Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, February 1937

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. Although there’s no cover credit on the TOC page and it’s unattributed on the Fictionmags Index, I suspect it’s the work of Arthur Mitchell. It looks like one of his paintings, and he did a lot of covers for ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE during this period.

The lead novella, “Gun Smoke on the Pecos”, is the third and final story in the Roaming Reynolds series by Charles M. Martin. I haven’t read the first one, but I read the second one a while back and liked it fairly well. In this story, Roaming Reynolds and Texas Joe, a pair of drifting cowboys/gunfighters/adventurers, return to their home country in West Texas and immediately find themselves mixed up in a range war. The plot is very much by-the-numbers, right down to the rancher the boys are working for having a beautiful daughter, and Martin’s heavy-handed pulp cowboy lingo and narrative style wear thin pretty quickly. If I’m being honest, and I try to be here, this is a rather mediocre story. And yet . . . the numerous action scenes work really well, the setting rings true, and Martin does a good job of playing up the epic, mythological clashes between Roaming Reynolds and the evil gunfighter on the other side. When they face off at the end, I could hear Ennio Morricone music welling up inside my head. So this novella has that going for it, anyway, and ultimately, that was enough for me, but you might feel differently.

Harry F. Olmsted is one of my favorite Western pulp authors. His story “Headboard Tally” in this issue packs quite a bit of plot in a few thousand words. It’s a revenge yarn, as a cowboy tries to track down the four men responsible for lynching his brother, but as it opens, he’s already killed three of the four and doesn’t know the identity of the final man. He finds out in what turns out to be a pretty far-fetched coincidence, but Olmsted writes well enough I’ll cut him that much slack. For a story that’s mostly bleak and dark, this one turns out to have a heartwarming element to it, as well. It worked for me, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

James P. Olsen, who also wrote a lot for the pulps as James A. Lawson, was a consistently good author, with many stories that tend toward over-the-top action. For that reason, “Malachi Murphy—Cowboy” is something of an oddity among Olsen’s work in that it’s a quiet little slice-of-life story about an old cowboy spending the winter at an isolated high country line camp. Not much happens, but it’s well-written and the title character is an interesting one.

I’ve read quite a few stories over the years by Hapsburg Liebe, real name Charles Haven Liebe. While his work is usually enjoyable, I’ve never considered myself a fan of his stories. “Bullet” is about a teenage boy whose father is an outlaw. When Bullet’s pa and another owlhoot rob a bank and are caught, it’s up to Bullet to save them from being lynched. This is a well-written, cleverly plotted story, one of the best from Liebe that I’ve read.

Darrell Jordan is best remembered for almost a hundred stories he wrote for the aviation and air war pulps, but he also turned out a few detective and Western yarns, including the novelette “Range War Nemesis” in this issue. The protagonist, young cowboy Brad Bannon, wants to repay the man who grubstaked his father twenty years earlier, but that effort lands Brad in the middle of a range war, and the fact that he’s a dead ringer for a notorious gunman complicates the issue. This isn’t a bad story and there are some nice action scenes, but the plot is pretty muddled and hard to keep up with. I don’t recall ever reading anything by Jordan before. I ought to try one of his aviation stories.

Sam H. Nickels wrote the long-running Hungry and Rusty series in WILD WEST WEEKLY as well as a lot of stand-alone stories under his own name and various house-names. His stories appeared outside of the pages of WILD WEST WEEKLY from time to time, too, as in this issue with “When the Sheriff Lied”. This is a pretty good action yarn with a protagonist who pretends to be an outlaw and winds up saving a lawman’s life. The reason behind the deception isn’t very surprising, but the story works effectively.

Ralph Condon was a life-long newspaperman who wrote several dozen stories for various Western pulps in the Thirties and Forties. “Red Trail” is about a cowboy and his grizzled old sidekick trying to track down a herd of stolen horses. It’s almost all action and fairly well-written, nothing special but entertaining enough.

