This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know who did the cover art, but I’m not very impressed with it. I don’t guess they can all be by Norman Saunders or Robert Stanley or Sam Cherry, can they? Not that I could do any better, I hasten to add. I have no artistic ability whatsoever, so maybe I shouldn’t be complaining.
Anyway, this is the next to last issue of NEW WESTERN, a run that lasted twenty
years. It’s also a pulp that was on the stands after I was born, although being
less than a year old at the time, I doubt if I ever saw a copy back then. It
leads off with a short story, something of a rarity since most pulps had a
novella or novelette in the first position. “Blood Star for Satan” is by
William Heuman, one of my favorite Western authors. The title doesn’t fit the
story at all, and neither does the blurb that some editor at Popular
Publications came up with. However, the story itself is a taut little tale
about an inexperienced lawman having to deal with a trio of train robbers who
ride into his town. Heuman has never disappointed me and he does a fine job
with this suspenseful story.
Next is “Blast a Red Trail!” by Robert L. Trimnell, billed as a novelette on
the Table of Contents but closer to novella length in my opinion. And it packs
in enough plot that it could almost have been a novel. The story opens with the
protagonist, Blaine Sandford, in jail, charged with murdering a man he hired to
help him on his freight line. Sandford is innocent, of course, and the man who
was killed had dropped some hints about having enemies back in the town where
he came from, two hundred miles away. So when Sandford escapes, that’s where he
heads, determined to dig up the secrets of the murdered man’s past and uncover
the real killer.
He winds up in the middle of a war between a freight line operated by a beautiful
young woman known as The Wench and some hired killers and corrupt businessmen
working with the railroad that wants to extend into the area. If that’s not
enough, there’s a lot of psychological drama going on behind the scenes and the
sort of family secrets that often show up in the work of Ross Macdonald, Walt
Coburn, and Max Brand. In fact, this offbeat story reminds me quite a bit of some
of the stories by Max Brand (Frederick Faust).
“Blast a Red Trail!” took me completely by surprise. I’d read only one other
story by Robert L. Trimnell in the past, as far as I recall, and it was a humorous
Western I didn’t like very much. But this story is an absolutely terrific
hardboiled Western yarn with fascinating characters and a terse, fast-moving
style. Trimnell wrote about 120 stories in a pulp career that lasted only eight
years from 1948 to 1956. After that, he wrote one historical novel published by
Lion Books and a number of soft-core novels published by Beacon/Softcover
Library under the pseudonym Brian Black, before turning out a Western series
called The Loner in the Seventies. Those three novels were published under his
real name by Manor Books and are expensive if you can find them. I don’t think
I have any, but I’m going to check my shelves. And I’m certainly going to keep my
eyes open for his name on Western pulp TOCs in the future. I want to read more
by this guy.
“A Man Must Fight” is a short story by Roe Richmond, not one of my favorite
Western authors but one who usually can depended on for a decent story. This
one is very reminiscent of the movie HIGH NOON, with a lawman who is reluctant
to seek help from the townspeople when a couple of outlaws show up intent on
killing him. It’s set up as a moral dilemma story but is resolved pretty
easily. Other than that, it’s okay but not very memorable.
“The Rider From Hell” is another title that must have been slapped on by an
editor at Popular Publications, because it doesn’t fit J.L. Bouma’s story at
all. This is another lawman story as a young deputy with new-fangled ideas
about keeping the peace clashes with a hard-nosed old town-taming marshal of
the “shoot ’em all and sort it out later” school. It’s a low-key tale without
much action, and the drama comes more from the characters than from gunplay. It’s
very well-written, and although this kind of story normally isn’t really in my
wheelhouse, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Bouma is one of those authors who did
mostly good work, published steadily for a long time, never achieved any real
fame, and is mostly forgotten these days. He’s almost always worth reading,
though.
Walt Coburn’s “The Death Dealer” is a long novelette that’s a reprint. It
appeared originally in the July 1938 issue of DIME WESTERN MAGAZINE as “Signed On
to Die”. That title makes a little more sense than “The Death Dealer”, although
quite a bit of death is dealt in this yarn. As usual with Coburn’s work, there’s
a ton of back-story and a plot that’s almost too complicated to follow and difficult
to describe. What we have is a stalwart young cowboy from Montana who buys a
spread in Arizona known as the Haunted Cave Ranch because, well, there’s a cave
on it that may well be haunted. You see, a gang of outlaws used it as a hideout
and there’s a rumor that a fortune in loot is hidden in it. There’s even supposed
to be a map split up in a number of pieces that, if combined, will lead to the
treasure. Throw in not two but three, count ’em, three feuding owlhoot
families, a beautiful girl and her spunky twin brother, a crooked range detective,
some false identities, and last-minute revelations from ’way out in left field,
and you have a confusing but fast-moving, action-packed, and downright compelling
tale . . . which accurately describes a lot of Coburn’s work. This one is goofy
as all get-out, but I still enjoyed it a lot.
I’ve probably mentioned before how I met Fred Grove at the Western Writers of
America convention in San Angelo, Texas, in 1990. Let me tell you, sitting and
talking with Fred Grove for a couple of hours at an outdoor barbecue, under
some giant pecan trees on the banks of the Concho River as the cool of the
evening settled down over West Texas, is a pretty darned good memory. His short
story “Satan’s Saddlemate” wraps up this issue. (What was it with the editor of
this issue? This is the second story with “Satan” in the title, plus we also
have “The Rider From Hell”.) This one is about a cavalry patrol in Texas coming
on a family of settlers massacred by Comanches and trailing the war party back
to their village for a showdown. There’s also a white girl captive to be
rescued. Although there’s some nice action late in this story, most of it is
rather low-key and introspective. Grove was a really fine writer and does a
good job of capturing the time and place. He’s always worth reading, and this story
is no exception.
This is a very solid issue of NEW WESTERN MAGAZINE. There’s not a bad story in
the bunch, and several of them are very good to excellent. If you have a copy
on your shelves, it’s very much worth reading.