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.

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.

Review: The Vampire Master - Edmond Hamilton

I’m a long-time fan of Edmond Hamilton’s science fiction, and I do mean long-time since I was reading the paperback reprints of his Captain Future novels almost sixty years ago. But I knew he wrote some horror stories as well, and since I’m trying to read a little horror fiction this month, I opened my copy of THE VAMPIRE MASTER AND OTHER TALES OF HORROR to read the title yarn, the novel-length “The Vampire Master”, which was serialized in WEIRD TALES from October 1933 to January 1934 under the pseudonym Hugh Davidson.

“The Vampire Master” is an occult detective story, with the protagonist being Doctor John Dale, a noted investigator into the eerie and strange. The narrator is his secretary and assistant Harley Owens. Doctor Dale is headquartered in New York City, and as the story opens, he and Owens are being visited by a physician from a town in upstate New York, in the Hudson River valley, concerning a woman who has recently died from a strange malady resembling extreme anemia. Now the woman’s daughter seems to have come down with the same condition. Why, it’s almost like something is draining the blood from their bodies!

Well, we all know where this is going. Doctor Dale doesn’t beat around the bush. A vampire is to blame for what’s happening, and before you know it, they’re all off to the small town to wage war against the evil of vampirism.

Please don’t mistake those comments for snark. Is “The Vampire Master” a very traditional story? Yes, it is. Every bit of vampire lore in it comes straight from DRACULA, both the book and the movie, the latter of which had come out only two years earlier. Of course, Hamilton was influenced by it. This is a very straightforward tale, and like a traditional Western, it rises or falls depending on how well the author makes use of those familiar elements.

I’m happy to report that for the most part, Hamilton does a pretty good job. As the menace of the vampires widens and claims more and more victims, there are some genuinely creepy scenes. The Vampire Master, who has returned to the Hudson River valley after being run out two hundred years earlier, is a suitably despicable villain. There are no sympathetic vampires here. They’re all thoroughly evil, although some through no fault of their own.

There are two flaws in this story, starting with the fact that it’s too long. Stretching the plot out to novel length means that events start to get a little repetitious before it’s over. And the second problem is that for a famous occult detective, Doctor John Dale is strangely ineffective. His plans to combat the vampires never work and he and his allies suffer defeat after defeat until they finally triumph. Maybe Hamilton was just trying to show how dangerous the Vampire Master is, but I kept thinking, dang, Jules de Grandin would have wrapped this up a lot quicker, before quite so many people died.

And speaking of Jules de Grandin, the issue of WEIRD TALES in which the first installment of the serialized version appears sports one of the most iconic, instantly recognizable covers in pulp history, the Bat-Woman by Margaret Brundage. Also in that issue are a Conan story by Robert E. Howard (“The Pool of the Black One”), a Jules de Grandin story by Seabury Quinn (“The Mansion of Unholy Magic”), stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Jack Williamson, and Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and a Cthulhu Mythos story by an author I’d never heard of, Merle Prout. Yep, just another day at the newsstand for WEIRD TALES.

Don’t let my mild criticism scare you off from reading “The Vampire Master”. Hamilton’s fast-moving prose is a pleasure to read, as always, and as I mentioned, there are some really nice creepy scenes and a sense of gathering doom. He wrote another story featuring Doctor John Dale, “The House of the Evil Eye”, and I intend to read it before the month is over. In the meantime, the collection THE VAMPIRE MASTER AND OTHER TALES OF HORROR, published by Haffner Press, seems to be out of print, but used copies can be found for a reasonable price. If you want an e-book edition of “The Vampire Master” without the other stories, that can be had on Amazon.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Street & Smith's Complete Stories, July 15, 1932

I don't know what's going on in this cover by Edgar F. Wittmack, and I'm not sure I want to know. But I know there are some good authors in this issue of STREET & SMITH'S COMPLETE STORIES, including T.T. Flynn, a White Wolf story by Frederick C. Davis, writing under the name of the series creator Hal Dunning, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, inconsistent but often very good, C.S. Montanye, likewise, and an author unknown to me, Jack Hulick. Unusual it may be, but that cover is certainly eye-catching, and Flynn and Davis are enough to make an issue worthwhile by themselves.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Giant Western, June 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. I don’t know who did the cover, but I’m not fond of it. It seems too drab and murky to me. But in this case, since the stories inside looked promising, I didn’t really care that much about the cover. It was just good to get a chance to read a Western pulp again after being away from them for a while.