There’s also a story by S. Omar Barker in his Boosty Peckleberry series, and that’s another one I don’t read. Just not a fan of humorous tall tales, I guess.

Overall, this is probably the weakest issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE I’ve read, with most of the stories falling into the readable but unmemorable range. The ones by Olmsted and Olsen are the best, but I wouldn’t put either in the top rank of those authors’ work. I believe I’ve now read all the issues of ALL WESTERN that I own and I probably won’t seek out any more.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Team Zero - Chuck Dixon

Some of the first comic books I remember reading are an issue of OUR ARMY AT WAR that I read at a cousin’s house and an issue of G.I. COMBAT I bought at Tompkins’ Drug Store when it was on Main Street in an old wooden building that’s now well over a hundred years old and still there. [It's now a very good burger joint.] The drug store is long gone, though, along with its soda fountain and spinner rack of funny books. However, I digress. My point is that I’ve been a fan of war comics for almost fifty years [more than sixty years now, good grief], so it’s not surprising that I enjoyed a recent trade paperback from DC/Wildstorm reprinting their Team Zero mini-series from a couple of years ago.

When Image Comics first came on the scene in the mid-Nineties, I read quite a few of the titles in their Wildstorm imprint, which is now part of DC, of course. My favorite was DEATHBLOW, and I also liked a character called Grifter who appeared in their WILDC.A.T.S. title. Both Deathblow and Grifter appear in the World War II yarn TEAM ZERO . . . but not the same Deathblow and Grifter. No superheroics here. This is a straight-out war story following a specially-assembled team of commandos dropped far behind enemy lines in the waning days of the war to snatch up the German rocket scientists at Peenemunde before the Soviet army can get its hands on them. It’s exactly the sort of assignment that in another comics era would have been given to Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos (and what a great comic book that was for a lot of years). The soldiers recruited for this mission are given code-names that would later figure prominently in the Wildstorm Universe – Deathblow, Grifter, Backlash, Claymore, etc. – but with one exception, they’re not the same characters. That tenuous connection to what comes later chronologically isn’t really important to the reader’s enjoyment of this story; TEAM ZERO can be read as a complete stand-alone.

It’s written by Chuck Dixon, who was one of my favorite comics authors during the Nineties with his work on AIRBOY and THE PUNISHER. There’s plenty of action in the story, a few plot twists, and plenty of blood ’n’ guts, as you’d expect from a war comic. I enjoyed it a lot and highly recommend it to any comics fans out there.

(This post, which appeared originally on June 10, 2008, is a good example of how the world is an odd place, and the Internet has made it even more so. When I wrote this review, I was just a long-time fan of Chuck Dixon's work. These days, I consider him a good friend, and I've even been privileged to edit a few novels in his very popular Levon Cade series. The trade paperback edition of TEAM ZERO that I read back in 2008 is out of print, but e-book editions of the six comic book stories it collects are available on Amazon and I still highly recommend them if you're a fan of gritty, well-written war yarns.)

Review: The Gun Man Jackson Swagger - Stephen Hunter

These days, I’m always a little leery when a big name in some other genre decides to write a Western. It’s not like the old pulp and paperback days when writers moved back and forth between genres all the time. On the one hand, any very successful author who writes a Western almost has to have a genuine fondness for them. You can bet the publishers aren’t clamoring for Westerns from their big-name thriller writers. On the other hand, whether they really like Westerns or not, that doesn’t mean they’re suited to write them. Maybe that’s just a skill set they don’t have.

But if any modern-day thriller author seems cut out to write a Western, it would be Stephen Hunter, who has made a career out of writing books about laconic heroes who are capable of great violence, usually with guns. And that’s just what he’s done in THE GUN MAN JACKSON SWAGGER.

This novel goes back another generation in the Swagger family, the fictional clan that has starred in most of his novels over the years. It’s 1897, and a grizzled old cowboy who just calls himself Jack shows up at the Crazy R ranch in southern Arizona, not far from the Mexican border. The owner of the spread, Colonel Callahan, is no more honest than he has to be, and he employs a group of hired gunmen to take care of any dirty work benefiting the ranch or the railroad that’s building a line through the region. The colonel and the railroad are in cahoots, and he also has a connection with a corrupt Federale officer below the border. Once Jack demonstrates his skill at handling a rifle, the colonel hires him, but Jack’s not really looking for a job. He has another reason for coming to the Crazy R.

