things, too, including boy’s adventure novels and mystery and detective yarns. I’ve been reading his work for close to 60 years now and always enjoy it. Just a very solid, dependably entertaining writer. His story in this issue, “Fledgling’s Finish”, is no exception. A young pilot volunteers for a suicidal bombing run on a castle that’s the center of the German communications network. When his commander refuses to let him, he takes it on himself to make the effort anyway. Most of the story is written from the point of view of the commanding officer, which proves to be an effective and suspenseful tactic. I really enjoyed this story.

Joe Archibald’s specialty was humorous stories. He didn’t just write them for the air war pulps (although he did a bunch of them), he turned out humorous yarns for the Western, detective, and sports pulps, too. I’m not a big fan of his work, but sometimes I find his stories mildly amusing. That’s a pretty good description of “A Flyer in Cauliflowers”. This is part of a series featuring two American pilots named Ambrose Hooley and Muley Spink (the narrator). The plot concerns a prizefight between an American flier and a British pilot to determine who deserves credit for shooting down a couple of German planes. There’s also a captured German ace who escapes and has to be hunted down. As I said above, it’s mildly amusing and moves along fairly well, so it’s a readable story. Not much more than that, mind you, but I did finish it, which is more than I can say for some of Archibald’s yarns.

Hal White wrote dozens of Western, detective, and aviation stories for the pulps between the mid-Twenties and the early Fifties, but that’s all I know about him. His story “Fly High and Die” wraps up this issue. It’s about a squadron of fighter pilots who believe they’ve been cursed by a dead German ace. Anytime they fly higher than 8000 feet, something terrible happens to them. Of course, there’s more to it than that. The actual solution to the mystery struck me as a little bland, but overall the story is okay.

And okay is a good description of this issue as a whole. The Lone Eagle story is excellent, the Robert Sidney Bowen story is very good, and even though I found the George Bruce story a little disappointing, it’s still a good story and makes me want to read more by him. The other stories are mildly entertaining but forgettable. I probably won’t go hunting for more issues of SKY FIGHTERS, but if I come across any, I won’t hesitate to grab them, either.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Frontier Stories, Summer 1945

I don't own this issue of FRONTIER STORIES, so I haven't read it. But it has a dramatic cover by Richard Case and a fine group of writers inside. The lead story by Les Savage Jr., "The Lone Star Camel Corps", may have been cannibalized for Savage for his novel ONCE A FIGHTER. It was reprinted in one of the Les Savage Jr. collections packaged by Jon Tuska and I have a copy of that book on order. I'm looking forward to reading the story. Also on hand in this issue of FRONTIER STORIES are William Heuman, Tom W. Blackburn, William R. Cox, R.S. Lerch, Fairfax Downey, and the lesser-known Ben T. Young and Raymond L. Hill. Lots of good reading there, I have no doubt about that.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Bodyguard - Roger Torrey

Roger Torrey was one of the leading authors of hardboiled detective fiction for the pulps during the Thirties and Forties, starting out in BLACK MASK and writing for a number of other pulps as well, including SPICY DETECTIVE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE, and Street & Smith’s DETECTIVE STORY. 

Torrey’s work has two major strengths. One is the easygoing, conversational style in which the stories are told. According to Black Dog Books’ editor and publisher, Tom Roberts, reading a story by Roger Torrey is like sitting in a bar somewhere and listening to a guy spin an exciting yarn about something that happened to him. The fact that the guy is usually a private eye, and the story concerns some bizarre case mixed up with murder and beautiful babes, is a real plus.

The colorful characterization of the narrators in most of Torrey’s stories is their other strong point. Despite the fact that they all have different names, those narrators are basically the same person: a private detective, often an ex-cop and a lone operative, smart but not infallible, tough but no superman, basically a decent sort but not above a little chicanery and lechery. He’ll get beaten up when the odds are against him, he’ll be fooled by an attractive woman from time to time, and he’ll muddle his way through cases with dogged determination as much as anything else. But in the end, he comes up with the killer every time, of course.

