This is a pulp that I own and read recently, and as usual in those cases, the scan is
from the actual issue I read. DIME WESTERN, like all the Popular Publications
Western pulps, was a consistently entertaining magazine, and this issue is no
exception.
Tom W. Blackburn was one of the heroes of my childhood, although I didn’t know that at the time. I say that because he wrote the scripts for the Davy Crockett episodes of THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY that featured Fess Parker. There was no bigger fan of Davy Crockett in the early Sixties, when those shows were being rerun on a regular basis, than I was. I sang the theme song all the time, too, and Blackburn wrote those iconic lyrics. In recent years I’ve read some of his pulp stories and liked them. His novelette that leads off this issue, “Quest of the Thirty Dead”, is an excellent hardboiled Western yarn about a bounty hunter tracking down the members of an outlaw gang who raided a town and burned down a hotel as a distraction while they looted the banks, resulting in thirty fatalities. There are a few plot twists and plenty of action in this one, and it comes to a very satisfying conclusion.
J.H. Holland is an author I’m not familiar with. His short story, “Get Up and Fight Again!” is next in this issue. It’s set right after the Civil War and concerns a former Union soldier who goes west to find the sister of a friend who died in the Andersonville prison camp. Naturally enough, the sister is having trouble with the local range hog, and the ex-soldier takes up her cause. Holland seems to have been a real person but didn’t publish much. This is the first story of his listed in the Fictionmags Index. It’s fairly well written but never generates much suspense, and the ending seems rushed, as if Holland was too inexperienced to know how to develop the situation. It has some nice bits of action and description, though.
Dean Owen’s stories are always good. “A Brave Man Dies But Once”, set in Virginia City, Nevada, during the silver boom, is narrated by traveling cigar salesman Sam Kincaid, who is more than he seems. A crisis forces him to make a choice about which way his life is going to go, and not surprisingly, it all leads to the satisfying conclusion of an excellent tale.
By this point in Walt Coburn’s career as a writer and a two-fisted drinker, rumor has it that his manuscripts were heavily rewritten by editors, so it’s impossible to say how much of the novella “Hell With a Running Iron!” is Coburn’s work and how much came from some Popular Publications staffer. Most of it, however, reads like Coburn to me. The plot is fairly simple for one of his yarns—big ranching syndicate frames a small rancher for rustling so it can gobble up his spread—but as usual Coburn has a large cast of characters with a lot of back-story. Sometimes Coburn throws in so many elements his stories don’t really have a chance of making sense, but thankfully that’s not the case here. It’s a good story with some nice action and the undeniable sense of authenticity that you find in most of Coburn’s work. Not in the top rank of his efforts, but for the late Forties, not bad at all.
George C. Appell had a nice career writing for the pulps, slicks, and digests from the mid-Forties on through the Sixties, as well as producing a number of novels. His story “Last Roll Call” concerns the aftermath of the Battle of the Little Big Horn and a couple of soldiers from the 7th Cavalry who may have survived the massacre. It’s a good plot, and Appell writes very well. I’ve seen a lot of his work around but haven’t read much of it. Based on this story, I probably should.
I started reading Frank Bonham’s juvenile novels when I was a kid, with no knowledge of his career as a writer for the Western pulps. He did a lot of stories with unusual protagonists, and “Payment Past Due” is one of them. The hero is a doctor from the East with a dark secret in his past who heads west to make a new start. Eventually, of course, that secret will come out and the doctor will have to find out if he’s as good with a six-gun as he is with a scalpel. Bonham is another writer whose work is just about always good, and I enjoyed this story quite a bit.
Every so often I run across a pulp story written by someone I’ve actually met. That’s the case with Thomas Thompson’s “The Hangin’ Plague Hits Tonto Basin”. Thompson was at the WWA convention in Fort Worth in 1986 and I got to say hello to him there. I don’t remember much about it except that he was pleasant enough and looked a lot like the actor Al Lewis, who played Grandpa Munster. He was the story editor on BONANZA for many years, so I was a fan of his work there, but I’m not sure I’ve ever read any of his pulp stories before this one. I’ll definitely be looking for them from now on, though, because “The Hangin’ Plague Hits Tonto Basin” is maybe the best story in this issue of DIME WESTERN. It’s a variation on the old sheepmen-versus-local-cattle-baron plot, with an ex-con caught in the middle, but it’s very well written with a great hardboiled tone and plenty of action. I really enjoyed it and want to read more by Thompson, soon.
