Saturday, July 09, 2011

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Quick Trigger Western, May 1936

This is another obscure Western pulp, at least to me, but man, what a line-up of authors!  There are only three stories in this issue, listed as novels but probably more like novellas, but the authors are W.C. Tuttle, Eugene Cunningham, and Hugh Pendexter.  All of those are pretty big names in the pulp field.  Tuttle is a long-time favorite of mine, Cunningham has a great reputation and what little I've read of his work has been good, and Pendexter is an old hand from the glory days of ADVENTURE.  I haven't read any of Pendexter's work, but I know his stories are highly regarded.  I'll bet Walker Martin can offer an opinion on them.  The cover of this issue itself is nothing special, but I'll bet the contents are pretty darned good.  (And judging by the listing in the Fictionmags Index, they're not reprints, either.)

3 comments:

Walker Martin said...

Hugh Pendexter is another example of a writer being unjustly forgotten. During the 1920's he was one of ADVENTURE's best writers of westerns. Many of his novels dealt with the early days of America, especially the 1600's through the 1800's and stressed the conflict between France, England, and the settlers.

He also was an expert at portraying the Indians in a sympathetic manner. His novels and stories often had a young man as the hero with a Indian friend or sidekick. Just about all his novels were based on fact and history.

Though he published stories in many different magazines, ADVENTURE was his main market and I once counted close to 40 serials and complete novels during the period that the magazine was publishing two or three issues each month. Most, if not all of these novels were reprinted in hardcover and many are available on abebooks.com.

If you like historical adventure base on true events, then you will like Hugh Pendexter. It was writers like Pendexter that convinced me it was worthwhile to try and collect extensive runs of ADVENTURE and other pulps.

Cowboy Yogi said...

A writer who focused on the 1600's through the 1800's? Sounds like I should start looking for some Hugh Pendexter stories.

James Reasoner said...

Amazon has a free e-book edition of Pendexter's novel A VIRGINIA SCOUT for anyone with a Kindle who wants to sample his work. I picked it up the other day but don't know when I'll get around to reading it.