And you’ll figure out what that reason is pretty easily as Jack navigates through all the danger and treachery surrounding him. I mean, we know who he really is, it’s right there in the title. But it’s still very entertaining to watch him go about it, manipulating people and events to uncover the information he needs and then taking action to achieve his ends. Nobody these days writes as well about guns and gunfights as Hunter, and Jack is a very sympathetic protagonist, managing the neat trick of being mythic and realistic at the same time.

My only real complaint is that Hunter is maybe just a little too leisurely in getting where he’s going. The best way I can think of to put this is to say that THE GUN MAN JACKSON SWAGGER is probably around 70,000 words long (actually a little on the short side for a New York-published hardback by a big name), while Ben Haas would have written the exact same story at about 50,000 words. It’s easier to forgive such an ambling pace when an author writes as well as Hunter does.

I’m also not that fond of the ending, but hey, that’s just me.

I suspect this may be a one-and-done for Hunter when it comes to writing Westerns, but I could be wrong about that. I’d certainly be willing to read more if he ever decides to write them. I think he loves and respects the Western, and overall he does a very good job, with some top-notch action scenes and great dialogue. I give THE GUN MAN JACKSON SWAGGER a high recommendation. It’s available on Amazon in e-book and hardcover editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dare-Devil Aces, July 1937

Man, Frederick Blakeslee could really pack a lot into an air-war pulp cover! Nine planes (assuming I didn't miss any), plus a bunch of ack-ack bursts in the air and bombs going off on the ground. I think this scene does a great job of conveying the controlled chaos of aerial combat in World War I. Inside, this issue features three authors I associate more with Westerns: Orlando Rigoni, Claude Rister, and William O'Sullivan. Also on hand are aviation pulp stalwarts Robert Sidney Bowen and Darrell Jordan, house-names William Hartley and Larry Jones, and Fred Flabb, which I suspect is this little-published author's real name, because it doesn't sound like what you'd come up with as a pseudonym.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, May 1947

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat ragged copy in the scan. The cover is by Sam Cherry, as usual, and I like it, also as usual.

Ah, Tombstone and Speedy! A ghost story seems perfect for this pair of bumbling but surprisingly astute range detectives, and the novella “Ghost of the Tumbling K” brings them to the title ranch on their latest assignment for the Cattlemen’s Protective Association. However, they don’t know why they’re there, because the rancher who sent for them lies seriously wounded and unconscious. Tombstone and Speedy fetch help for the injured man and, in the process, discover that the ranch is supposed to be haunted. Since they don’t know why they were summoned, they decide to stay there and keep an eye on the place, which, of course, leads to a ghostly encounter.

Author W.C. Tuttle packs a lot of plot into his yarn, as he always does with the Tombstone and Speedy stories. Most of it revolves around the hidden loot of a mysterious outlaw known as the Yellow Mask, who is believed to have died several years earlier. But is he really dead? If he is, could it be his spirit haunting the Tumbling K? Tombstone and Speedy untangle the whole thing, of course, with plenty of action and humorous banter along the way. These stories are pretty formulaic, but they sure are entertaining.

“Indian Slap” is by Barry Scobee, the only pulp Western author with a mountain named after him. Scobee’s work is hit-or-miss for me but mostly good, and I enjoyed this tale about a white boy who was a captive of the Comanches trying to fit back in among a community of settlers. Scobee does a good job with the Central Texas setting, too.

“West of Windigo” is a novelette by Norrell Gregory. I don’t recall if I’ve read anything by Gregory before, but I liked this story of a railroad detective trying to find out who’s been stealing construction supplies, smuggling whiskey to the Indians, and generally trying to stir up trouble on a spur line that’s being built. Gregory moves things along nicely. This would have made a good B-Western movie in the Forties or Fifties.

