Saturday, April 02, 2011

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, Fall 1940

This is the first issue of this pulp, which was notable later on for being the home of a lengthy series of novelettes by W.C. Tuttle about Tombstone and Speedy, a pair of not-so-bright range detectives (the slapstick version of Hashknife and Sleepy, Tuttle's somewhat more serious range detectives).  There's a good lineup of authors in this first issue, including Chuck Martin, Tom Curry, William Hopson, and C. William Harrison.  The author of the lead novel, Larry A. Harris, shows up frequently in Western pulps published by Ned Pines, but I've always found his work pretty undistinguished.  I don't know who did the artwork on the cover, but I like it, nice sense of danger and action to it.
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6 comments:

Paul Bishop said...

Exciting Western always had those bright yellow covres that worked so well . . .

9:22 AM, April 02, 2011
Ron Scheer said...

Good one, James. The treatment of the hands in the illustration is subtle and nice. How the girl seems to be hanging by a rope from a ledge certainly cries out for an explanation. Thanks.

12:12 PM, April 02, 2011
Anonymous said...

Paul has rightly mentioned those bright yellow covers that seemed so popular with the western pulp publishers. In the UK, the Amalgamated Press's Western Library series of the early 1950s also quickly adopted yellow backgrounds and red titling. But just last month one of my large-print publishers complained that though she had managed to secure some better artwork for her westerns, the artist's cowboys "have always got a yellow background and are mustached, which is a bit of a worry." I sent back this explanation: "Yellow backgrounds and skies are something of a tradition on western covers. I can't think why. It seems to date back to Dime Western pulp days in the 1940s. So Michael isn't alone there. I suspect the abundance of mustaches results from the research material he finds. Most photographs from the period show that nearly all the gents were bewhiskered. The clean-shaven western hero has his roots in 1930s Hollywood apparently."

3:05 PM, April 02, 2011
Walker Martin said...

The cover probably was done by one of the Rozen brothers. George and Jerome Rozen did alot of covers that look like the hero and girl on this issue.

5:59 PM, April 02, 2011
Tom Roberts said...

James,

The cover would be by George Rozen, of Shadow cover fame.

8:36 AM, April 04, 2011
James Reasoner said...

Thanks for the ID, Tom.

9:17 AM, April 04, 2011

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