Torrey’s background included stints as a piano player in nightclubs and an organist in movie theaters, and his stories often have some sort of show business background. He was a heavy drinker, and so are many of his characters. Despite their sometimes oddball plot elements, the stories have an air of authenticity about them, including a fatalism that foreshadows Torrey’s early death. (He wasn’t even 40 yet when he passed away, probably from alcoholism.)

BODYGUARD reprints eleven stories, several of them long novellas. While not all of them are what you’d call rigorously plotted, they’re all very entertaining and enjoyable. The book also includes an informative introduction by long-time author and editor Ron Goulart, as well as the first-ever bibliography of Torrey’s work. I had a great time reading BODYGUARD, and if you’re a fan of hardboiled pulp fiction, I highly recommend it.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 17, 2010. BODYGUARD is still available in e-book and trade paperback editions, and my recommendation of it stands. It's well worth reading.) 

Review: Backfire - Charles L. Burgess

A while back, I read and enjoyed Charles Burgess’s novel THE OTHER WOMAN, which was published originally by Beacon Books in 1960 and reprinted last year by Stark House as part of their great Black Gat Books line. Burgess, a Florida author who specialized in writing articles for the true crime magazines, wrote only two novels, and his other one, BACKFIRE, was very rare, having been published only in Australia. Now the good folks at Stark House have tracked it down and reprinted it as well, along with Burgess’s only short story and a selection of his true crime yarns. I’ve just read BACKFIRE.

The novel’s protagonist is Martin Powers, about as normal and run-of-the-mill a guy as you could find. He’s a salesman for a cosmetics company and is recently married to a beautiful brunette named Angela. He has a pretty good life, he thinks—until somebody starts trying to kill him.

After several failed attempts on his life, Martin’s wife brings in the cops, in the person of a hulking detective named Sam Bannerman. Unfortunately, Bannerman doesn’t seem to be able to make any progress in finding out who wants Martin dead. So Martin figures if he wants to stay alive, he’d better do some investigating himself. He was adopted as a young child and knows very little about his background, so he decides that would be a good place to start. He proves to be a clever, dogged detective, too, and starts uncovering things. But will he arrive at the ultimate answer before his mysterious enemy knocks him off?

BACKFIRE is a well-constructed mystery/suspense novel that generates considerably urgency and kept me flipping the pages. I think Burgess revealed some key elements of the plot maybe a tad too early, but that didn’t take away from my overall enjoyment of the book. He keeps the central questions unanswered until late in the book and keeps tightening the screws on Martin until a satisfying climax.

Maybe due to Burgess’s background as a true crime author, there’s a strong sense of realism to this book, as well, a sense that the investigation really could have gone this way. There’s nothing flashy about the style, just straight-ahead storytelling, but in a story like this, that’s a very effective approach. I'm sorry Burgess didn't write more novels. I had a fine time reading BACKFIRE and give it a high recommendation. It’s available in e-book and trade paperback editions. I haven’t yet read the true crime articles that round out the book, but I intend to.

Review: 'Nada - Daniel Boyd (Dan Stumpf)

I’m not sure how I missed this novel when it came out in 2010. I’m sure I read the reviews of it on Bill Crider’s blog and Mystery Scene, and I should have picked it up then because it sounds exactly like my kind of book. Plus, the author and I are acquainted on-line. He’s commented here under his real name, Dan Stumpf, and I’ve commented on his book and movie reviews over on Mystery Scene. But even though it took me a while to get around to it, I’m very glad I did because ‘NADA is a terrific book.

It's set in Mexico in 1936. The title does double duty, since “nada” is the Spanish word for nothing, and in this book it’s also the nickname of the small town of Quenada, which is on the other side of the desert from the abandoned Old Pesos Mine. The mine isn’t completely abandoned, however. There’s a caretaker of sorts, Vernon Culley, a World War I veteran turned bootlegger and gangster turned mining engineer. He’s the narrator, and he provides a colorful, distinctive narrative voice that’s a pleasure to read.