“Badmen Are Plumb Foolish” is by Donald Bayne Hobart, a very prolific pulpster whose work I’ve come to enjoy. This story is about a gambler framed for a murder he didn’t commit, and despite its short length, maybe 2500 words, Hobart manages to work in a train robbery and a plot twist, too. This is a nice, enjoyable yarn by a real pro.

“Sheriff” by William O’Sullivan uses the “old lawman whose time has passed” plot, and not surprisingly, the old badge-toter has some life left in him after all, as an election campaign against his young whippersnapper deputy proves. This isn’t a memorable story at all, but it’s well-written and pleasant enough.

I’m convinced that Donald Bayne Hobart is also the author of “Bait for a Range-War Gallows”, even though it was published under the house-name Jackson Cole. The style reads very much like Hobart’s work. This is a range war story, as you probably guessed from the title, but it starts with a very nice twist: the range war is already over when the story begins. And everybody who supported the losing side is now considered an outlaw, including young cowboy Dake Latimer, who is holed up in an old adobe hut trying to fight off a horde of gunmen led by his mortal enemy who hates him because Latimer once stopped the lowdown hombre from raping a young woman. Hobart drops the reader down right in the middle of the action, which is something I always enjoy. Latimer gets out of that scrape but almost immediately finds himself in another one with a wounded youngster’s life on the line. Hobart packs a lot into this story and the action never slows down for more than a few paragraphs. This is just a superb Western yarn, one of the best I’ve read recently.

The protagonist of Nels Leroy Jorgensen’s novelette “Longrider Gun-Law” is also a good-guy owlhoot, the son of an Arizona lawman. He’s been below the border in Mexico rustling cattle and horses as part of a gang of American outlaws, but when the group disbands, he heads home to find the area being plagued by a series of stagecoach robberies. The plot developments in this one are pretty predictable, but Jorgensen’s tough prose makes it entertaining reading. Jorgensen’s career started in the early Twenties with detective and adventure yarns. He was a regular contributor to BLACK MASK during that pulp’s early glory days and eventually became a prolific Western pulpster, as well. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by him.

There’s also an animal story by Harold F. Cruickshank in this issue, but I didn’t even try to read it. I loved wildlife yarns when I was a kid, but they just don’t work for me anymore.

Other than that, every story in this issue is good and I think it’s a fine issue overall. Although, as usual when there’s not a Navajo Tom Raine story, I missed that series.

To end on a more serious note that usual, I’ve realized that on several occasions recently, I’ve read and reviewed books and pulps that I previously read and reviewed several years ago, with absolutely no memory of reading and reviewing them before. At my age, this is a mite worrisome. If I have any doubts about a book or a pulp, I try to remember to search the blog and see if I’ve already covered it. But the key phrase there is “try to remember” because that’s where the problem lies, isn’t it? If any rate, if you see such duplication, it’s not intentional, and don’t hesitate to bring it to my attention. It’s helpful for me to know about such things.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Where is Janice Gantry? - John D. MacDonald

It takes me a long time to read a book these days, a combination of being really busy, not having much time to read, and a rather scattershot attention span. But even though it took me about a week, I read John D. MacDonald’s novel WHERE IS JANICE GANTRY? and enjoyed it quite a bit.

I liked the narrator/hero in this one, Sam Brice, a former pro football player and insurance appraiser who lives in a small town on the west coast of Florida. Trouble comes into his life in the form of a young acquaintance of his who has escaped from prison and needs his help. Somewhat against his better judgment, Sam goes along with the request, and that sets in motion a series of violent events that include the disappearance of his former girlfriend, the Janice Gantry of the title.

The plot’s a little thin and probably won’t surprise many readers, but MacDonald’s ability as a pure storyteller is clearly in evidence here, pulling the reader along. I don’t doubt that under normal circumstances I would have finished this book a lot faster than I did, because when I did get a chance to read I got caught up in it and was really flipping the pages. The last fifty pages or so are very suspenseful. Well worth reading, I say.

