Saturday, January 28, 2012

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Big-Book Western, April 1940

This is another Popular Publications pulp, as you might guess by the yellow background and the red banner along the top of the cover. Popular really loved yellow and red. At this stage of BIG-BOOK WESTERN's existence, Ed Earl Repp is in nearly every issue. Of course, there's really no way to know who actually wrote those stories published under Repp's name, since he's known to have used several ghosts. The other stories are by Tom Roan, John G. Pearsol (both Popular Publications regulars), Larry A. Harris (who wrote for nearly all the Western pulp publishers), and a couple of authors I'm not familiar with, I.L. Thompson and Jack Bloodhart, which sounds like a pseudonym to me but quite possibly isn't. I like this cover because it continues the tradition that nearly every woman in the Old West had red hair and was handy with a shootin' iron.

3 comments:

Ron Scheer said...

Thanks, James. Another good one.

Anonymous said...

Boothill's Broken Battle Legion!

Man, that title packs some alliterative, evocative power.

I see a title like that and I feel an almost unreasonable desire to read the story. Who's in that Legion? Who are they battling? What the heck broke them?
You really do not see titles like that any more. Too bad.

John Hocking

James Reasoner said...

Yeah, I like that title a lot, too. The authors (and editors) at Popular came up with some good ones.