Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, Second October Number, 1957

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover is by Sam Cherry, one of the few I’ve seen by him that’s signed. The colors on my copy are kind of washed out and there’s a chunk out of the cover, but I’m glad to have it anyway.

I’ve written before about how RANCH ROMANCES during the Fifties is one of my favorite Western pulps, and this issue is a good example of why that is. It starts off with the novella “Hired Killer” by Ray Gaulden, one of the most dependable hardboiled Western writers of the Fifties and Sixties. Hired gun Blain Damaron returns to his hometown on a job. He’s supposed to find and kill a man who murdered a rich man’s son. Damaron carries out this assignment right away, but for some reason, he finds that he can’t leave his old stomping grounds. There are too many people he knows, too many old enemies who are out to take over the whole area. A range war is brewing, and the sheriff asks Damaron to stay on and wear a deputy’s badge. He’s very reluctant to do so, but really, it’s pretty obvious what he’s going to wind up doing.

The plot may be pretty standard stuff, but as usual, Gaulden elevates it with good characters and terse, top-notch prose. He expanded this story into the novel DAMARON’S GUN, published as a paperback original by Signet in 1958 under the pseudonym Wesley Ray. I’m pretty sure I have a copy of that book, but I’ve never read it. I may have to do that, once this version has settled a little in my brain.

Ben Frank’s work is hit-or-miss with me, mostly miss, to be honest, because I just don’t find his comedy Westerns very funny. But his story “The Man Who Came Back” in this issue isn’t a comedy, and it’s excellent. A young rancher is badly injured in a tornado and is laid up in the hospital for a long time. He’s lost everything, and he’s not in great shape physically. Can he start over again, despite the fact that a neighboring rancher is trying to crowd him off his range? Maybe he can, with the help of a pretty young schoolteacher who has some trouble of her own in her past. Frank, whose real name was Frank Bennett, does a fine job with this one and I really enjoyed it.

I’ve been reading and enjoying Walker A. Tompkins’ Westerns for almost sixty years, starting with the paperback reprints of some of his Jim Hatfield novels when I was in high school. His novelette “Blizzard Pass” in this issue is a very solid tale about the sheriff of a settlement high in the Rocky Mountains that gets cut off from the outside world for four or five months every winter when the pass that’s the only in or out is blocked by snow. In this story, just as the blizzard that will cut the town off is moving in, the lawman gets word that an escaped outlaw is headed that way. He’s faced with the prospect of having a vicious killer on the loose with no way for potential victims to escape from him. Tompkins does a fine job with the claustrophobic aspects of this story. The twist ending is pretty easy to see coming but is well-handled. This story probably would have been better at a longe length so Tompkins would have had the opportunity to ratchet up the suspense even more, but as is, I still found it very entertaining.

“Wagontrain Woman” by Barbara Bonham is an actual romance story about a woman whose husband is killed in an Indian attack while they’re heading west as part of a wagon train. One of the men traveling with the train loses his wife in childbirth. It’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen, but even so, this is a gentle, well-written, poignant story that I thoroughly enjoyed. Bonham published a couple of dozen stories during the Fifties, mostly Western romances, and I found this one to be a very nice change of pace from the usual leather-slappin’ and powder burnin’. (Don’t get me wrong. As a general rule, the more gunplay, the better when it comes to Western pulp yarns.)

Norman Wells wrote half a dozen stories published in RANCH ROMANCES during the late Fifties. That’s all I know about him. His story “Border Hunt” is in first person, something of a rarity in the Western pulps, and he does a good job with it. It’s about a young man trying to track down the Apache renegade who killed his brother. His search is complicated when his widowed sister-in-law shows up. This is a pretty well-written, reasonably entertaining story that ultimately doesn’t have much to it.