(Wait a minute. This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on February 18, 2008, so that means I've been complaining about how long it takes me to read a book for at least 18 years now. Dang! I think I just need to get used to it. I'm a long-time fan of John D. MacDonald, and I plan to read the books of his that I've never gotten around to. Problem is, many of them I don't recall if I've read them or not. Oh, well, even rereads are worthwhile with JDM. This one is still in print and is available in e-book and paperback editions on Amazon.)

Review: Texas Land Grab - Johnny Nelson (Gordon Clive Bleeck?)

During the Seventies, Leisure Books in the United States reprinted several Western novels originally published in Australia by Cleveland Publishing, including one of the Larry and Stretch novels by Leonard F. Meares writing as Marshall Grover and several double volumes of Benedict and Brazos novels by Paul Wheelahan writing as E. Jefferson Clay. My friend Anders Nilsson, who is doing some excellent bibliographic work regarding Australian Westerns, tipped me off to the existence of another American edition of an Australian Western I’d never come across: TEXAS LAND GRAB, published under the house-name Johnny Nelson. The most likely author of this one, according to Anders, is Gordon Clive Bleeck, a very prolific Australian writer who turned out more than 400 novels in a variety of genres under many different pseudonyms and house-names. I was curious enough to find a copy of TEXAS LAND GRAB and read it.

The protagonist of this yarn is Chad Walford, a cowboy who has homesteaded some land to start his own ranch. Unfortunately, he finds himself in the middle of a three-cornered range war involving a cattle baron and a group of sodbusters who have moved in and established a new town. In a nice twist, the cattle baron and the leader of the farmers join forces against Chad, whose only allies are a hotheaded young gunfighter and a wily, half-Apache old-timer. Also involved in the story are a long-winded judge and his beautiful niece.

There are some good action scenes in this novel, including a stampede that threatens to wipe out the sodbuster town. Chad is a stalwart protagonist, if a little bit bland, and the judge and the old half-breed are colorful, well-done supporting characters. The villains are suitably despicable. Overall, TEXAS LAND GRAB is nothing we haven’t seen many times before, but it’s put together reasonably well and is a fast, entertaining read if you’re a fan of traditional Westerns like I am. There are only a few instances of words and phrasing not quite ringing true to indicate that the author was Australian, not American.

Given Leisure’s history, I’ve always figured they pirated the Australian Westerns they published, and that may well be true. The American edition gives a 1979 copyright date for the Cleveland edition, but Anders believes TEXAS LAND GRAB was published originally in the mid-Sixties, based on its cover price. I’m perfectly willing to accept that because Anders knows more about this stuff than probably anybody else in the world. And I’m glad he brought this one to my attention. I had a good time reading it, and a short, enjoyable Western yarn was just what I needed right now.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1951

The cover by Leo Morey on this issue of SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY caught my eye as I was looking through the Fictionmags Index. There's a decent group of writers inside this issue as well: Arthur C. Clarke, James Blish, Frederik Pohl (writing as James MacCreigh), James E. Gunn (writing as Edwin James), Larry T. Shaw (who was my editor, officially, for one issue of MSMM, although I never had any contact with him whatsoever), Morton Klass, and Joe Kennedy (writing as Joquel Kennedy). I'm not familiar with Klass and Kennedy, but I've read and enjoyed work by all the others. This issue is available at the Internet Archive, along with other issues of SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, July 1946

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my rather tattered copy in the scan, with a fine action cover painted by Sam Cherry.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue is by A. Leslie Scott writing under the Jackson Cole house-name, as is obvious from the vivid descriptions right from the start. The Lucky Hammer of the title is the name of a silver mine in Texas’s Big Bend region, so-called because the two old prospectors who discover the vein also find an ancient Aztec carving of a snake that’s shaped in the form of a hammer. Oh, and the hammer just happens to be lying next to the body of a dead man who appears to have guzzled down a drink from a poisoned waterhole.

