Overlooked Movies: Git Along Little Dogies (1937)

Some of the first movies I remember seeing on TV when I was a kid are the B-Westerns starring Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. Back then I liked them both pretty much equally, although as time went on I became much more of a Roy Rogers fan. Even so, every so often I get the urge to watch one of Gene’s movies, so I took a look recently at GIT ALONG LITTLE DOGIES from 1937. There’s a chance I saw this one on TV, but if I did, it was nearly 60 years ago and I had no memory of it.

This is very much one of those oddball hybrids where contemporary technology such as cars, trucks, telephones, and radio stations exist alongside cowboys who gallop around on horseback and pack shootin’ irons. Gene plays a rancher who starts out opposed to an oil well being drilled in what has always been cattle country. He’s afraid it’s going to ruin the water supply. He changes his mind when he finds out that if oil is discovered, the railroad will build a spur line into the valley, and the benefit of this to the cattlemen will outweigh the problems of having oil rigs around. This plotline is complicated by Gene’s on-going feud with the pretty girl who runs the local radio station, whose banker father has a stake in the oil well. Then some big city gangsters show up and Gene really has his hands full.

The script by Dorrell and Stuart McGowan (who wrote some pretty good movies during their career) is actually fairly complicated, although it’s never any real secret who the hidden mastermind behind all the trouble really is. GIT ALONG LITTLE DOGIES was directed by Joseph Kane, who kept the action scenes moving along nicely. Kane directed many of the early Roy Rogers films and knew his way around a B-Western. There’s some good stunt work, and Autry, who was never a good rider or athlete, tries gamely to do his part, although it’s often clear that he’s being doubled by somebody else.

One drawback with this film, as far as I’m concerned, is that there are too many musical numbers and most of them seem even hokier than usual. Smiley Burnette plays Frog Millhouse, Gene’s sidekick, and while I thought Frog was hilarious when I was a kid, a little of him goes a long way now.

I don’t want to sound too critical, though. I enjoyed GIT ALONG LITTLE DOGIES quite a bit, enough so that I wouldn’t mind watching some of Gene’s other movies. There are quite a few of them I either haven’t seen or have totally forgotten.

The Last Stand - Mickey Spillane

The 100^th anniversary of Mickey Spillane’s birth is coming up, and Hard Case Crime is marking the occasion by publishing a new volume containing two never-before-published Spillane stories.

The first is a novella entitled “A Bullet for Satisfaction”, which appears to have been written by Spillane in the early to mid-Fifties but never edited and submitted. Max Allan Collins has worked from the original manuscript to smooth out inconsistences and bridge the different parts of the story together. The result is a lightning-paced crime yarn that’s like a Fifties paperback in miniature. The protagonist is Homicide detective Rod Dexter, who works in a medium-sized city somewhere in the Midwest. He’s trying to solve the murder of a recently elected state representative, and it’ll come as no surprise that Dexter soon finds himself up to his neck in crooked politicians, gangsters who are trying to take over the town, imported hitmen, and a number of beautiful women who may or may not be trustworthy. Dexter winds up getting kicked off the force when his investigation gets too close to uncovering the truth, but does that stop him? What do you think? That he’s gonna get his hands on a gat and continue cutting a bloody swath through the bad guys?

I think we all know the answer to that.

Spillane packs enough plot into this yarn for a full-length novel, along with plenty of action, some great dialogue, and several really harrowing scenes of violence. This is good stuff, and I can’t imagine any fan of classic era Spillane not having a great time reading it.

THE LAST STAND is the final novel Mickey Spillane completed, just a few weeks before his death. I don’t know how much editing and polishing Collins did on this one, but I suspect not much. The voice is very consistent with the other later Spillane novels I’ve read, SOMETHING’S DOWN THERE and DEAD STREET.