“Vengeance Station” is an early story by T.V. Olsen, who really didn’t write that much short fiction compared to his career as a prolific Western novelist. This one opens with the young protagonist set afoot in the desert in West Texas, pursued by twin brothers from a family that has a long-standing feud with his. He manages to reach a stagecoach station where the man who runs the station has a beautiful daughter. But the young man’s enemies catch up to him, and gritty action ensues. Olsen was a really fine author of hardboiled Westerns, and I kind of regret that I spent a long time avoiding his work because I didn’t care for the first novel of his I read, many years ago. But on the other hand, that gives me a lot of good books to read now. “Vengeance Station” is a very good story, although I think Olsen’s stuff works better at longer lengths.

There’s also a serial installment from the novel THE WAITING GUN by John S. Daniels, who was really Wayne D. Overholser. This was published under Overholser’s name, but not until after he had passed away. I have a copy of the novel version and might get around to reading it one of these days.

This is a really good issue of RANCH ROMANCES, which means it’s a top-notch Western pulp. If you have a copy on your shelves, it’s very much worth reading.

Review: Pickman's Model - H.P. Lovecraft

It seemed like reading a story by the old gentleman himself would be the best way to cap off this week, and since a commenter on one of the earlier posts mentioned “Pickman’s Model”, I thought that might be a good choice. WEIRD TALES published this story by H.P. Lovecraft in the October 1927 issue, and it’s been reprinted many, many times since then.

The narrator of “Pickman’s Model” is a man named Thurber, who seems to be a well-to-do gentleman of Boston. He’s having drinks with a young friend of his named Eliot, and during the course of the evening, he explains why he no longer associates with the well-known artist Richard Upton Pickman. Pickman, it seems, is a hugely talented artist, but the subjects of his paintings are so grotesque and bizarre that he’s become increasingly shunned in Boston society.

The highlight of Thurber’s story is a recounting of the time Pickman took him to a rented house in a poorer section of town that he uses as a private gallery and studio. Pickman takes Thurber into the basement, and what they encounter there leads Thurber to believe that Pickman isn’t just painting his pictures from imagination. He’s actually witnessed some of the terrible things he’s captured on canvas.

That’s really all there is to “Pickman’s Model”. Like most of Lovecraft’s work, it’s all atmosphere and creepiness and vague but horrifying concepts. It’s well-written and draws the reader in. I just can’t help but wish that something actually happened in it.

I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll never be as big a fan of Lovecraft’s work as many are. I suspect I came to it too late. Bill Crider once told me that the best time to discover Lovecraft is the summer between eighth and ninth grade. I was close to fifty years past that.

By the way, I can certainly see how this story might have been the inspiration for Robert Barbour Johnson’s story “Far Below”, which I wrote about a few days ago, and that makes me glad I read it.

I’ve really enjoyed reading the stories I’ve read this week. Look for more reviews of Mythos-inspired fiction in the days to come. Now that I’ve started those anthologies, I’d like to read more of them.

Review: The Faceless God - Robert Bloch

Mentioning Robert Bloch put me in the mood to read something by him, and “The Faceless God”, originally published in the May 1936 issue of WEIRD TALES and also available in THE CTHULHU MYTHOS MEGAPACK, was handy.

There are SPOILERS BELOW, so beware.

This starts out with a very graphic and disturbing torture scene, as a smuggler and criminal tries to extract the location of a potentially valuable find in the Egyptian desert from an old man. The thing is the head of a statue that was buried in the sand sometime in ages past, but the constantly shifting dunes have uncovered it. Getting wind of the discovery, the crook wants the statue for himself, figuring that it’s bound to be worth a lot of money. The old man can’t hold up under the torture and finally reveals the statue’s location before dying.

This is basically the story’s prologue, and in the hands of, say, Robert E. Howard, “The Faceless God” would have been a corking yarn, as one of REH’s adventurer heroes would have gone after the statue, too, and clashed violently with the bad guy before the statue—which turns out to be that of an ancient Egyptian elder god—enters the fray in bloody and dramatic fashion.

But that’s not what happens. The bad guy goes after the statue, finds it, and terrible things ensue. Needless to say, it’s all very well-written. Bloch was a great storyteller. It’s just that he chooses not to tell much of a story here.

