Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, April 1939

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. I don’t have access to a scanner at the moment, so I took a picture of my copy instead, and that’s it above. The cover is by Carl Reiter, and all I know about him is that he did a few pulp covers. As you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I’m a long-time fan of the pulp TEXAS RANGERS and have been reading the Jim Hatfield novels published in it for more than 50 years, since I discovered them in paperback reprints in the Sixties.

This issue is from fairly early in the series’ run, when most of the Hatfield novels were written by either Leslie Scott, the series creator, or Tom Curry. “Vaquero Guns” is one of Curry’s entries, and as usual in his novels, it features a secondary hero. In this case, it’s drifting cowboy Jerry Farmon, who starts the action off by searching for a missing friend of his, a deputy sheriff who disappeared while on the trail of an escaped killer. But Hatfield, a Texas Ranger who’s known as the Lone Wolf, is soon involved, being sent by his boss, Captain “Roarin’” Bill McDowell, to West Texas to break up a gang of masked marauders that has been raiding settlements along the border.

When Hatfield arrives on the scene, he quickly discovers that there’s a violent feud going on between the biggest ranch in the area, the Square A, and everybody else in the region. The Square A’s crew is composed of vaqueros imported from Mexico, and they’re the ones who have been raiding the settlements. Or are they? Could something else actually be going on, something more sinister behind the scenes?

After a long series of gunfights, fistfights, captures, and escapes, Hatfield uncovers the truth and exposes the criminal mastermind who will have been obvious to most readers from very early on in the novel. That’s the main problem with this one. Even for a pulp yarn, everything is just too predictable.

Even so, there are some things to like about “Vaquero Guns”. The opening scene, which features a nighttime escape from a train, is very evocative and well-written. The action scenes are always good in a Curry novel, and the big battles have a nice epic feel. There are clever callbacks to previous Hatfield novels written by Curry. And Hatfield himself is a great character as always, mostly superhuman but still likable and believable. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who hasn’t read a Hatfield novel before, because it really is one of the series’ weaker entries, but as an old-timer, I found it enjoyable reading.

Moving on to the back-up stories, “White Hat for an Outlaw” is by Robert E. Obets, who, under that name and as Bob Obets, wrote scores of stories for various Western pulps between the mid-Thirties and the mid-Fifties. Almost completely forgotten now, he was a solid writer, and his story in this issue is very good. It’s about a young outlaw infiltrating a company of Texas Rangers to lead them into a trap, then having to decide whether he wants to continue on the owlhoot trail or go over to the side of law and order. I liked it quite a bit.

“Gun-Gang Plot” is by an even more forgotten writer, Anson Hard. It’s about a saloon swamper who witnesses a confrontation between a gang of stagecoach robbers and a stranger who might be a Texas Ranger. This one has a twist ending I should have seen coming but didn’t, and again, I enjoyed it.

Syl MacDowell is best remembered for his humorous Swap and Whopper series and the Sheriff Blue Steele series he wrote under the pseudonym Tom Gunn. But he wrote plenty of traditional, stand-alone Western tales, too, including “West of the Pecos” in this issue, which finds a young Ranger trying to rescue the sister of a dead pal from a life of shame and degradation as a soiled dove, although MacDowell is never quite that blunt about what’s going on. This one is well-written and also has a twist ending that’s a little more of a stretch but still effective. I don’t care for Swap and Whopper but have enjoyed everything else I’ve read by MacDowell, including this one.

Given that the Hatfield novel isn’t one of the best and it takes up most of the pages, this is probably a below-average issue of TEXAS RANGERS. Of course, I’m still glad that I read it. If you’re a long-time Hatfield fan like me, you’d probably enjoy it, too.