Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, June 1955

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover is by the dependable Sam Cherry. As always, this issue of TEXAS RANGERS leads off with a novel featuring Jim Hatfield, also known as the Lone Wolf. “Beyond the Tenido Barrier” was written by Peter B. Germano under the house-name Jackson Cole.

This novel begins with a fairly simple premise: Texas Ranger Jim Hatfield is on the trail of a train robber and killer known as the Sonora Kid. That trail leads him to the Tenido Barrier, an escarpment in far West Texas, beyond which is a fertile (for the region) valley that was once part of a Spanish land grant. The family of hacendados that has controlled this area for more than a hundred years still owns the ranch that takes up most of the valley, but the spread is being plagued by rustlers. Before you know it, Hatfield has rescued the rancher’s beautiful daughter from a wild bull, befriended the man’s son who has just returned from school in Mexico City, clashed with the local sheriff and deputy, who seem to have an agenda other than keeping the peace, and uncovered a link between the man he’s pursuing and a band of revolutionaries headquartered just across the border in Mexico, where they’re awaiting a shipment of smuggled rifles before starting a bloody rebellion.

In other words, Germano, who always wrote in a terse, hardboiled style, packs plenty of plot and characters into this short novel (35,000 words or so, I’m guessing). There’s so much going on that it’s a little hard to keep up with, and Hatfield has his hands full untangling everything and surviving numerous fistfights and shootouts. Germano really keeps things moving. I think “Beyond the Tenido Barrier” would have been a little better if it was longer, and that’s something I hardly ever say. The plot could have used a bit more room to develop and wouldn’t have seemed so rushed. That said, I still enjoyed this yarn a great deal. I’ve never read a Hatfield novel by Germano that wasn’t exciting and entertaining.

Next up is the short story “The Wrong Guess” by Lauran Paine. In addition to being a fairly prolific pulpster, Paine wrote close to a thousand Western novels under dozens of different pseudonyms, most of them published only in England even though Paine was an American and lived in the Pacific Northwest. He found his niche and wrote the heck out of it. Late in his career, he wrote a number of hardback Western novels for Walker & Company and paperback originals for Ballantine under his own name and the pseudonym Richard Clarke, one of which was made into the movie OPEN RANGE. I’ve never read much by him, and what I have read didn’t impress me much, but in this case, “The Wrong Guess” is a terrific short story. It’s a vengeance yarn featuring an old rancher, but to say anything else about the plot would be giving away too much. This is easily the best thing I’ve read by Paine, though.

I don’t know anything about Phillip Morgan other than the fact that he published approximately 50 stories in the pulps during the 1950s, mostly Westerns but with a few detective yarns mixed in. If he ever published a novel under his name, I couldn’t find any mention of it. He’s the author of the short story “Prairie Town” in this issue, and it’s a good one. This is a town tamer yarn, of the sort that finds an aging lawman questioning the life he leads. It’s a low-key, character-driven tale without much action, but Morgan writes so well that it’s a compelling story anyway. I’ll be on the lookout for his name in other pulps.

Steuart M. Emery had a career as a pulp writer that lasted almost 40 years, beginning in 1919. For the first three decades of that career, he produced mostly war and aviation stories, but during the Fifties he turned to Westerns and specialized in cavalry stories, appearing often in TEXAS RANGERS, usually with novelettes, such as the one in this issue, “Paddlewheel Fort”. This is a great story about a stalwart cavalry lieutenant battling not only Apaches in Arizona but also a by-the-book colonel and a spit-and-polish rival for the colonel’s beautiful daughter. As you might guess from the title, there’s a riverboat involved, too. You might think that’s really out of place in Arizona, but steamboats were used quite a bit on the Colorado River. There are some fantastic battle scenes in this one, and it would have made a fine 1950s movie with, say, Rod Cameron in the lead.

Philip Ketchum was a prolific, widely respected pulpster, known for Westerns, historicals, and detective yarns written under his own name and the pseudonym Carl McK. Saunders. And after the pulp era, he went on to a long career as an author of paperback Westerns, all the way up into the Seventies. His story in this issue, “Skin Deep”, is something of an oddity for him. There’s no action at all. Instead, it’s a quiet, sweet tale of a cowboy courting a rancher’s daughter who, for a change, isn’t beautiful . . . or is she? It’s the sort of story I don’t usually enjoy, but Ketchum’s fine writing saves it, and I wound up liking it quite a bit.

Herbert D. Kastle isn’t really a name I expected to run into in a Western pulp, but his story “The Slow Draw” rounds out this issue. As it turns out, a check of the Fictionmags Index reveals that Kastle wrote several stories for various Western pulps in the mid-Fifties, along with science fiction and detective stories for the digests, before going on to a long career as a paperback author of glitzy bestsellers and dark suspense novels. “The Slow Draw” is a little predictable with its story of a man who seeks out gunfights despite not being fast on the draw, but it’s enjoyable anyway.

Overall, this is a very good issue of TEXAS RANGERS, with a solid Hatfield novel and not a bad story in the bunch among the backups. Steuart Emery’s novelette is the best story by him that I’ve read so far, and that’s saying something since I really like his work. If you have a copy of this one in your collection, it’s well worth pulling out and reading.