The Stock Tank Mystery

“The Stock Tank Mystery”. Sounds like the title of a Hardy Boys book, doesn’t it? But in reality, it’s an on-going mystery I’ve been meaning to do a post about for a while now, and it’s finally deepened to the point that I have to.

For those of you unfamiliar with stock tanks, they’re ponds that are usually created by bulldozing up shallow walls of dirt on three sides of some gently sloping ground to form a reservoir in which rainwater collects. There was one in the field on the other side of the creek from where I grew up. I nicknamed it The Volcano. They’re used for watering livestock, hence the name, but this being Texas, more often than not they’re dry. You can tell how much rain we’ve gotten by whether or not there’s any water in the stock tanks.

There’s one about a mile and a half up the road from where we live. The image above isn't the actual tank, it's just one I found online, but the one I'm talking about looks similar. A few years ago, I was driving past it when I noticed a small boat sitting in the middle of it. I’m not a boat guy so I can’t go into details, but it looked to me like the kind of boat you’d take out fishing on a lake. It sat there, and the next time it rained and the tank got enough water in it, the boat floated and drifted around a little. But then the water dried up, and the boat sat there on the dry, cracked dirt.

Time passed.

And then, out of the blue, a second boat appeared, very similar to the first. Now there were two of them sitting in the dry stock tank, floating a little when there was water in it, and then sitting some more.

More time passed.

Then, about a year ago, something else appeared in the stock tank, but it wasn’t another boat. No, it was the tail assembly of a small airplane. Just sitting there with the boats, but it doesn’t move when water collects. I guess because it’s built to fly, not to float.

Now we come to today. I was driving by this morning and I noticed something new had been added to the collection. Sitting in the middle of the dry stock tank is a four-or-five-foot-tall replica of the Statue of Liberty, uplifted torch and all. I just kind of shook my head and drove on because I had places to be, but when I went back by later I checked again, and my eyes hadn’t played tricks on me. The Statue of Liberty was still there, beckoning the huddled masses to the other side of the stock tank.

I have no explanation for any of this, but never mind what I said about the Hardy Boys. This is starting to feel more like I’m living in a Harry Stephen Keeler novel, for those of you familiar with his work. Maybe someday I’ll find out the connection between two fishing boats, a small airplane tail assembly, and the Statue of Liberty. But for now, I’ll just have to remain puzzled.

Review: Weasels Ripped My Flesh!: The Illustrated Men's Adventure Anthology - Robert Deis, Wyatt Doyle, and Josh Alan Friedman, eds.

When Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle published the original edition of WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! TWO-FISTED STORIES FROM MEN’S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES back in 2013, it was the first book reprinting such stories in decades. There were paperback collections of stories from the men’s adventure magazines back in the Fifties and Sixties, but nothing since then as far as I know. The original edition of this book was successful enough that it launched an entire line of such reprints known as the Men’s Adventure Library, as well as the fantastic MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY.

Now, Deis and Doyle have published an updated deluxe edition of this landmark volume that started it all. It’s one of the most beautifully produced books I’ve ever seen, with more cover reproductions and interior illustrations, better printing, full color, and updated and expanded articles and story introductions.

In addition to that, you have the stories themselves, of course, which are hugely entertaining. I’ll be honest with you, I was just going to skim through this new edition and read the updated material, but time and again, I found myself stopping to reread and enjoy all over again some of the stories. It was great fun revisiting these wild yarns by such authors as Lawrence Block, Robert Silverberg, Walter Wager, and Harlan Ellison. I found myself appreciating even more the talents of the legendary Walter Kaylin, who has two stories in this book. And it brought back fond memories of another author with a pair of stories included, Robert F. Dorr, who I was fortunate enough to correspond with, talk to on the phone, and consider a friend before he passed away.

If I had to pick one story that knocked me out even more this time, it would be “I Was a Slave of the Savage Blonde” by Emile C. Schurmacher, from the Summer 1956 issue of HUNTING ADVENTURES. This tale of a two-fisted botanist lost in the jungles of Paraguay, captured by fierce natives, and enslaved by the beautiful blond Spanish anthropologist who has become the tribe’s queen is well-written and moves at a breakneck pace. I remember enjoying it the first time I read it, but I really got swept up in it this time, to the point that I ordered several paperback collections of Schurmacher’s stories from the men’s adventure magazines.

