Saturday, October 17, 2020

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, Second May Number 1946


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. 

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whoa, my mind is kind of run off-kilter at the thought of H.A. DeRosso in 'Ranch Romances'.
What 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

James Reasoner said...

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.

James Reasoner said...

One 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.

James Reasoner said...

You can read the whole story using the Look Inside feature on the Amazon page for the Kindle edition.