THE LAST STAND is a contemporary Western and more of an adventure novel than a mystery. The protagonist, successful businessman Joe Gillian, is flying a vintage World War II airplane, a hobby of his, across the desert southwest when engine trouble forces him to set down in the middle of nowhere. He’s in a bad spot, but he soon encounters Sequoia Pete, who lives on a fairly close-by Indian reservation. Pete’s horse has thrown him and run away, so he’s stranded, too. They have to walk back to the reservation, which takes several days, but they make it and by the time they do, they’ve become good friends. Then Gillian meets Pete’s beautiful sister Running Fox, and thinks maybe the bad luck with his plane wasn’t so bad after all.

Naturally enough, it’s not long before trouble breaks out involving three different plotlines: the search for a legendary fortune in gold hidden in the Superstition Mountains and the attempted murder of an old prospector; the discovery of a mysterous mineral that may have incredible scientific and military applications; and the jealousy of Running Fox’s other suitor, a massive Indian known as Big Arms, who wants to beat Gillian to death. Spillane adds some gangsters and federal agents to the mix, then weaves everything together perfectly in a fast-moving tale. It’s told in third person, rather than first, and although the stakes are plenty high, the tone isn’t as dark as much of Spillane’s earlier work. There’s even a hint of breeziness about it, which is not something you expect from Spillane, but it’s balanced by a poignant, elegeiac undercurrent of change and the passage of time and inevitable endings. And he does an excellent job of capturing the southwestern landscape as well.

THE LAST STAND is a fine novel that I thoroughly enjoyed. Along with “A Bullet for Satisfaction”, it makes this volume another real winner from Hard Case Crime. Its publication is a major event for any fan of Spillane’s work, and I give it my highest recommendation.
  

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, August 12, 1939

The mid-to-late Thirties is the high point of ARGOSY for me, with consistently good covers and great writers. But those serials! I guess it didn't matter much when you could go down to the newsstand and buy the new issue every week, but now they're the bane of a collector's existence. Lots of fantastic reading whenever you manage to put together all the installments of a serial, though. This particular issue has three serials running, all by popular authors: Theodore Roscoe (one of the best pulp writers), Jack Mann, and Charles Rice McDowell. The cover-featured novella is by Roy de S. Horn, an oddly bylined but excellent writer/editor. The cover is by Rudolph Belarski. Looks like another typically fine issue of ARGOSY from this era.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Aces, June 1940

This issue of WESTERN ACES sports a nice action cover from Jerome Rozen. Inside are stories by some top Western pulpsters, including L.P. Holmes, John G. Pearsol, Larry A. Harris, Tom J. Hopkins, Lee Floren, Kenneth L. Sinclair and some lesser-known authors.

Forgotten Books: Ki-Gor--and the Temple of the Moon-God - John Peter Drummond

Some minor spoilers ahead.

A legal thriller isn’t exactly what you’d expect to come across in the pages of a Ki-Gor novel, but that’s kind of what KI-GOR—AND THE TEMPLE OF THE MOON-GOD, from the Summer 1941 issue of JUNGLE STORIES, turns into at times. This one finds Ki-Gor and his beautiful redheaded wife Helene visiting with a friendly tribe of natives. Ki-Gor agrees to help them hunt down a giant killer leopard that’s been plaguing the village. The chief’s son accompanies the hunting party, and when a tragic accident leaves him dead, Ki-Gor finds himself accused of murder and put on trial in the Temple of the Moon-God, which is the center of the tribe’s rather elaborate legal system.

The proceedings end in what we would call a mistrial, and Ki-Gor’s fate is left to the Priestess of the Moon-God, who decrees that he must go on a quest to determine his guilt or innocence. He has to accomplish two things: he has to find a place where the stars shine at midday, and another place where the sun’s rays are cold instead of hot. If he fails to complete this quest, he will be judged guilty and executed by being put in a crocodile pit, but if he doesn’t get back in time, the sentence will be carried out on Helene instead, who will remain a prisoner until then.

