Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, March 1951

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The cover art is probably by Sam Cherry, although I’m not a hundred percent convinced of that. It’s a nice cover, no matter who painted it. That’s my copy in the scan.

For more than a decade, the stories about Texas Ranger Walt Slade were one of the regular series in THRILLING WESTERN. A. Leslie Scott, under the pseudonym Bradford Scott, wrote more than 70 yarns about Slade, who was also known as El Halcon (The Hawk) and was reputed to be an outlaw, although he was actually an undercover Texas Ranger. “Trail From Yesterday”, the Slade novelette in this issue, is the final pulp story in the series, although as most if not all of you know, a few years later Scott began a series of paperback original novels featuring the character that ran for even longer.

This is an excellent tale for Slade to go out on, as far as his pulp run. Most of the time, these stories find Slade chasing outlaws in the rangelands of West Texas or the brush country of South Texas. “Trail From Yesterday” begins in Dallas (a far different place in the 1880s from what it is today) and the trail of a famous Texas owlhoot was believed to be dead leads Slade to the treacherous swamplands of East Texas, with its dangers of snakes, gators, and quicksand. The plot involves smuggling, gun-running, and a fortune in black opals. Scott packs almost enough material for a novel into this novelette, and he keeps the pace racing along with his usual vivid descriptions and several terrific shootouts. Slade also has a great sidekick in this one, Little Mose Wagner, a black former cowboy who’s too stove up to ride the range anymore, but he functions as Slade’s guide and assistant during this adventure in the swamp. This is great stuff, one of the best Walt Slade pulp yarns I’ve read. Scott was at the top of his game here.

The name Dabney Otis Collins is familiar to me from many Western pulp TOCs, but I don’t recall if I’ve ever read anything by him until now. His short story in this issue, “The Third Outlaw”, is about a fateful encounter between a lone cowboy and a gang of bank robbers on the run from the law as a blizzard is closing in. It’s a very suspenseful, surprisingly hardboiled tale, and I liked it a lot. I’m going to have to keep my eyes open for more by Collins.

The last time I read a Swap and Whopper story by Syl McDowell, I surprised myself by kind of liking it. The S&W story in this issue, “The Roaming Riders”, is pretty entertaining, too. It’s the usual goofy mix of wild circumstances, this time including a runaway pair of pants with all the duo’s money in it, a housing development in the desert of Southern California (this series is a modern-day Western), and an escaped elephant that’s supposed to be in a jungle movie. McDowell pulls it all together and makes it work fairly well. I got a few smiles out of this one. No outright chuckles that I can remember, but the series is growing on me.

Jim O’Mara was a pseudonym of Vernon Fluharty, who also wrote Westerns under the name Michael Carder. He was never all that prolific but he had a steady career producing well-written Westerns. His short story in this issue, “Collateral”, is a cattlemen vs. sodbusters yarn, written from the point of view of a former cowboy turned farmer. It’s a rather bleak yarn, but it has some nice action and a dark but still somewhat hopeful ending. I liked it quite a bit.

The same can’t be said of “Crop o’ Calamity” by Roger Dee (pseudonym of Roger D. Aycock), an author probably best remembered for his science fiction. This is another humorous Western about a couple of characters named Nosy Nolan and Doc Durgin, and it has something to do with escapees from a wild animal show. I don’t know for sure because it’s written in present tense (a style I don’t care for) and is dialect-heavy, and I just didn’t care for it at all, leading me to give up after a few pages. I may be warming up to Swap and Whopper after all these years, but not this one.

Much, much better is “Who’ll Ride With Me”, from the always dependable Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson. This novelette is a reprint from the August 1947 issue of THE RIO KID WESTERN. It’s a cavalry vs. the Apaches yarn set in Arizona Territory, and as usual when Wheeler-Nicholson is writing about the military, there’s a real ring of authenticity to it. Some great action, although the ending isn’t quite as dramatic as it could have been. This story is also a good example of how the late Jon Tuska was wrong when he claimed that pulp editors wouldn’t allow romances between white and Hispanic characters. There’s a nicely handled romantic angle between the white cavalry lieutenant who’s the protagonist and the beautiful daughter of a Mexican rancher, and it’s written the same as any other romance in a Western pulp.

Harold F. Cruickshank wrote a lot of air war stories early in his pulp career and then became a prolific Western pulpster. I’ve never cared for his Pioneer Folk series that ran in RANGE RIDERS WESTERN. He has a stand-alone short story, “Prodigal Gun Thunder”, in this issue. It’s about a young man framed for being a horse thief who returns home from a stretch in prison to get to the bottom of things and settle the score. It’s a definite improvement over the other Western stories by Cruickshank that I’ve read, but there’s still something about his writing that just doesn’t resonate with me.

Harvey Ivison is a brand-new name to me. He wrote only a few stories for the pulps. His story “Thataway” is about a fugitive from the law who isn’t exactly what he appears to be. On the run from a posse, he shows up at a ranch where there’s a badly injured man, and unexpected things happen. This story is written with a very nice hardboiled tone that includes a few traces of dry humor. I really liked it and will have to be on the lookout for more stories by Harvey Ivison.

This issue concludes with a condensed novel, SCORPION by Will James. Is there a difference between a condensed novel and an abridged novel? I don’t know, but I feel like there should be. In a condensed novel, you take out words here and lines there, right? Whereas in an abridged novel, you take out entire scenes or sections. I have no idea which approach was taken in producing the version of SCORPION printed here. I remember reading James’s horse novel SMOKY when I was a kid, but that’s all I could tell you about it. SCORPION is a horse novel, too, and while I wanted to like it, page after page of horse-breaking narrative with no dialogue or actual plot did me in. I didn’t read this one, either. I just don’t have the time or patience I once did.

So the March 1951 issue of THRILLING WESTERN turns out to be a really mixed bag. The Walt Slade story by Scott is superb. The stories by Collins, O’Mara, Wheeler-Nicholson, and Ivison are all very good to excellent. The Swap and Whopper yarn by McDowell is okay, the Cruickshank story is readable but forgettable, and I didn’t finish the other two. As always, some of you might enjoy the stories I didn’t, so if you have this issue on your shelves, it’s worth taking down and sampling its contents.