One day a truck shows up at the mine. The two men in it are fleeing from a gang of bandits led by the Serrano Brothers, with whom Culley is acquainted. There’s a shootout, one of the men winds up dead, and Culley discovers that the truck is full of gold bars that were entrusted to the Dutchman who was killed in the battle. He was supposed to sell the gold and return the proceeds to some Dutch Jews who fled to America from the Nazis. One of the group is the dead man’s father-in-law. The Dutchman had hired a Mexican/Indian named Ray to drive him and the gold to its destination. Ray and Culley team up to try to carry out the Dutchman’s mission, since they promised the dying man they would.

Of course, it won’t be easy since they’ll have to battle the desert, vicious bandits, and corrupt lawmen along the way. Not to mention their own mercenary impulses and the guilt that haunts Ray . . .

This is the sort of historical adventure yarn that Jack Higgins used to write, although I think ‘NADA is better written than any of the Higgins novels I’ve read. The author gives us a bunch of superb action scenes but also really develops the characters of Culley and Ray as they work together and get to know each other. They discuss books, philosophy, religion, and plenty of other subjects, but even so, Stumpf never lets the action lag for long and the pace is suspenseful and relentless.

This is the first novel that Stumpf wrote as Daniel Boyd, but he’s done several more since then. It's also the first fiction by him that I’ve read, but I’m going to have to remedy that. Meanwhile, I give ‘NADA a very high recommendation. It's available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I think it’s a lock for my top ten list at the end of the year.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, December 30, 1939

By the end of the Thirties, ARGOSY was wrapping up its run as one of the top pulps in the business. It would still publish plenty of excellent fiction for another decade, but it wasn't as strong overall as it was at its peak in the mid-Thirties. Despite that trend, this looks like a really strong issue with a good cover by Rudolph Belarski and stories by E. Hoffmann Price, Eustace L. Adams, Allan Vaughan Elston, Louis C. Goldsmith, Bennett Foster, Frank Richardson Pierce, and an installment of one of the occult detective novels by Jack Mann (E. Charles Vivian). Those are some fine writers. I need to read those Jack Mann novels. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, August 27, 1938

I own a couple dozen issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY, but the August 27, 1938 issue isn’t among them. It’s available on the Internet Archive, though, and I picked it to read for a reason which I’ll get around to. The cover is by the legendary Norman Saunders, and it’s a good one illustrating the lead novella, “The Cougar’s Claws”.

That novella features Pete Rice, and that’s the reason I read this one. A little background for those of you unfamiliar with the character: Inspired by the success of THE SHADOW and DOC SAVAGE, in 1933 the good folks at Street & Smith decided to launch a Western hero pulp. The result was PETE RICE MAGAZINE. The title character is the two-fisted, fast-shootin’ sheriff of Trinchera County, Arizona, who's assisted by two deputies, scrawny little Misery Hicks (who does double duty as the barber of Buffalo Gap, the county seat) and Teeny Butler, who, in keeping with the nicknaming tradition of pulp characters, is well over six feet tall and weighs 300 pounds. The gimmick of the series, if you can call it that, is that while it has all the Western trappings, it’s set in the modern day, putting it in firmly in the same camp as the Western B-movies of the times starring Gene Autry and others. These Pete Rice novels, and they were full-length novels, were written by veteran pulpster Ben Conlon under the pseudonym Austin Gridley.