As I’ve mentioned before, I would see these magazines on the stands when I was a kid and really wanted to buy some of them, but I never did. Now, thanks to the efforts of Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle, I can read some of the best stories from them, and I really appreciate that. The new edition of WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH!: THE ILLUSTRATED MEN’S ADVENTURE ANTHOLOGY is available in hardback and trade paperback editions from Amazon or directly from the publisher here or here. If you’re a fan of great art and wild, over-the-top storytelling like I am, I give it my highest recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: G-Men, November 1935

As some of you know, I’m a long-time fan of the Dan Fowler series. Fowler, ace agent of the F.B.I., had his adventures chronicled in the pages of the pulp G-MEN (later G-MEN DETECTIVE) for many years, first under the house-name C.K.M. Scanlon and then later under the real names of the various authors who contributed novels to the series. The November 1935 issue of G-MEN, sporting a cover possibly by Richard Lyon, contains the second Dan Fowler novel, which has a great title: “Bring ’Em Back Dead”.

I don’t own this issue, but I do have a copy of BRING ’EM BACK DEAD, a great collection from Black Dog Books that reprints the first three Dan Fowler novels. I read and reviewed the first one, “Snatch!”, a while back, and now I’ve moved on to the second novel in the series. In this one, Fowler and his friend and fellow agent Larry Kendal are after a gang responsible for multiple thefts of silk shipments once they’ve arrived from the Orient and are on their way to wholesalers in the United States. There’s a great sequence on board a train that takes up the first part of the story, with shootouts, chases, and the grisly murder of a young agent. The crooks get away, but with Dan Fowler on their trail, you know they’ll run out of luck sooner or later.

The Fowler novels are a very appealing blend of well-done procedural drama and terrific action scenes. That’s the case in this one as Fowler and Kendal prove to be dogged investigators, as usual, but can also throw a punch or handle a tommy gun with great skill. Beautiful blond Sally Vane, the love of Dan’s life, joins the Bureau after helping out as an amateur in the previous novel and comes in for her own share of the action.

Like “Snatch!”, “Bring ’Em Back Dead” was written by the creator of the series, George Fielding Eliot, under the C.K.M. Scanlon name. Most of the Fowler novels I’ve read have been from later in the series, but I really like these early ones. I give a high recommendation to the Black Dog Books reprint volume, which is available in both e-book and paperback editions.

Since I don’t own the actual pulp issue, I haven’t read the two backup stories, but they’re by Tom Curry, whose Westerns I enjoy, and Joe Archibald, whose work is kind of hit-and-miss for me, but many of his stories are good. I suspect I’ll be reading another Dan Fowler story relatively soon. It’s a great series. And it occurred to me while I was reading this one that it’s a shame Republic Pictures never made a Dan Fowler serial directed by William Witney and John English and starring Clayton Moore as Dan. Well, I can imagine it, can’t I?

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Street & Smith's Western Story, May 24, 1941

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The cover is by H.W. Scott, and while I normally like Scott’s work quite a bit, this cover strikes me as being pretty drab. It wouldn’t have caught my eye on a newsstand in 1941, I don’t think. However, I read it now because I was in the mood for an issue of STREET & SMITH’S WESTERN STORY, the most venerable of Western pulps. Also, I was curious about the work of Ney N. Geer, an odd name I’d seen before, and he wrote the lead novella in this issue, “Gun Packer By Proxy”.

Geer published 34 stories in a short career that ran from 1936 to 1943. All but two of them were published in STREET & SMITH’S WESTERN STORY, so obviously he found a receptive market there. The two stories published elsewhere were in WESTERN ADVENTURES, also a Street & Smith pulp, and WESTERN TRAILS from Ace. His only series character (13 stories) was someone named Potluck Jones. I haven’t read any of them so I don’t know anything about ol’ Potluck, but I’ll admit, the name doesn’t make me optimistic. Geer had only four books published, Western novels in 1936, ’37, and ’39 and then a Potluck Jones novel (probably a fix-up from some of the pulp stories) published only in England in the early Forties. I found a Ney Napolean Geer, born in Ohio in 1895 and died in Washington in 1974, and feel confident this must be the Western pulpster. But that’s all I was able to come up with about him. Why he stopped writing in 1943 remains a mystery, although it’s possible he could have continued under another name.