Naturally, the silver strike results in the founding of a boomtown, and a boomtown always brings owlhoots, and eventually things get so lawless in the area that a call for help goes out to the Texas Rangers. And who’s going to respond to that call? I think we all know the answer to that question.

“The Lucky Hammer” is a dandy Jim Hatfield yarn full of the things that make Leslie Scott’s stories so enjoyable: a historical background, a terrible sandstorm on the desert, underground scenes in a mine, exploding dynamite, a missing archeologist, rustlers, smugglers, and gunfights galore. The big twist in the plot is fairly obvious, but to be honest, I would have felt cheated if it hadn’t been there. Sure, I knew it was coming, but I liked it anyway. Actually, there’s nothing in this novel that we haven’t seen in numerous other Hatfield novels by Scott, but he puts the various elements together so well, I still greatly enjoy reading them. He was at the top of his game in these mid-Forties Hatfield novels.

Bennie Gardner, who wrote as Gunnison Steele, turned out some excellent novels for the Thrilling Group Western character pulps, but he was also very prolific when it comes to short-short stand-alone stories. “Cold Creek Killer” in this issue is probably about 1500 words long, but in those words Gardner packs rustling, murder, and a canny sheriff bringing a killer to justice. The twist ending to this one is a little weak, I thought, but Gardner’s fast-moving prose still makes it fun to read.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t make it very far in Ben Frank’s “Doc Swap’s Powder Puff”. I just don’t like this series. I’m not sure why. The author, whose real name was Frank Bennett, puts words together well enough, but the Doc Swap stories just don’t work for me.

On the other hand, I really like the Long Sam Littlejohn stories by Lee Bond, and they’re every bit as formulaic as the Doc Swap yarns. In “Long Sam Collects a Bounty”, the good-guy outlaw is trying to corral a notorious outlaw and collect a reward, when he’s usually the one who’s the quarry in a situation like that. Naturally, his long-time nemesis, Deputy U.S. Marshal Joe Fry, shows up, too. Quite a few of the Long Sam stories, like this one, take place in the Big Thicket in East Texas, and that makes for a nice change-of-pace. I wish Bond had done a little more with the character, but I still enjoy the series and am always glad to read another one.

And the same holds true for most issues of TEXAS RANGERS. Even with Doc Swap and a slightly below-average Gunnison Steele story, this one is well worth reading if you have a copy on your shelves.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Wounded and the Slain - David Goodis

Some critics have said that David Goodis’s novels read like book-length suicide notes. That’s certainly an apt description of THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN, originally published by Gold Medal in 1955 and recently reprinted by Hard Case Crime [in 2007]. This one even opens with the protagonist, James Bevan, contemplating doing away with himself, even though he’s on vacation at a luxurious Jamaican resort with his beautiful young wife. Bevan’s wife is his problem, though, since their marriage is one of the most corrosive you’re likely to encounter in fiction. Like other Goodis characters, Bevan seeks refuge from that unhappiness in booze, which leads him into an encounter with violence and death.

Then, yep, you guessed it, Things Get Worse.

THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN is somewhat unusual among Goodis’s novels, in that it takes place in Jamaica rather than Philadelphia or some other large American city. It veers away from the noir stereotype in another way as well, with many of the scenes taking place in hot, bright sunshine rather than dark alleyways. The interior of James Bevan’s mind is plenty dark on its own, though, and ultimately the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, are just as mean as those of Philadelphia or New York. The motivations of some of the characters may seem a little clichéd today, but Goodis’s writing still makes them ring true. The headlong pace carries the reader along to a very satisfying conclusion. All in all, and not surprisingly, this is an excellent novel and comes with a high recommendation from me.

(This post originally appeared on June 20, 2007. The Hard Case Crime reprint mentioned above is out of print, and you can actually find copies of the original Gold Medal edition for about half the price of the HCC edition. Either way, this book is well worth reading. Goodis, however, remains one of those authors I like a lot and want to read more of, but I don't seem to get around to it.)