I’m a long-time fan of William Hopson, although I’ve always found his work inconsistent. He wrote some great books, some not very good ones, and a lot in between that were still entertaining. The lead novel in this issue of GIANT WESTERN is one of those rare cases where a pulp novel actually is novel-length. And in fact, “Cow Thief Empire” was published as a hardback novel by Arcadia House, also in 1953. It might have been expanded some for book publication, but my hunch is that it wasn’t, at least not in any significant way. The pulp version is long enough to have been an Arcadia House Western.

But what is it about, you ask? Stony Burns, a rancher who has a spread in Indian Territory on land leased from the Indians, rides down into the Texas Panhandle to the ranch where his late father worked. When he got word of his father’s death, Stony decided to visit the ranch and put up a gravestone. But when he gets there, he immediately clashes with the beautiful young woman who inherited the ranch and winds up making an enemy out of the ranch manager, as well. The stove-up old cowboy who serves as the ranch cook has a beautiful daughter, too, and before you know it, we have a tension-filled romantic rectangle that results in several brutal fistfights.

This is far from being a Western romance, though. Before you know it, a Comanche war party jumps the reservation and follows the buffalo south through the Panhandle, and “Cow Thief Empire” turns into an Indian fighting yarn, with Stony Burns and the young woman who owns the ranch holed up in an isolated line shack, trying to survive a blizzard and an attack by that war party. Up until then, Stony has hated the girl, but now he sees her in a new light.

But wait, the cook’s daughter is captured by the Comanches, and Stony has go after her, joining up with a cavalry patrol to do so, and “Cow Thief Empire” becomes a cavalry vs. the Indians story. If that’s not enough, an army of rustlers descends on the Panhandle after the Indian threat is dealt with, and those rustlers are led by an old enemy of Stony’s, which makes “Cow Thief Empire” (finally, the title fits) a Save the Ranch tale, with some Texas Ranger action thrown in to sweeten the pot.

Whew! You get the idea. “Cow Thief Empire” has the same sort of epic sweep and kitchen sink plotting as TO TAME A LAND, my favorite Louis L’Amour novel. L’Amour was a better writer overall than Hopson, and Hopson’s Texas geography is a little shaky at times, but although I wasn’t sure at first, I wound up really enjoying “Cow Thief Empire”. I love big, sprawling Westerns like this, and Hopson keeps things moving along briskly. The characters are interesting, and they actually evolve over the course of the story. The protagonist, Stony Burns, is pretty unlikable at the start. In fact, he’s downright rotten, but he grows into a sympathetic hero. This isn’t the best novel I’ve read by William Hopson, but it’s right up there. (My two favorites by him, for what it’s worth, are THE RANGE CAT and GUNFIGHTER’S PAY, and I go back and forth on which one is better.)

Thomas Calvert McClary published hundreds of Western, detective, and adventure stories in the pulps and digests in a long career that lasted from the early Thirties to the mid-Sixties. His story in this issue, “Frontier Post”, published under the name T.C. McClary, is a cavalry yarn, as you might guess from the title. The captain in command of the post has to deal not only with a horde of Blackfeet on the warpath but also an overbearing Senator on an inspection tour of the West. It’s not a bad story, but the writing isn’t very good and I struggled a little to get through it. I haven’t read a lot by McClary, but I think this is the weakest story of his I’ve encountered.