I’m a firm believer in reviewing the story the author wrote, not the one I wish he had written, so I feel bad saying I found “The Faceless God” to be a disappointment. As I said, the writing is excellent, and on that basis alone, I’m glad I read it, and it certainly won’t keep me from reading other stories by Bloch in the future. This one is a bit of a misfire for me, but it might not be for you. If you haven’t read it and want to give it a try, it’s been reprinted numerous times, most notably in the Bloch collections YOURS TRULY, JACK THE RIPPER, THE OPENER OF THE WAY, and MYSTERIES OF THE WORM.

Review: The Salem Horror - Henry Kuttner

Say you’re a writer, an author of very popular light romances, and your publisher is pressuring you to finish the new book, and you’re having trouble with it, so you need a nice quiet, peaceful place to work. What do you do?

You rent a house in Salem, Massachusetts, that once belonged to an evil witch who was hanged several hundred years earlier when the mob discovered that her body wouldn’t burn at the stake, and before she died she cursed the town and nobody’s been able to live in the house for very long ever since. Of course that’s what you do. Sure, why not?

That’s the set-up of Henry Kuttner’s story “The Salem Witch”, which appeared originally in the May 1937 issue of WEIRD TALES, which has a striking cover by Margaret Brundage, by the way. Kuttner is a long-time favorite of mine. He was one of those authors who could write in several different genres and handle them all extremely well. The stories of his from WEIRD TALES that I’ve read have all been excellent, and “The Salem Horror” is no exception. The protagonist of this yarn pursues a rat into the basement of the old house, where he proceeds to find a hidden room that has to be the old witch’s sanctum where she invoked dark rituals. Naturally, the guy decides this would be a fine place to write and finish his novel at last. Who cares if he starts having bizarre, disturbing dreams about a giant black blob rampaging through the town and slaughtering people?

This story also introduces occult detective Michael Leigh, who returns in the next issue of WEIRD TALES in a story that’s a collaboration between Kuttner and Robert Bloch. Unfortunately for him, that’s the end of his series. I may have to find that one and read it, too, since Bloch is another favorite of mine. In the meantime, I read “The Salem Horror” in the aptly named THE CTHULHU MYTHOS MEGAPACK from Wildside Press, which you can find in an e-book edition on Amazon. I really enjoyed this one, and I suspect I’ll be reading more from that collection very soon.

Review: Spawn of the Green Abyss - C. Hall Thompson

I once owned the November 1946 issue of WEIRD TALES. I remember that Boris Dolgov cover. However, I never got around to reading it. But continuing with my sudden and unexplainable interest in Cthulhu Mythos stories (gee, that sounds kind of sinister, doesn’t it?), I moved on in the anthology A MOUNTAIN WALKED to read the novelette “Spawn of the Green Abyss” by C. Hall Thompson.

C. Hall Thompson is best remembered, if he is at all, as a Western writer, but he published four well-regarded stories in WEIRD TALES. “Spawn of the Green Abyss” is narrated by Dr. James Arkwright, a former brain surgeon and now a convicted murderer who’s waiting for his execution. Thompson lets us know right away that Arkwright killed his wife and her unborn baby, but of course, there’s more to it than that, and slowly, in clearly Lovecraft-influenced prose, he peels back the layers of what really happened.

Arkwright, you see, suffering from the stress of his medical career, takes a break from it by renting a cottage in a small town on a peninsula extending into the Atlantic from the New Jersey shore. Out at the point of that peninsula is a creepy old house where a creepy old man lives, along with his beautiful daughter. Naturally, Arkwright becomes obsessed with the house and the old man, and he falls in love with the daughter, as we all knew he would. She is, in fact, the wife he’s in prison for murdering.

I’m sure a lot of you have already read this story, and those of you who haven’t won’t have any trouble figuring out what’s going to happen in it, but the fun is in getting there and Thompson clearly relished the journey. Along the way, the reader gets a lot of chilling, haunting images and a bit of sea-going adventure, to boot.