That wraps up this issue of DIME WESTERN, and it’s a very good one, with only one weak story (and it’s not terrible) and the others ranging from good to excellent. That’s not surprising, given DIME WESTERN’s consistent quality. If you have any issues or come across some, chances are they’ll be well worth reading.
Tom W. Blackburn was one of the heroes of my childhood, although I didn’t know that at the time. I say that because he wrote the scripts for the Davy Crockett episodes of THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY that featured Fess Parker. There was no bigger fan of Davy Crockett in the early Sixties, when those shows were being rerun on a regular basis, than I was. I sang the theme song all the time, too, and Blackburn wrote those iconic lyrics. In recent years I’ve read some of his pulp stories and liked them. His novelette that leads off this issue, “Quest of the Thirty Dead”, is an excellent hardboiled Western yarn about a bounty hunter tracking down the members of an outlaw gang who raided a town and burned down a hotel as a distraction while they looted the banks, resulting in thirty fatalities. There are a few plot twists and plenty of action in this one, and it comes to a very satisfying conclusion.
J.H. Holland is an author I’m not familiar with. His short story, “Get Up and Fight Again!” is next in this issue. It’s set right after the Civil War and concerns a former Union soldier who goes west to find the sister of a friend who died in the Andersonville prison camp. Naturally enough, the sister is having trouble with the local range hog, and the ex-soldier takes up her cause. Holland seems to have been a real person but didn’t publish much. This is the first story of his listed in the Fictionmags Index. It’s fairly well written but never generates much suspense, and the ending seems rushed, as if Holland was too inexperienced to know how to develop the situation. It has some nice bits of action and description, though.
Dean Owen’s stories are always good. “A Brave Man Dies But Once”, set in Virginia City, Nevada, during the silver boom, is narrated by traveling cigar salesman Sam Kincaid, who is more than he seems. A crisis forces him to make a choice about which way his life is going to go, and not surprisingly, it all leads to the satisfying conclusion of an excellent tale.
By this point in Walt Coburn’s career as a writer and a two-fisted drinker, rumor has it that his manuscripts were heavily rewritten by editors, so it’s impossible to say how much of the novella “Hell With a Running Iron!” is Coburn’s work and how much came from some Popular Publications staffer. Most of it, however, reads like Coburn to me. The plot is fairly simple for one of his yarns—big ranching syndicate frames a small rancher for rustling so it can gobble up his spread—but as usual Coburn has a large cast of characters with a lot of back-story. Sometimes Coburn throws in so many elements his stories don’t really have a chance of making sense, but thankfully that’s not the case here. It’s a good story with some nice action and the undeniable sense of authenticity that you find in most of Coburn’s work. Not in the top rank of his efforts, but for the late Forties, not bad at all.
George C. Appell had a nice career writing for the pulps, slicks, and digests from the mid-Forties on through the Sixties, as well as producing a number of novels. His story “Last Roll Call” concerns the aftermath of the Battle of the Little Big Horn and a couple of soldiers from the 7th Cavalry who may have survived the massacre. It’s a good plot, and Appell writes very well. I’ve seen a lot of his work around but haven’t read much of it. Based on this story, I probably should.
I started reading Frank Bonham’s juvenile novels when I was a kid, with no knowledge of his career as a writer for the Western pulps. He did a lot of stories with unusual protagonists, and “Payment Past Due” is one of them. The hero is a doctor from the East with a dark secret in his past who heads west to make a new start. Eventually, of course, that secret will come out and the doctor will have to find out if he’s as good with a six-gun as he is with a scalpel. Bonham is another writer whose work is just about always good, and I enjoyed this story quite a bit.
Every so often I run across a pulp story written by someone I’ve actually met. That’s the case with Thomas Thompson’s “The Hangin’ Plague Hits Tonto Basin”. Thompson was at the WWA convention in Fort Worth in 1986 and I got to say hello to him there. I don’t remember much about it except that he was pleasant enough and looked a lot like the actor Al Lewis, who played Grandpa Munster. He was the story editor on BONANZA for many years, so I was a fan of his work there, but I’m not sure I’ve ever read any of his pulp stories before this one. I’ll definitely be looking for them from now on, though, because “The Hangin’ Plague Hits Tonto Basin” is maybe the best story in this issue of DIME WESTERN. It’s a variation on the old sheepmen-versus-local-cattle-baron plot, with an ex-con caught in the middle, but it’s very well written with a great hardboiled tone and plenty of action. I really enjoyed it and want to read more by Thompson, soon.