All this is pretty interesting and handled well, and that continues as Ki-Gor sets off on his quest to prove his innocence and save Helene. KI-GOR—AND THE TEMPLE OF THE MOON-GOD is a little low on action, but the author keeps the pace moving right along anyway and gives us more of an effective suspense novel, with a hint of mystery, rather than a slam-bang yarn.

I suspect that the unknown author of the previous novel, LAIR OF THE BEAST, wrote this one as well. The smooth prose style is very similar, and there’s a colorful supporting character in this one as well, a brash young native named Ekka who attaches himself to Ki-Gor during the quest and proves to be helpful as well as being a huge annoyance and providing some comedy relief. Best of all, Ki-Gor’s main sidekick Tembu George returns and is, as always, a fine character, smart and brave and likable. I really enjoyed KI-GOR—AND THE TEMPLE OF THE MOON-GOD and look forward to continuing with the series as it seems to be hitting its stride.

Overlooked Movies: Absolutely Anything (2015)

I never even heard of this Simon Pegg movie, missed it completely when it came out, so when I ran across it on Netflix I figured I ought to watch it. I’ve liked just about everything else I’ve seen with Pegg in it. His movies are usually an oddball mix of comedy and science fiction, and ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING certainly fits into that category.

In this one, Pegg plays a school teacher and would-be novelist who’s been pining away for his downstairs neighbor, played by Kate Beckinsale. He has problems with his headmaster, his unruly class, and his obnoxious landlady. Pretty typical nebbishy comedy so far.

Then a group of supremely powerful alien beings (computer generated, but voiced by some of the Monty Python guys) grant Pegg’s character the power to do anything with a wave of the hand, as a way of testing humanity to determine whether they wipe out Earth or leave it alone.

There’s not much in this movie that’s going to come as a surprise, from the romantic entanglements to the hijinks that ensue when Pegg grants his dog the power to talk. (The dog is voiced by an unusually low-key Robin Williams in his last role, which gives this movie kind of a bittersweet edge.) But ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING is still funny and good-hearted and worth watching, I thought.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1941

It's hard to go wrong with a cover featuring gorillas and ray-guns. This one is by Rudolph Belarski, and it certainly would have made me want to plunk down a dime and a nickel back in 1941. Inside are stories by some top-notch writers, including Manly Wade Wellman, Victor Rousseau, Ross Rocklynne, and Frank Belknap Long.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, March 1948

Every time I post a cover from LARIAT STORY, the cover and story titles make me think, "Dang, I wish I could have written for that magazine!" I mean, I think I could have written a pretty good yarn called "Siren of the Bushwhack Guns". In fact, I have written a story inspired by a previous LARIAT STORY cover I posted, and I'll get around to publishing it one of these days. I'd like to write a sequel to go with it first.

But I digress. This issue features stories by Laurence Donovan, Will C. Brown, Lee Floren, Al Storm, and Ben Frank, probably the best known names in the bunch. There are a couple of other authors I'm not familiar with. But if they wrote the kind of yarn that could make it into LARIAT STORY, I'll bet I'd like it.

Forgotten Books: The Dead Stand-in - Frank Kane

I’ve been reading Frank Kane’s novels and stories about private eye Johnny Liddell for close to 50 years now, and I still enjoy them. Kane’s short novel THE DEAD STAND-IN, which originally appeared in the January 1956 issue of the iconic hardboiled crime digest magazine MANHUNT, was reprinted in the double volume from Armchair Fiction that also contains Richard Deming’s top-notch noir yarn KISS AND KILL. It’s never been reprinted elsewhere, as far as I know.

Liddell is in fine form in this one, hired by a mystery client to investigate a shooting in which the police cornered and killed a fugitive who had previously murdered a man in a mugging. Liddell’s client, who is only a female voice on the phone to him, as well as a $200 retainer sent in the mail, believes there’s more to the case than that. In fact, she claims that the fugitive was actually murdered and wants Liddell to prove it.

