Walter Baumhofer is one of my favorite pulp cover artists, and I like this whimsical depiction of a harmonica-playing cowboy fending off an empty tomato can hurled at him by some listener, but I'm not sure how appropriate the scene is for a pulp subtitled "A Magazine of Hair-Trigger Hombres". But maybe that description refers to the music critic instead of the fella with the harmonica. I'd expect something more hard-bitten from a magazine called WESTERN OUTLAWS, but hey, owlhoots can enjoy a tune now and then, too. The best-known author in this issue is William Colt MacDonald, one of the big names of the pulp era and all the way through the Sixties, really. Chart Pitt and Thomas Thursday are on hand, too. Other than that, the writers are all unknown to me: Wolf Wilson, Willard E. Hawkins, Albert Wm. Stone, J.R. Johnson, Al H. Martin, R.T. Barkley, L. Simpson Turner, Charles P. Gordon, and Ludwig Stanley Landmichl. I may have heard, vaguely, of one or two of those, but I don't know anything about them. Still, I like the cover, a little odd though it may be, and MacDonald was always worth reading.
2 comments:
Stone is known to me, but only because I have many of his rejected Argosy rejects that landed in the Chicago Ledger. Likewise, Hawkins also had rejected stories appear in WW1 era CL alongside Stone. Hawkins was extremely prolific and I think also appears in the first Weird Tales, but don’t hold me to that as I’m on the road. Chart Pitt is an old favorite, authoring tons of Frozen North / Wilderness stories. I’m a low-budget fan of his works.
I need to read some of Chart Pitt's stories. He has a great name for a writer.
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