I don’t know much about Marc Miller. “A Bride Comes to Dry Gulch” was his first published story, and he went on to do about a dozen more Western and detective stories for various pulps. This is a mail order bride story, as you can guess from the title, and it’s told in the sort of folksy, humorous, first-person narration that often doesn’t work for me. I actually liked this story better than I expected to, but it’s not really that funny and it comes to a very abrupt ending, as if it’s just the first part of what should have been a longer story.

G. Davisson Lough is one of the pseudonyms of Glenn Dale Lough, a West Virginia writer whose career started in the Western and detective pulps in the mid-Forties, but who is best remembered today as the author of dozens of softcore novels, most of them for lower-rung publishers, under the names Glenn Low and John Furlough. I’ve read several of his novels and enjoyed them. I think “The Damned Die Old”, his novelette in this issue, is the first Western by him that I’ve read. It has an unlikely protagonist, a cowardly misfit who takes on the job of delivering the ex-wife of an outlaw who escaped from prison to a ghost town where the fugitive plans to take his revenge on her. Or does he? There’s also a fortune in hidden loot in play, as well as numerous other hardcases who want to get their hands on it. Lough drops the reader down right in the middle of this complicated plot. He tends to play up basic emotions in his work, so there’s plenty of lust, greed, and brutality in this one, but some admirable traits emerge from the characters as well, even the unlikely ones. The writing is gritty and raw and works very well. This is a terrific story that I thoroughly enjoyed. Lough’s fiction has a distinctive voice, and I really need to read more of it.

I don’t know anything about Fred Delano except that he published a few stories in various Western pulps in the mid-Fifties. “The Glass Ball” in this issue is about a down-on-his-luck rancher who decides to go after the reward on a bank robber because some clever deduction has clued him in on the thief’s identity. It’s an okay story, not at all surprising in its resolution but decently written.

Caddo Cameron, whose real name was Charles Richard Beeler, was a prolific contributor to the Western and general fiction pulps from the mid-Thirties to the early Fifties. His novelette “A Devil on the Cattle Trail” in this issue is his last published story. It’s about a trail drive and a young wrangler who gets a reputation as a hoodoo, or jinx. The actual protagonist is one of the cowboys who sticks up for the youngster. I don’t know anything about Beeler’s background, but I’ve read several of his stories and the air of authenticity about them always strikes me. I suspect that like Walt Coburn, J.E. Grinstead, Chuck Martin, Eugene Cunningham, and others, he worked as a cowboy at some point in his life. This story lacks a dramatic resolution, but it’s a very likable yarn despite that. 

With so much of this issue being taken up by Hopson’s novel, the overall quality sort of has to rise and fall with it, and it’s a good one so I’d say this is a pretty good issue of GIANT WESTERN. The story by Glenn Lough is also excellent and the others are all right, with McClary’s cavalry yarn being the weakest. If you have a copy on your shelves, it’s worth reading.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Hide Hunters - Lewis B. Patten

Unlike most of the Lewis B. Patten novels I’ve read, this one is based on a historical incident, the epic battle between thirty or forty buffalo hunters and hundreds of Comanche, Kiowa, and Southern Cheyenne warriors under the command of Quanah Parker at Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle. I think it’s a rule that every Western author has to write an Adobe Walls book sooner or later. It’s such a good, dramatic story, with the buffalo hunters, including Billy Dixon and a young Bat Masterson, standing off what should have been an overwhelming force of Indians.

In this novel, Patten creates a few fictional characters and gives them reasons to be at Adobe Walls when the attack takes place. Would-be buffalo hunter Jess Burdett rescues beautiful Edith Clinger from her abusive husband, who of course follows them to Adobe Walls bent on reclaiming his wife and having his revenge on Burdett. For some reason, a lot of Patten’s heroes wind up in love with other men’s wives, and that’s the case here. He usually has some sort of violent death conveniently befall the husband, freeing the woman to wind up with the hero, but the resolution isn’t quite so neat in this book.

As always with Patten’s work, there’s a good deal of moral ambiguity, plenty of terse prose, and some hard-nosed action scenes in THE HIDE HUNTERS. He gets the history right and does a fine job of portraying the battle itself, so the reader winds up with a very good blend of fact and fiction. I enjoyed this one enough that I’m tempted to read his Custer book, THE RED SABBATH, another historically-based novel.