Well, of course in a private eye story, no case that appears cut-and-dried really is, and in no time at all, Liddell is up to his neck in trouble involving gangsters, a sultry torch singer, a hired killer imported from Detroit, and a second killing, this time an obvious murder which somebody fashions into a neat frame for Liddell, so that he has to find the real killer to save himself from the electric chair. Helping him out is beautiful redheaded reporter Muggsy Kiely, my all-time favorite sidekick/girlfriend for a fictional private eye. (Yes, I like her even better than Lucy Hamilton.)

This is the pure quill, full of snappy patter, beautiful babes, and gimlet-eyed bad guys. Everybody smokes and drinks constantly, Liddell gets hit on the head not once but twice, and I grinned from first page to last. The plot’s nothing special, but reading it made me feel like that kid again, you know, the one sitting in a lawn chair on his parents’ front porch on a summer day with a transistor radio playing rock and roll while he flips the pages of a paperback as fast as he can.

I’ll take that feeling any day of the week.

Overlooked Movies: Dr. Cyclops (1940)

I saw this 1940 film on TV when I was a kid and thought it was the greatest movie I’d ever seen. I hadn’t watched it since then, however, and when Svengoolie showed it a few weeks ago, I decided to record it and give it a try. I’m glad I did, because while it turns out not to be the greatest movie I’ve ever seen, it’s still pretty darned entertaining.

The doctor of the title is actually named Dr. Alexander Thorkel (Albert Dekker), who’s experimenting with the effects of radiation on organic matter in his South American laboratory. Since his sight is failing, he summons several other scientists to assist him, but they quickly figure out that he’s a mad scientist who has discovered a way to shrink living beings. Rather than have his nefarious plans exposed, he traps the three scientists, their guide, and a native servant in the room with his radium condenser and shrinks them down to miniature size. From that point, the rest of the movie centers around their efforts to escape from and/or kill Thorkel, all while surviving the dangers of being five inches tall in a full-sized world.

The plot maybe could have used another twist or two, but the movie’s strengths more than make up for that. With his bald head, thick glasses, and hulking frame, Dekker is great as the crazed scientist. He underplays for the most part, rather than chewing the scenery as you might expect from such a part, but that quiet menace makes him one of the most chilling movie characters I’ve come across in a while. The other characters are sort of non-entities, dwarfed (no pun intended . . . oh, what the heck, yeah, it was) by Dekker’s performance. The production values of this film are top-notch, with some of the best Technicolor photography from this era that you’ll find. The movie looks great. (That’s something I didn’t notice when watching it on a 19-inch black-and-white TV all those years ago.) The special effects, which consist mostly of building enormous sets that perfectly match the regular sets, are really good, too.

Unfortunately, some of the books, movies, etc., that I loved as a kid don’t hold up all that well. DR. CYCLOPS definitely does hold up, and if you haven’t seen it, I think it’s well worth watching. If, like me, you haven’t seen it in many years, you might want to think about watching it again.

(Side note: There’s actually a novelization of this movie, something that wasn’t all that common during that era. It was published under the name Will Garth, which was a house-name in the pulps published by Standard/Best Publications, aka the Thrilling Group. I believe the novel was actually written by Joseph Samachson, an editor there, but I could be wrong about that.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Black Mask, October 1934

Another classic issue of BLACK MASK, with a fairly provocative cover by Fred Craft and stories inside by Raymond Chandler, Horace McCoy, W.T. Ballard, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, and Thomas Walsh, who was still writing new stories for EQMM and AHMM as late as 1983. I remember reading them, but at the time I didn't realize his career stretched back as far as it did. Quite an accomplishment.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Ranch Stories, July 1935

THRILLING RANCH STORIES always had action-packed covers. It was meant as a competitor to RANCH ROMANCES, but other than the presence of a woman on the covers (usually ridin' or shootin' right alongside the stalwart cowboy hero), it looks more like a regular Western pulp with the emphasis on adventure. I particularly like this cover, but I don't know who the artist is. Inside this issue are stories by some top Western pulpsters: Eugene Cunningham, Leslie Scott writing as A. Leslie, Lee Bond, Stephen Payne, George M. Johnson, and a couple of house-names, Jackson Cole and Sam Brant. There's also a story by a female author, Zaida Packard, but it seems to have been her only Western pulp yarn.

