Most of the RANCH ROMANCES covers in the mid-Forties were still a little on the sweet side, but they were starting to show some action now and then, as in this one by an artist I'm not familiar with, Will Gimby. There are certainly some hardboiled authors inside this issue, H.A. DeRosso and Joseph Chadwick, along with RANCH ROMANCES regulars L.P. Holmes, Stephen Payne, and James Routh. Appears to be an issue well worth reading.
Whoa, my mind is kind of run off-kilter at the thought of H.A. DeRosso in 'Ranch Romances'.
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of western romance would an author as bleakly noir as DeRosso produce?
I imagine the work he did here had a different flavor than the stuff we know him best for today.
John Hocking
He sold another seven or eight stories to RANCH ROMANCES in the Fifties and even sold one to RANGELAND ROMANCES. RANCH ROMANCES could be surprisingly hardboiled at times, especially in the Fifties, but yeah, DeRosso seems like an odd fit for the magazine. I'll have to see if I can dig out some issues with his stories in them. I probably have a few.
ReplyDeleteOne of his RANCH ROMANCES stories, "Long Lonesome", is in the collection UNDER THE BURNING SUN, so I've read that one, but I don't remember it.
ReplyDeleteYou can read the whole story using the Look Inside feature on the Amazon page for the Kindle edition.
ReplyDelete