“Spawn of the Green Abyss” is another excellent story, and I’m glad I got on this little binge. I’m intrigued by the idea that the same guy who wrote this dense, atmospheric yarn was primarily a Western writer. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything else by Thompson, but I may have to remedy that.

Review: Far Below - Robert Barbour Johnson

Reading Mearle Prout’s “The House of the Worm” the other day put me in the mood to read more like that, so I dug out my copy of the S.T. Joshi-edited anthology A MOUNTAIN WALKED: GREAT TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS and read “Far Below” by Robert Barbour Johnson, which appeared originally in the June/July 1939 issue of WEIRD TALES.

In Joshi’s introduction, he says that in 1953, readers of WEIRD TALES voted “Far Below” as the best story ever published in the magazine. Well, no, not hardly, in my opinion, for reasons I’ll get to. But it is a very good story in some ways.

The whole thing is some nameless narrator who’s a writer talking to a friend of his, a former doctor and scientist, in some sort of bizarre control room buried deep below the streets of New York in the subway system. It seems that, unknown to the general public, monsters roam through a certain section of the subway in the middle of the night, and the New York Police Department has set up special squads and listening posts (of which this is one) to monitor their activities and protect the subway riders from them.

That’s a great concept, and as the doctor-turned-cop explains all the background to his friend, there are some wonderfully creepy bits, so vivid that they linger in the mind. But when you get right down to it, other than a little twist at the end, that’s all “Far Below” is: a concept. Very well written, to be sure, but nothing happens. That’s why it’s far from the best story ever published in WEIRD TALES as far as I’m concerned.

But am I glad that I read it? Absolutely! As I said, it’s very well-written, and I enjoy being creeped out from time to time. This’ll do it, that’s for sure. You can find used copies of A MOUNTAIN WALKED on-line, but they’re pretty pricey. Or you can hunt up a PDF of that issue of WEIRD TALES. Either way, I recommend “Far Below”, and I figure I might just delve a little deeper into the Mythos this week.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, September 13, 1930

I always enjoy seeing a good-looking redhead on a pulp cover, and Paul Stahr supplies one on the cover of this issue of ARGOSY. There are some fine writers inside this issue, too, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Theodore Roscoe, Eustace L. Adams, J. Allan Dunn, J.E. Grinstead, Harold de Polo, R.F. Starzl, Art J. Purcell, and Joseph Ivers Lawrence. Some of those names are considerably more familiar than others, of course, but they had to be pretty good to sell to ARGOSY.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, August 7, 1937

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The beautifully painted and rather sedate (by WILD WEST WEEKLY standards) cover is by Tom Lovell. That’s Sonny Tabor, long-running series protagonist and the hero of the lead novelette in this issue.

Sonny Tabor, for those of you who don’t remember, is a young outlaw who was unjustly forced onto the owlhoot trail, but now he’s the most wanted man in Arizona Territory. In “Sonny Tabor’s Oregon Boot”, he’s captured by the law after suffering minor wounds in a shootout. To insure that he doesn’t escape, he’s locked into the Oregon Boot of the title, a special shackle that makes walking very difficult. But does that stop Sonny for very long? What do you think? Of course he gets away, but then he finds himself smack-dab in the middle of a scheme by outlaws to take over a couple of ranches owned by a pair of brothers. Sonny, despite being on the wrong side of the law, is really a good guy, so naturally he risks his own freedom to protect the innocent and deal out justice to the real evildoers. Author Paul S. Powers, who wrote this series and others under the pseudonym Ward M. Stevens, was great at spinning these fast-moving, action-packed yarns, and I always thoroughly enjoy them. Sonny really has problems piled up on him in this one, but he comes through, of course. I also found myself wondering if Stan Lee ever read WILD WEST WEEKLY, because Kid Colt seems very much influenced by Sonny Tabor.