Forgotten Books: The Lost End of Nowhere - Gordon MacCreagh

First of all, isn’t that a great title? “The Lost End of Nowhere” . . . That really makes me want to read the story, which in this case is the third Kingi Bwana yarn by Gordon MacCreagh, originally published in the January 15, 1931 issue of ADVENTURE. At upwards of 37,000 words, it’s really more of a novel. As it opens, the American adventurer named King is hired by a German university to locate a scientist who disappeared in what was then German East Africa fifteen years earlier. The university has received a letter from the missing man claiming that he has made an earth-shaking scientific discovery, but there’s no way of knowing how long ago the letter was sent or whether there’s any truth to it. At least, not without sending in King to find out the truth.

King is intrigued enough to take the job, and along with his friends and sidekicks, the Masai warrior named Barounggo and the Hottentot known as Kaffa, he sets out to find the lost scientist, who had been studying gorillas and chimpanzees. King discovers clues to an eccentric white man who “married a monkey” and disappeared into the jungle. While he’s on the trail of his quarry, he and his safari clash with a couple of different tribes and hear even more mysterious stories about the missing scientist.

What King finally finds is not only earth-shaking scientifically, it’s also a grave threat to the safety of the world. There’s a lot of blood-and-thunder action, written in MacCreagh’s slightly old-fashioned but highly effective style, leading up to a great battle that approaches Robert E. Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs level at times.

This Kingi Bwana stories are classic, old-school adventure fiction with an air of undeniable authenticity even when they get a little far-fetched in some of their elements, such as this one. I really enjoyed “The Lost End of Nowhere” and look forward to reading the rest of the stories in the series.

Overlooked Movies: Silent Men (1933)

Growing up, I was never a fan of Tim McCoy's Western movies. They didn't show up very often on the local TV stations, and anyway, I was too busy watching Roy, Gene, and Hoppy. But now that I'm older, I've come to appreciate McCoy's work. A former military officer, Wild West showman, and Indian expert, McCoy was a little on the stiff side as an actor, but with his jutting chin and enormous hat, he always projected plenty of strength and gravitas.

The 1933 movie SILENT MEN finds him playing a respected range detective and brand inspector in Montana, but the character has a secret: he's really an escaped convict who was sentenced to life in prison in Arizona for a crime he didn't commit. His old cellmate (who happens to have been a member of the gang that framed McCoy's character) shows up and tries to blackmail him into overlooking the rustling that's going on in the area. McCoy, who blames a pair of shady brothers played by Wheeler Oakman and J. Carrol Naish for the rustling, is too upright to go along with that, of course, so the gang frames him for a killing and he winds up in jail.

From there, however, he gets some help from an unexpected source and escapes to track down the real mastermind behind the cattle thefts and the murder. There's some fightin' and ridin' and shootin', naturally, but not really a lot for a B-Western.

You can really tell that this movie is based on a pulp story by Walt Coburn. (Unfortunately, I don't know which one.) It's just packed with back-story, plot twists, and characters who don't turn out like you might expect them to. The acting is generally pretty good, especially Naish and Oakman, and Glenn Strange, a welcome presence in any Western, shows up in a couple of scenes as a cowboy. One of the scripters was Gerald Geraghty, who went on to write some of those good Roy Rogers movies directed by William Witney.

If you've never seen a Tim McCoy movie, SILENT MEN wouldn't be a bad place to start. It's a good solid B-Western, and I'm glad I watched it. A tip of the enormous Stetson to Steve Mertz, who made that possible.

The Digest Enthusiast, Book Seven - Richard Krauss, ed.

