Nice action cover on this issue of BLUE RIBBON WESTERN, and it's interesting to me because it has the magazine version of Harry Sinclair Drago's novel "Doctor Two Guns", which was published that same year, 1939, in hardback by William Morrow under the house-name Peter Field. Drago wrote two books under that name, the other being THE TENDERFOOT KID. Both were stand-alones, not part of the long-running Powder Valley series. The other stories in this issue are by house-names and little known writers.
5 comments:
The painting on the cover is great. What's odd is the price. $2.00 jumps out at you, but I'm guess the mag itself was only $0.15 cents (on the right). Was the publisher trying to name the value you'd get for only 15 cents?
You mention Powder Valley series. IIRC, in the box of non-L'amour westerns I got from my grandfather, I think there's one in there. Name sounds familiar anyhow.
Yeah, the pulp was 15 cents, the $2.00 must have been the price of the William Morrow hardback of DOCTOR TWO GUNS.
The Powder Valley series was a pretty good one. It ran from the mid-Thirties to the late Fifties or early Sixties in hardback, published first by William Morrow and then by Jefferson House. Many of the novels were reprinted in paperback by Pocket Books. The series was written at first by William Thayer Hobson. Davis Dresser wrote most of the book in the Forties, and Lucien Emerson was the main author after that, but other authors wrote as Peter Field now and then, including Drago. The hero of the Powder Valley series is Colorado horse rancher Pat Stevens, who is also the local sheriff in some of the books. He has a couple of old codger sidekicks named Sam and Ezra. I read a bunch of them from the bookmobile when I was a kid.
I have several of the Powder Valley series in UK editions; also a Western Library (Amalgamated Press, London, 1951) copy of Law Badge -- a great, archetypal western of its time which I'd always accepted was written by Drago. Can anyone confirm this?
Yep, according to Pat Hawk, LAW BADGE is indeed by Harry Sinclair Drago. He wrote one other Peter Field book I'd forgotten about called MAN FROM THIEF RIVER.
$X NOVEL COMPLETE IN THIS ISSUE FOR ONLY Xc was a pretty common banner on the pulps.
Who edited the Columbia pulps in those pre-Lowndes days? Do we know? Or was Blue Ribbon not yet a Columbia title-set?
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