Well, PETE RICE MAGAZINE was not a raging success. It ran for 31 issues, approximately two and a half years. I read one of the novels years ago and don’t remember much about it except that I wasn’t impressed and didn’t seek out any more of the series. But . . . after Pete’s own magazine was cancelled, the character moved to WILD WEST WEEKLY, where he starred in 21 more novellas and novelettes. Or did he? You see, the stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY are no longer set in the modern day but take place in the Old West, which prompted a recent discussion between me and a friend about the idea that the Pete Rice in the WILD WEST WEEKLY stories is actually the father or grandfather of the Pete Rice who starred in his own magazine. That seems feasible, other than the fact that in WILD WEST WEEKLY, Misery and Teeny are still Pete’s deputies, and claiming that those characters are also an earlier generation seems like quite a stretch to me. I suspect that in real life, nobody at Street & Smith ever gave the change in time period a second thought other than maybe instructing Conlon to make the stories actual Westerns in hopes that they would help sell WILD WEST WEEKLY. It’s a safe bet that none of the pulp writers and editors dreamed anybody would still be talking about this stuff nearly a century down the road!

Anyway, another difference in the characters in PETE RICE MAGAZINE and WILD WEST WEEKLY is that in the later incarnation, Austin Gridley became a house-name. Ben Conlon continued to write some of the stories, but other authors contributed Pete Rice yarns, too, including Paul S. Powers, who teamed Pete with his popular character Sonny Tabor, leading to a joint byline of Austin Gridley and Ward Stevens (Powers’ pseudonym); Ronald Oliphant, who penned a crossover between Pete and Billy West of the Circle J, under the names Austin Gridley and Cleve Endicott (the house-name on the Circle J series); Lee Bond; and the extremely prolific Laurence Donovan, who also ghosted some Doc Savage novels for Street & Smith. The Pete Rice story in this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY I just read, “The Cougar’s Claws”, is Donovan’s first Pete Rice story.

And after my lukewarm at best reaction to the other Pete Rice yarn I read, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I really enjoyed this one. The Cougar is the leader of an outlaw gang plaguing Trinchera County and has come up with a really grisly way of disposing of his enemies: he wraps them in green bullhide and then lets the sun dry it out so that it shrinks and crushes the victims to death. Pete and his deputies clash several times with the Cougar and his gang, escape from some death traps, and finally expose the real mastermind behind all the villainy. There are some clever twists and Donovan was always really good with action, of which there is plenty. I found Pete and his deputies likable and had a fine time reading this novella. I’ll be on the lookout for more of the Pete Rice issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY.

I think the novelette “Gunsmoke Tornado” is the earliest story I’ve ever read by Dudley Dean McGaughey, the real name of Dean Owen, who gets the credit for this one. I’ve read quite a few of McGaughey’s pulp novels from the Forties and a bunch of paperbacks from the Fifties and Sixties, but “Gunsmoke Tornado” was only his ninth published story. It’s a good one, too, about a drifting young cowhand who signs on with a ranch crew where he faces some hazing. That might have been a story in itself, but there’s more going on than that, and before you know it, our young hero finds himself in danger up to his neck because of a feud between rival ranches. McGaughey’s work has a nice hardboiled tone to it and this story is no exception.  Plenty of tough action makes this one a winner.

I’m familiar with Lee Bond mostly from the long-running Long Sam Littlejohn series he wrote as backup stories in TEXAS RANGERS, but he did several series for WILD WEST WEEKLY, including one featuring drifting cowpokes Calamity Boggs and Shorty Stevens. Shorty is, well, short and feisty, just as you’d expect. Calamity is tall and husky and full of doom and gloom, an extreme pessimist who always believes the worst is about to happen, which is, I’m sure, how he got his nickname. Bond doesn’t explain that in “Calamity Hubs a Frame-Up” in this issue, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s easy enough to just jump right into this yarn in which our two rambling heroes find a recently abandoned line shack, decide to spend the night there, and wake up the next morning to find themselves the prisoners of a posse out to hang them for murder and rustling. As you might suppose, eventually they sort things out and everything gets resolved in a big gunfight, as things usually do in a Lee Bond story. Bond moves things along well and was always excellent when it comes to the action scenes. This is the third very good story in a row in this issue.