THE DIGEST ENTHUSIAST continues to be one of my favorite current publications, and the recently released Book Seven is no exception. Once again it provides an in-depth look at a variety of digest publications from past and present, leading off with a lengthy interview with Rick Ollerman, editor of DOWN & OUT: THE MAGAZINE, as well as the author of several well-received suspense novels and many top-notch introductions and essays from Stark House reprints of classic hardboiled, noir, and mystery fiction. The interview covers all these aspects of Ollerman’s career and is very informative and entertaining.

Other highlights for me include Peter Infantino’s continuing issue-by-issue survey of the iconic crime digest MANHUNT; a look at all the stories by Robert Edmond Alter (an author I really like) published in ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, also by Infantino; Josh Pachter’s look back at ESPIONAGE MAGAZINE, a publiction with which he had a personal connection (and which I remember buying faithfully off the magazine rack at the local grocery store); and an article by Joe Wehrle Jr. on the Telzey Amberdon science fiction stories by James H. Schmitz, some of which I’ve read, and this article makes me want to collect and read the rest of them. All in all, THE DIGEST ENTHUSIAST is well worth your time and money if you have any interest in these magazines at all, and if you don’t, it just might change your mind. Highly recommended.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy-Adventure Stories, November 1937

This is a pulp I own and read recently. The cover is by H.L.V. Parkhurst. The scan at the top of the post is from the Fictionmags Index because my copy has the top few inches of the front cover removed, which means the owner of whatever newsstand it was once on cut it off and returned it for credit, but the otherwise intact magazine found its way into the wild and ultimately to me. For which I’m glad, because I nearly always enjoy the Spicy pulps.

This issue starts off with “The Pope’s Gonfalonier” by Wyreck Brent. That seems to have the author’s real name, but I’m not familiar with his work at all. This swashbuckler is set in 15^th Century Rome and concerns the adventures of a young swordsman playing rival clans the Borgias and the Orsinis against each other. Brent gets in some decent swordplay and there are the requisite scenes where pretty girls lose nearly all of their clothes, but for the most part the writing is bland and the formula seems more tired than usual. This is a rare miss for a Spicy pulp, and I’m not sure why the editor ran it as the issue’s lead story.

Next up is “Storm Warning”, a yarn by one of the true stalwarts of the Spicy pulps, Robert Leslie Bellem. Newsreel cameraman Johnnie Piper goes to an isolated Florida key intending to shoot footage of an impending hurricane, only to find an abandoned mansion, a beautiful dame who may or may not be trustworthy, and a bunch of trouble. Great set-up, and Bellem tells the tale in his usual breezy, hard-charging prose, but he seems to not know much about actual hurricanes and the ending is a considerable letdown, as if Bellem realized he had enough words and just kind of stopped. This is another below-average story, especially for Bellem. What the heck is going on with this issue?

Things take a turn for the better with “Kiss of Death” by Hamlin Daly, who was really another prolific contributor to the Spicy pulps (and lots of others!), E. Hoffmann Price. This story is about about an American who owns a mine in Malaya and has to battle bandits, a Chinese tong, corrupt politicians, a ruthless American tycoon out to gobble up all the smaller mines in the country, and beautiful but treacherous women. If that sounds like a lot for a 15 page pulp story, that’s because Price never slows things down. This one is all action, all the way.

The next story is even better. “Clear All Wires” is by veteran pulpster John A. Saxon, writing as Rex Norman. Saxon’s tale concerns an American foreign correspondent getting mixed up with the dangerous politics of a Graustarkian Central European country, and he tells it in a very smooth, polished style. I enjoyed this one quite a bit.

“Phantom Throne” continues the upward trend for this issue. It’s by “Hugh Speer”, who was really Victor Rousseau, an even more veteran pulpster than John A. Saxon. This one finds a British soldier in colonial India caught up in a violent political upheaval as he tries to rescue a beautiful young American woman, while also becoming involved with a beautiful Indian courtesan. The setting is rendered well, there’s plenty of action, and I found this story thoroughly entertaining, a spicier version of the sort of yarn that Talbot Mundy wrote.