George C. Henderson was a pretty good but now completely forgotten Western pulpster. He has two stories in this issue, the first being “The Jail Break at Big Horse” under the house-name Andrew A. Griffin. In it, two outlaws escape from custody. One of them is a hardened rustler and killer, the other a young man new to the owlhoot trail. The older man takes the younger one into his gang, but eventually the law is bound to catch up to them. This one has a twist ending and I saw part of it coming, but not all of it, and any surprise is a welcome bonus. Other than a slightly rushed ending, this is an entertaining yarn with some well-written action.

The Whistlin’ Kid is actually range detective Pete Prentiss, and he stars in a very long-running series in WILD WEST WEEKLY published under the house-name Emery Jackson. J. Allan Dunn wrote more of them than anyone else, although Guy L. Maynard and Ronald Oliphant contributed to the series, too. Dunn wrote this issue’s “The Whistlin’ Kid Plays Injun”, in which Prentiss, who hunts rustlers, is mistaken for one himself and almost strung up, and when he gets out of that mess, he disguises himself as an Indian to track down the real outlaws. Dunn was an old pro who always turned in a competently written story with some nice action, but there’s really not much to this one and I’d say it’s one of the weaker stories by him that I’ve read.

I’m a fan of T.W. Ford’s work, but I’ve also known for a long time that he could be inconsistent. His novelette in this issue, “Vengeance of the Peacemaker”, reads like it’s part of a series, but as far as I can tell, this is the only appearance of drifting adventurers Ben Hobbs, known as the Peacemaker, and his sidekick Poison Hellson. The two of them save a young cowboy from being gunned down by a crooked gambler who’s an old enemy of the Peacemaker’s, and that catapults them into a Save the Ranch story in which circumstance makes them wind up working with the rustlers, at least for a while. But you know they’ll straighten everything out eventually. I wasn’t sure I was going to like this one at first. The writing seemed a little rushed, to the point that I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I stuck with it and wound up liking it okay, although I wouldn’t rate it as high as most of Ford’s Silver Kid stories, the series for which he’s best remembered.

I’ve become a fan of the Shorty Masters series by Allan R. Bosworth, who was one of the best writers to contribute to WILD WEST WEEKLY. Mule driver Shorty, along with his gunslinging partner Willie Weatherbee, also known as the Sonora Kid, also run afoul of cattle thieves in “Rustlers on Wheels” and are mistaken for outlaws themselves, which seems to be kind of a probably unintended theme of this issue. Naturally, they figure out a way to clear their names and corral the real rustlers. It’s a well-written tale with touches of humor and plenty of action, another good entry in a consistently good series.

George C. Henderson makes his second appearance in this issue, this time under his name, with the novelette “Crazy Q’s Gunpowder Jamboree”. Unfortunately, this is part of a series of linked novelettes that amounts to a serialized novel, and so much of it depends on what has gone before that I never could get into it and wound up not finishing it. Henderson was pretty good, as I mentioned above, and I’m sure if I had all six parts, I would enjoy reading about the adventures of Buckaroo Boone and the other cowboys from the Crazy Q ranch. I’ll pass for now, though.

There are some features and a comic strip, all of which I just glanced at, as usual. For the most part, I’m just interested in the stories, and this issue, none of them rise above the level of pretty good and some are fairly weak, making this a slightly below average issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY in my opinion. The stories by Paul S. Powers and Allan R. Bosworth are well worth reading, though.

Review: The House of the Worm - Mearle Prout (Weird Tales, October 1933)

Since I read and reviewed Edmond Hamilton’s “The Vampire Master” earlier this week, my friend Fred Blosser suggested I read “The House of the Worm” by Mearle Prout, which appears in the same issue of WEIRD TALES as the opening installment of Hamilton’s serial. That sounded like a good idea to me.

We don’t know much about Mearle Prout. He was born in 1911, possibly in Texas, died in 1964, and apparently spent most of his life in Oklahoma. He published four stories in WEIRD TALES, starting with “The House of the Worm” in the October 1933 issue and then three more, one each in 1937, 1938, and 1939. “The House of the Worm” was the most successful, going on to be reprinted six times in various magazines and anthologies. I had never run across it until now, though.