I’ve written here before about how Elmer Kelton and I enjoyed talking about Western pulps whenever we’d get together. I think I may have been the only one of his friends who was a pulp fan. He told me several times that WILD WEST WEEKLY was his favorite pulp when he was a kid growing up on a ranch in West Texas, and Sonny Tabor was his favorite character. Paul S. Powers wrote the Sonny Tabor series under the pseudonym Ward M. Stevens. More than 130 novelettes and novellas between 1930 and 1943 is quite a run. Some of those stories were crossovers featuring Sonny Tabor meeting up with other series characters from WILD WEST WEEKLY, including Kid Wolf (also a Paul S. Powers creation), Pete Rice, and Billy West and the Circle J outfit.

But who was Sonny Tabor? He was a good-guy outlaw, falsely accused of some crime (I don’t know the details) and on the run from the law, blamed for every bit of outlawry that occurs any time he’s around, and sometimes even when he’s not. The novelette in this issue, “A Murder Brand for Sonny Tabor”, is actually the first one I’ve read. The youngest of three brothers who own a ranch together is gunned down, shot in the back, and the name Tabor is carved into his forehead. The dead man’s brothers and the local law blame Sonny, of course, and he has to uncover the real killer to clear his name of this charge, anyway, although he’ll still be wanted for dozens of others. This is a really well-written story and I found myself liking Sonny and rooting for him right away. I have quite a few more issues with Sonny Tabor stories in them and I’m glad of that because I really enjoyed this one.

I was familiar with Allan R. Bosworth as the author of several excellent Western novels, but I’ve discovered in recent years that he also wrote scores of stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY under house-names, as well as contributing to the magazine under his own name. He used it on his long-running series about freight wagon driver Shorty Masters and his sidekick Willie Wetherbee, also known as the gunfightin’ Sonora Kid. In “A Hangin’ on Live Oak Creek”, all Shorty and Willie want to do is run a trotline and catch themselves a mess of catfish for fryin’ up. Instead, they find a fella who’s been lynched, but luckily they come across him before he’s choked to death. Rescuing him puts our heroes smack-dab in the middle of a fight between ranchers and rustlers. There’s a nice twist in this one. I saw it coming, but that didn’t make it any less satisfying. Also, I like the way Shorty names the mules in his team after classical music composers. That’s a nice touch I wasn’t expecting. Another really good story.

One of WILD WEST WEEKLY’s specialties was the series of linked novellas that could then be combined and published as a fix-up novel. Walker A. Tompkins was the master of this format, writing many of them for the pulp. His story in this issue published under the house-name Philip F. Deere, “Death Rides Tombstone Trail”, is the third of six to feature a Wyoming cowboy named Lon Cole who is in Texas working as a trail boss and also getting mixed up in various adventures. In this one, he’s between trail drives and takes a job as a special guard for a stagecoach carrying a shipment of gold. Of course, the stagecoach is held up. Lon is grazed by an outlaw bullet and knocked out so they think he’s dead and ride off leaving him there. He goes after the varmints, of course, and discovers they’re a gang known as the Secret Six and are led by a mysterious mastermind known as The Chief. This is nothing we haven’t all seen before, but Tompkins is good at it. Even though the story has a beginning, middle, and end, it’s weakened slightly by being part of a bigger whole, but I had a good time reading it anyway. The six Lon Cole stories were combined into the novel THUNDERGUST TRAIL, published under Tompkins' real name by Phoenix Press in 1942. I own a copy of that book but haven't read it. When I get around to it, I'll have already read a chunk out of the middle of it, but I don't think that'll bother me too much.

Overall, this is one of the best Western pulps I’ve read in a long time. Every story in this issue is very good to excellent, and several of them really make me want to read more about the characters. If you’ve never read an issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY, it would make a good introduction to the magazine, I think. If you’re a long-time fan like me, it’s well worth downloading and reading.