That wraps up this issue of DIME WESTERN, and it’s a very good one, with only one weak story (and it’s not terrible) and the others ranging from good to excellent. That’s not surprising, given DIME WESTERN’s consistent quality. If you have any issues or come across some, chances are they’ll be well worth reading.
9 comments:
Thanks for this detailed review of one of the better western pulps. By 1948 the great years were over but it was still a good magazine. I still find it hard to believe that we are down to only a handful of fiction magazines now.
Well, Walker, you of all people should know we have an arguably surprising number of fiction magazines still (even if a certain lack of western fiction titles), between the larger littles that still get some newsstand distribution and all the littles and semipros that don't...compare, say, car magazines theses days, and you see what shrunken market looks like. It is a sad thing that TIN HOUSE and THE PARIS REVIEW's circulations are now comparable to that F&SF or EQMM, but only to the extent all should be larger.
So, the Popular western titles were from initiation always among the best, or did they have a DIME MYSTERY-style shaking down period before becoming impressive? This one sounds good...and I was surprised, too, to see how many writers I knew from YA books I read in the early/mid '70s had serious careers in the pulps and western and crime fiction, among others, when I started exploring there...Bonham, he of DURANGO STREET (urban YA), among them...
DURANGO STREET was the first Frank Bonham novel I read and I recall liking it a lot.
From what I've seen, DIME WESTERN and STAR WESTERN were good right from the start. I've read the first issue of STAR WESTERN and it's really solid. I've never had any early issues of 10 STORY WESTERN, but since it had stories from the same general group of authors I'm sure it was good, too. Same for NEW WESTERN and .44 WESTERN. I think Popular's Western pulps were consistently good, start to finish, which can't be said for some of the other genres they published.
At some point in the Disney show, Crockett says something like, “I’ve got the fastest horse, the prettiest sister, the surest rifle and the ugliest dog.” I don’t know if Davy actually said this, but if Blackburn wrote it, then I am a fan, too. The Disney Channel re-ran these shows late nights in the 1990s, and I saw them when I was up helping with bottles and diapers.
I know what Todd means and I should have typed in that we are down to only a few *genre* fiction magazines(I don't consider electronic online fiction to be from real magazines but that's another story and plenty of readers disagree.)
I especially should know since this morning I'm reading a stack of little magazines including fiction from CONJUNCTIONS and PLOUGHSHARES but these are not really genre magazines of course. So if we count literary magazines, there are still plenty of fiction magazines.
Following my literary train of thought I see I have completely forgot about Todd's last paragraph which I see James has answered already. But I'll back him up by saying that I've found DIME WESTERN and it's companion STAR WESTERN, to be two of the best western pulps, right from the beginning. Popular Publications paid top rates, more than the other western publishers with the possible exception of WESTERN STORY. I know Walt Coburn was getting good money for use of his name every month, even if he was drinking too much.
Good to know, about the PP western titles.
And, Walker, while a number of the semipro magazines have gone web-only, and some pro magazines, too, there are still a number of fantasticated and crinimous paper and ink fiction magazines getting limited, if any, US newsstand distribution...BLACK STATIC, INTERZONE, CRIMEWAVE and a few others from the UK and Ireland, ANDROMEDA SPACEWAYS from Australia, ON SPEC from Canada, DARK DELICACIES, APEX, and such POD magazines as NEEDLE, BETTY FEDORA, et al. in the States...to name only a few off the top (fedora pun semi-intentional)...
George C. Appell strikes me as underrated. I can't say I've read much by him but the stories I have read usually rank with the best of whatever pulp they appeared in. Does anyone know what became of him? Fictionmags Index gives no death date and Appell would be going on 102 if alive. With Blackburn, Bonham and Thompson along for the ride this looks like a strong issue. Dime ran smaller than other Popular westerns of this period but probably was the best of the line.
Appell appears to have died in 1982. There's a Social Security death index listing for a George Appell born in 1914 dying in that year, and he was from Milford, Connecticut. There are mentions in Connecticut newspapers of an author named George C. Appell living in Milford in the Sixties. Got to be the same guy. I plan to read more of his work.
Post a Comment