Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double-Action Western, January 1951

Yet another Old West poker game that ends in powdersmoke and hot lead! This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, complete with a pencil-scribbled address, 547 W. Main. Whenever I see something like this, I always wonder: What was located at 547 W. Main? Why did one of this pulp’s previous owners have to grab a pencil and write that address on whatever was handy . . . like the January 1951 issue of DOUBLE-ACTION WESTERN? With that cover date, which was an off-sale date, this issue would have been on the newsstands and magazine racks during December 1950. But that doesn’t mean that’s when the address was written on it. Could have been then, could have been any time since then until the time the copy came into my hands. We’ll never know. But I like to ponder such things anyway.

The lead novel in this issue—and at 60 pages of small, double-columned type, it actually is pretty close to novel length—is “Satan’s Home Spread” by Galen C. Colin. I’ve seen Colin’s name on plenty of Western pulp TOCs, but I don’t recall reading anything by him until now. In this story, our protagonist Brad Towler has escaped from prison in Montana, where he was locked up for a crime he didn’t commit, and headed for Arizona, where he hopes to find the outlaw Sonora Jackson, who framed him and got him sent to prison. No sooner does Brad arrive in the cowtown of Loder than he encounters gambler and gunman Apache Crockett, whose younger brother Tom just happened to be Brad’s cellmate in prison and who was also framed for a crime he didn’t commit by the villainous Sonora Jackson. Crockett convinces Brad to pose as notorious gunman Buck Briggs so he can infiltrate Jackson’s gang, but he neglects to tell Brad that Briggs is wanted for murder, so Brad soon finds himself behind bars again with a lynch mob howling for his blood. Oh, and the rancher Buck Briggs supposedly shot in the back has a beautiful daughter, and Brad falls for her right away even though she hates him because she believes he gunned down her father.

Got all that? If it sounds like there’s enough coincidence and back-story for a Walt Coburn yarn, that’s because there is, and Colin piles it fast and thick. And honestly, before the end of the story he kind of loses control of the plot, so that several twists stretch our suspension of disbelief past the breaking point.

Despite that, “Satan’s Home Spread” is an entertaining tale, no doubt about that. Brad is a good protagonist, the action moves along at a fast pace, and a very appealing little dog figures heavily in the plot, which isn’t something you see a lot of in Western pulps. I own one novel by Galen C. Colin and I’m sure I’ll read it eventually, but probably not right away.

Next up is the short story “Only Dead Men Leave” by an author I’m not familiar with, Floyd C. Day. It’s about a young man blackmailed into joining an outlaw gang to keep his father’s crimes from being exposed. It’s okay but utterly forgettable. Day only published a few stories, but for different publishers so he seems to have been a real guy, not a house-name.

“Test of Guilt” is by T.W. Ford, a very prolific and generally dependable pulpster who wrote scores of Western and sports yarns. It’s a low-key story about a rancher who has to determine whether his ne’er-do-well brother-in-law is really a murderer. It’s a minor story that Ford probably wrote in a couple of hours, but it’s well-written and effective enough to be entertaining.

The issue concludes with the short story “Hell’s Postmaster” by Cliff Campbell, which was a Columbia Publications house name. Whenever I see a house name, I always suspect that the actual author already has a story in the same issue under his own name or another pseudonym, so I immediately thought that T.W. Ford might be the author of this tale about a two-fisted, fast-on-the-draw postmaster, a stolen gold shipment, and a hidden mine. Based on the style, which includes heavy use of what I call “Yuh mangy polecat” dialect, I don’t think it’s Ford’s work after all. So I don’t know who wrote this yarn, but it has enough over-the-top action in it that I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Overall, I wouldn’t call this an outstanding issue, but every story in it is readable, and despite some reservations about the plotting, I’m glad I finally read a story by Galen C. Colin.