(It'll come as no surprise to most of you that I haven't, in fact, read THE RED SABBATH in the years since this post first appeared on October 9, 2009. But I still might someday. There's no reprint of THE HIDE HUNTERS currently available, but used copies are out there in the wild and not too expensive.)

Review: Commando #5603: The Buffer - Brent Towns

A while back I read J.E. Macdonnell’s World War II naval adventure novel THE BUFFER and really enjoyed it. Recently I noticed that an issue of COMMANDO, the British series of digest-sized graphic novels about war, also has an entry called THE BUFFER, and it was written by one of my favorite authors, Brent Towns. Well, you don’t have to hit this old boy over the head. I immediately grabbed the Kindle version of that issue and read it, too.

The characters and story are completely different, of course, no relation to Macdonnell’s novel. In this version, the Buffer is Michael O’Rourke, a chief petty officer on the Australian destroyer Norse. O’Rourke has issues with his temper, and whenever the Norse is in port, he’s constantly getting into fights and thrown into the brig by the MPs. He’s a top-notch sailor, though. When the destroyer encounters a Japanese submarine while patrolling and is sunk, O’Rourke and one other sailor are the only survivors. Other members of the crew would have made it if the sub hadn’t surfaced and killed them all with machine gun fire.

O’Rourke and his companion make it ashore on an island where they’re found by an Australian coastwatcher. A team of Australian commandos come into play, too, because they’re on the island to carry out a vital mission. Unfortunately, O’Rourke’s volatile temper endangers not only that mission but all of their lives. Can he get control of himself long enough to keep from costing them everything?

I’ve said it before, but man, Brent Towns knows how to spin a yarn. The pace in this one is almost non-stop, but in the midst of all that action he also manages to create some compelling characters. The art is by Paolo Ongaro and does a good job of keeping the story rocketing along. THE BUFFER is half naval adventure, half jungle warfare, and Towns and Ongaro capture both very well. I had a great time reading it, and if you’re a fan of fast-moving World War II fiction, I give it a high recommendation.

By the way, while I was there I bought all the other issues of COMMANDO scripted by Towns that I hadn’t already bought and read, so there’ll probably be more of these reviews coming up in the near future.

#437

I just sent novel #437 to my editor. I'm creeping closer to 450. This is only my fifth novel this year, a far cry from the old days but still pretty productive. And I'm already making plans for next year. I may be old, but I still have some pages left in me.

Review: A Crooked Mile - L.D. Whitney

Some years I try to read some horror fiction during October for Halloween, and other years I just ignore it. This year I’m kind of in the mood for some spooky stuff, so when I came across this new novella from L.D. Whitney, I didn’t hesitate to give it a try. I enjoyed the prehistoric adventure novella I read by him a few weeks ago, so I had high hopes for A CROOKED MILE.

Set in the early years of the Twentieth Century, this yarn is narrated by the editor of the weekly newspaper in Wilmarth, Nebraska, a small farming and ranching community. It seems there’s a long-running boundary dispute between the owners of two adjoining homesteads, and one of them has hired a surveyor to try to settle the matter. Now that surveyor has disappeared while out on the plains mapping the boundary, and the local sheriff’s deputy sets out to investigate and try to find the missing man. That investigation leads to some strange happenings, several violent deaths, and an explanation—if you can call it that—that’s downright otherworldly.

This is a really good story. Whitney’s prose has a deliberately Lovecraftian tone to it without being a slavish imitation, and he does a fine job of capturing the feeling of the setting and time period. A CROOKED MILE proves that the windswept plains of Nebraska can be just as creepy as New England. I’d love to see more like this from Whitney, who demonstrates that he’s just as adept at horror as he is at adventure fiction. This story is available in an e-book edition on Amazon, and I give it a high recommendation. It’s a very good start to my horror reading this month.