Rousseau also contributes the next story, “Lords of Folly”, under his more common pseudonym Lew Merrill. It’s a tale of the upheaval just prior to the French revolution, as the bastard son of an aristocrat returns to France from America with dangerous ideas in his head. Rousseau packs enough plot for a fat historical novel into this short story but doesn’t skimp on the action in the process. This is another very enjoyable yarn.

It’s not often that historical figures show up as the protagonists of pulp stories, but that’s the case in “Hell in Darien” by E. Hoffmann Price, writing under his own name this time. It features soldier and explorer Vasco Nuñez de Balboa in Panama, and like Victor Rousseau in the previous story, Price packs in enough political intrigue, romance, and swordplay into this novelette for a whole novel. It’s an excellent historical adventure yarn with a bit of an unexpected ending. At least I didn’t expect it.

The issue wraps up with another story by Robert Leslie Bellem, this time under his Jerome Severs Perry pseudonym. “Treasure Trail” is about an American aerial photographer in Africa who’s hired by a beautiful British girl for a mysterious job, only to have trying to stop him from taking it, by any means up to and including attempted murder. Naturally the protagonist unravels what’s going on, but not before getting into all sorts of trouble. This is an improvement on the other Bellem yarn in this issue, but it’s still nowhere near as good as most of his Dan Turner stories.

So overall, I guess this issue averages out. A couple of weak stories, a couple of very good ones, and the rest competently written and entertaining, if nothing special. I’m not sure the Spicy formula works as well with adventure stories as it does with detective yarns and Westerns. I still enjoyed this issue and am glad I read it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Six-Gun Western Magazine, December 1950

This appears to have been the final issue of SIX-GUN WESTERN MAGAZINE, but it's notable for a couple of other reasons. The cover is by Robert Maguire, who's probably better known for his paperback covers, and it's a late variation on the cowboy/girl/geezer trio that shows up so often on Western pulp covers. The other reason someone might be interested in this issue is that it contains one of Elmer Kelton's early stories, "Bullets From the Past". I haven't read this story and don't know anything about it. I wish somebody would do a complete collection of Kelton's pulp stories, though. I'm sure there are plenty of good yarns of his that have never been reprinted.

Otherwise, this issue appears to have been fairly undistinguished. The most recognizable of the other authors is Lloyd Eric Reeve, who published quite a few stories in a variety of Western pulps from the late Twenties to the early Fifties. There's also a story by Frank E. Smith, who was really Jonathan Craig, best known for his hardboiled crime and police procedural novels published by Gold Medal and others in the Fifties and Sixties. The other authors are either house-names or guys you've never heard of. I do kind of like that cover, though.

Forgotten Books: Avalanche! - E.S. Dellinger

This week we're supposed to be writing about Forgotten Books by authors we haven't read before. E.S. Dellinger qualifies for me, but spoiler alert (not really), I'll certainly be reading more by him.

RAILROAD STORIES was one of the longest-running magazines to publish fiction. Beginning as a pulp called THE RAILROAD MAN’S MAGAZINE in 1906, it continued publishing stories about railroads and railroaders until January 1979, when it had long since become a slick magazine. True, there was a ten-year span in there when it was merged with ARGOSY, and the fiction published in the Seventies was mostly reprints from the magazine’s glory days during the Thirties, but still, that’s a pretty impressive record.

The star of RAILROAD STORIES during the pulp era was E.S. Dellinger, whose yarns were nearly always featured on the cover. Dellinger (1886-1962) was a former railroader himself who became a teacher and school superintendent as well as writing dozens of yarns for the pulps, beginning in 1926 with some sales to ADVENTURE. Bold Venture Press has started reprinting some of them, and I recently read a collection entitled AVALANCHE that includes three novellas, two starring engineer Rud Randall, the other featuring King Lawson, perhaps the most popular of Dellinger’s series characters. The title story, “Avalanche!”, the King Lawson yarn, appeared in the February 1934 issue of RAILROAD STORIES. The two Rud Randall stories are “The Lion Tamer”, from June 1935, and “Tornado!” from November 1935.