The narrator of this story is a young man named Art. He’s a writer, possibly a pulp writer, although that’s never specified. His roommate and best friend is a bank clerk named Fred. We never learn any more about these two young fellows than that. They take a break from their jobs to go on a hunting trip to a secluded valley in the Ozark Mountains (not far from Prout’s home in Oklahoma), but when they reach their destination, they find that all the vegetation in the valley is dying and the place has a loathsome stench about it. (You know you’re reading a WEIRD TALES story when there’s a loathsome stench involved somewhere.) They camp there anyway, and both guys have terrible nightmares involving worms and decaying corpses. Or were they nightmares?

Well, things go from bad to worse, as they have a habit of doing. Some sort of unearthly death and decay begins to spread out from the Ozarks. The army and a horde of scientists seem powerless to stop it. We’ll see what a couple of good old boys with a tractor, some barrels of kerosene, and a few cases of dynamite can do, by golly!

All kidding aside, this is an absolutely terrific story. It’s considered part of the Cthulhu Mythos, but that connection is pretty tenuous. Prout’s style is definitely Lovecraft-inspired, but his prose isn’t as dense as Lovecraft’s and there’s considerably more dialogue and action. Nor do his protagonists sit around and stare at the scary stuff until they go insane. Like Robert E. Howard’s heroes in his Mythos stories, Art and Fred may gaze in horror at first, but then they haul off and kick some Elder God ass.

If you want to read this story, you can find a PDF of that issue on the Luminist Archives, and it’s probably available on various other sites, as well. I really enjoyed “The House of the Worm”, and I’m going to see if I can find Mearle Prout’s other stories.

UPDATE: Thanks to Deuce Richardson for pointing out that "The House of the Worm" can also be found in TALES OF THE LOVECRAFT MYTHOS, edited by Robert M. Price, pictured above, which is available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions on Amazon.

Review: Mort Künstler: Covered, Volume 1 - Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, eds.

The men’s adventure magazines are very well remembered for their great covers, and for my money, no artist was ever better at painting those covers than Mort Künstler, who produced scores of them, usually signing his own name to them but occasionally using the pseudonym Emmett Kaye. Künstler’s absolute mastery of the genre is amply demonstrated in MORT KÜNSTLER: COVERED, VOLUME 1, the latest beautiful volume from the Men’s Adventure Library and #new texture.

Editors Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle lead off with a lengthy, informative, and very entertaining interview with Künstler before diving into the meat of the book, more than 100 full-page, full-color reproductions of covers Künstler did for various men’s adventure magazines, mostly FOR MEN ONLY but other magazines, too. These are just gorgeous and prove that Künstler could paint almost any kind of action and adventure scene, from war to Western, from jungle thrills and man against nature to hardboiled crime. Interspersed with these covers are sidebars about the history of the men’s adventure genre and background about each of the magazines featured.

I’ve mentioned before how I used to see those magazines on the racks at the drugstores and grocery stores where I bought comic books and paperbacks, and I always wanted to buy some of them. I was especially drawn to FOR MEN ONLY for some reason, so I’m very happy to see it featured in this volume. In looking through the covers Künstler did in the late Sixties, some of them looked familiar to me, but I honestly don’t know if I was actually recalling them from those days or if nostalgia was just kicking in. I do know that I love looking at them now and remembering those times.

For what it’s worth, I never bought an issue of FOR MEN ONLY or any of those magazines until I was in college in the Seventies, and by that time, they were a mere shadow of what they had been in earlier days. I was an expert at smuggling paperbacks with racy covers into my house, but a full-sized magazine was more of a challenge than I wanted to take on.

But I digress, as I often do. MORT KÜNSTLER: COVERED, VOLUME 1 is a terrific book, and if you’re interested in men’s adventure magazines or just in great artwork, I give it a very high recommendation. The best way to buy it is directly from Bob Deis. The softcover edition and the deluxe hardcover edition are both available. You can get them on Amazon as well. Wherever you buy them, you’re getting some great artwork, I can guarantee that.