This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat tattered copy in the scan. I’m not sure of the cover artist. Might be Robert Stanley, who did a lot of Western pulp covers for Popular Publications during this time period. But it might not be.
DIME WESTERN, like the other Popular Publications Western pulps, always had
good authors, but there’s a particularly strong lineup in this issue, leading
off with a surprisingly good Walt Coburn novella, considering how late this
story came in his career. “Shoot or Git Shot!” is a son-of-an-outlaw yarn,
where a widowed rustler leaves his six-year-old son with the father of his late
wife. The old-timer raises the boy to be a good man, rather than an owlhoot.
But as usual in a Coburn story, there’s a lot of back-story and not everything
is as it appears to be at first. There’s nothing in this one you won’t see
coming, but it’s well-written and has a nice epic feel to it for a novella.
Plus there’s a great, brutal fistfight and a spectacular shootout to wrap
things up. Coburn was inconsistent by this point, but “Shoot or Git Shot!” is
as good as most of his stories from ten or twenty years earlier.
Frank Bonham probably would be annoyed that one of the main things he's
remembered for these days is his slightly embittered essay “Tarzana Nights”
about his time spent ghostwriting Western pulp stories for Ed Earl Repp. But he
was an excellent writer and that’s on display in “Good Squatters Are Dead
Squatters”, his short story in this issue. It’s a big rancher vs. small rancher
story, but it’s very well-written and does a fine job of capturing the Texas Panhandle
country. The resolution is maybe a little hard to swallow, but this is still a
good story from a consistently good writer.
Clifton Adams was one of the best of the hardboiled Western writers who broke
into the pulps in the late Forties and then went on to write dozens of
excellent novels during the Fifties and Sixties. His story in this issue is a
novelette about a wounded outlaw on the run called “There’s Hell in His Holster!”
It’s a good story in its own right, but it has some historical significance,
too. I believe it’s the first appearance of Tall Cameron, who, a couple of
years later, would be the protagonist of Adams’ iconic Gold Medal novels THE
DESPERADO and A NOOSE FOR THE DESPERADO. Neither of the novels is an expansion
of this story, which is sort of an alternate universe take on the character,
but Adams took a lot of Tall Cameron’s history from this tale.
Wilbur S. Peacock was a pulp editor as well as a writer. He turned out scores
of Western, detective, and science fiction yarns and appears in this issue of
DIME WESTERN with a short-short called “Reward of Merit”, about an old sheriff
who’s been pushed out of his job in favor of a younger man. It’s well-written
but the ending falls flat as far as I’m concerned. I generally like Peacock’s
work but think this one was a misfire.
I’ve read good things about George C. Appell’s stories but don’t recall if I’ve
ever read anything by him before. His short story “The Search” relies on a
gimmick: not revealing one character’s true identity until the very end of the
story. That’s kind of interesting, and the search of the title, a hunt for hidden
loot, has promise, but overall the plot is muddled enough that it’s hard to
follow and I didn’t care much for this story, either.
Peter Dawson, actually Jonathan Glidden, brother of Frederick “Luke Short”
Glidden, was always dependable, and he comes through in this issue with the
novelette “It’s Your Town—Die in It!” The story concerns a new marshal who
believes he’s been roped into a town-taming job under false pretenses. He wants
to abandon the job and leave town, but a beautiful new seamstress just arrived
in the settlement, so maybe she’ll provide a reason for him to stay and have a
showdown with the local hardcases. There’s really not a lot to this story, but
it’s well-written and entertaining.
This issue wraps up with a novella by an author I’ve read quite a bit by lately,
E. Hoffmann Price (although he’s credited incorrectly as E. Hoffman Price on
the cover, TOC, and the story itself). “The Cowman Who Damned His Brand” has a
very intriguing twist: the protagonist, a prospector who enjoys hunting for
gold, falls in love with a woman who wants him to buy a ranch and settle down.
So he buys a spread and inserts himself into the middle of a range war, fully
intending to be a failure so he can convince the girl he needs to go back to
prospecting. Of course, things don’t work out as he planned. This offbeat plot
and Price’s talent for storytelling combine to make this a very good yarn.
This is a solid issue of DIME WESTERN with top-notch stories by Coburn, Bonham,
Dawson, and Price, and the stories I didn’t much care for are readable and
might be more to someone else’s taste. If you have a copy of it, it’s well
worth pulling down from the shelf and reading.
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