Dellinger covered several different phases of King Lawson’s life and career in that series. In “Avalanche!”, he’s the superintendant of a line that runs through the Rockies and is more of a supporting character in a yarn whose protagonist is a young engineer who was caught in a snowslide when he was a boy and has to battle a mortal fear of it happening again. Which, of course, it does, with a lot of lives at stake, including that of the girl the young hero loves.

Rud Randall, the protagonist of the other two tales, works for one of the rail lines that runs through the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas and Missouri, and there’s a definite flavor of rural Americana throughout these stories. Rud is a good character, a stubborn man devoted to railroading although he also loves his wife and children. He had a bit of a reckless streak and tends to push his locomotive as fast as it can safely go—and sometimes even faster. As a result, Rud is involved with more than one train wreck in these stories, although none of them are actually his fault. But if you need somebody to outrun a natural disaster or arrive on the scene of a wrecked circus train in time to save the day, nobody is better than Rud Randall.

There’s nothing fancy about Dellinger’s style, but he was a top-notch storyteller and can really keep the reader turning the pages. These yarns have plenty of action in them, but they’re surprisingly character-driven for pulp tales. “Tornado!” especially is a mini-epic, spanning more than a decade in Rud’s life and containing a lot of drama about the relationship between him and his son, in between train wrecks, the Stock Market Crash, and a giant killer tornado.

I really enjoyed this book. Dellinger was writing for an audience that knew a lot about railroading, so the stories are a little heavy on the slang and technical jargon, but everything is easy enough to figure out from the context. I picked up the other collections of Dellinger stories, and I also have a few issues of the actual RAILROAD STORIES pulp that I plan to dig out. Admittedly, most modern readers won’t have much interest in stuff like this, but I like visiting a simpler time now and then, when railroads really were the lifeline of the country and country kids grew up hearing a locomotive’s lonesome whistle in the night.

The Bloody Spur - Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Famous gunfighter Caleb York is still the sheriff of Trinidad, in New Mexico Territory, and he has trouble on his hands again as several newcomers arrive in Trinidad in the opening pages of THE BLOODY SPUR, the third novel in this series by Max Allan Collins based on characters created by Mickey Spillane.

The new arrivals in town are a representative of the Santa Fe Railroad, which wants to build a spur line to Trinidad (there’s where the title comes from); an ex-convict and former partner of York’s friend, rancher George Cullen; and a notorious gun for hire known as the Preacherman, who has come to Trinidad with a couple of minions to kill someone. York just doesn’t know who.

Complications quickly ensue. The railroad wants to build its spur line through George Cullen’s ranch. Cullen is opposed to the idea, but his daughter Willa (with whom York has had an on-again, off-again romance) supports the idea. York has to find out who the Preacherman’s target is, and just what is Cullen’s old partner up to, anyway? Before any of that can be sorted out, a tragedy occurs, and it’ll come as no surprise that what appears at first to be an accidental death is actually murder . . .

As you might expect, THE BLOODY SPUR is as much mystery novel as it is Western adventure, and it doesn’t skimp on either element. There’s plenty of both gunplay and detection before Caleb York untangles everything and delivers his own brand of justice. I’ve really enjoyed this series, and I think this is the best book so far. It’s well-plotted, and Collins’ style is about as smooth as any you’ll find, making for a very fast, entertaining read. I really enjoy his characters, too, especially Jonathan Tulley, former desert rat and current deputy to Caleb York. If these books were Western B-movies from the Forties (which they resemble in some ways), Tulley would have to be played by one of my favorite sidekicks, Al “Fuzzy” St. John.

THE BLOODY SPUR will be out later this month, but it’s available for pre-order, and if you’re looking for a very good traditional Western, I give it a high recommendation.