His story in this issue starts with gunman Jim Westover in Nevada looking for his twin brother Bob. Bob, who is also a hired gun, has signed on with one side in a range war, but Jim doesn’t know any more details than that. On his way to the town of Silver Butte, he makes a tragic discovery: the body of his brother, bushwhacked and murdered. There are several clues to the killer’s identity. Since they were twins, Jim decides to masquerade as his brother and try to find out what happened. This puts him in the middle of the range war, of course, where he clashes with gunnies on both sides and tangles with some rustlers.

The twin gimmick put me off a little at first, but I stuck with the story and soon got caught up in it. Geer’s writing is smooth and relatively fast-paced. This novella reminded me of the work of the Glidden brothers, better known as Luke Short and Peter Dawson. I thought that maybe I’d found another author well worth looking for . . . and then I got to the ending, which is one of the worst I’ve ever come across in a Western pulp, totally undramatic, an anticlimax that left a bad taste in my mouth. I’d read another story by Geer, but I’d be a little bit leery going into it.

When I was a kid, I loved Jim Kjelgaard’s juvenile novels about dogs but had no idea he was a pulp writer starting out. He specialized in animal stories, and despite my fondness for such when I was young, I have a hard time reading stories like that now. However, I stuck with “Sled Dog Savvy”, Kjelgaard’s short story in this issue and was glad I did. It’s a Northern about a Husky who’s stolen from his master by an unscrupulous trapper and the dog’s struggle to survive and be reunited with the human he loves. It’s a moving, well-written yarn. I wouldn’t want a steady diet of such stories, but I enjoyed this one.

Cherry Wilson was one of the few female authors who contributed prolifically to the Western pulps. A couple of others who come to mind are Eli Colter and C.K. Shaw. The protagonist of Wilson’s story in this issue, “Range of Hate”, has his hands full trying to prevent a war between cattlemen and nesters while at the same time trying to prevent a young man he regards as his surrogate son from turning outlaw. To complicate things, the youngster is the actual son of a woman he once loved, who chose another man over him. The domestic drama is even more complex than that, but that’s enough about it. Wilson does a good job of balancing all those elements and providing a satisfying story, although the ending is pretty bittersweet. I don’t recall ever reading anything by Wilson before, but I certainly would again.

Mojave Lloyd is known to be a pseudonym, but as far as I’m aware, nobody had ever figured out the author’s real identity. I’ve read one or two by him and haven’t cared much for them. So I wasn’t expecting much when I read “Bottle-Neck Boomerang”, his story in this issue. I was very pleasantly surprised by this tale of a Chinese cowboy trying to start his own ranch and being caught between a couple of range hogs. The protagonist is known as Shanghai Sam. He came to the United States to study religion but decided to take off for the tall and uncut and become a cowboy instead. He’s big, burly, and very intelligent, as the clever plot of this story demonstrates. I don’t know if there are any more Shanghai Sam stories, but I’d be happy to read there if there were. It should be noted that some modern readers might be offended by this story, but they really shouldn’t be. Shanghai Sam is a great protagonist and this is a very entertaining story.

Russell A. Bankson is one of those vaguely familiar names to me. And it should be familiar since he wrote hundreds of stories, mostly Westerns, in a career that stretched from 1915 to 1957. But if I’ve ever read anything by him before, I don’t remember it. His story in this issue, “Lawman’s Jackpot”, is about a lawman’s desperate plan to keep from being killed by an outlaw whose younger brother was killed in a shootout with the protagonist. It’s a well-written story and generates a decent amount of suspense.

There’s also a serial installment from the novel THE STAGLINE FEUD by Peter Dawson (Jonathan Glidden). I normally don’t read serial installments in pulps unless I have all of them, and I read the novel version of this one some twenty years ago, so I skipped this one and the usual columns and features on guns, travel, and penpals.

I don’t really know how to rate this issue of STREET & SMITH’S WESTERN STORY. The short stories are all good but not great. I thought the lead novel by Ney N. Geer was excellent until I got to the final two pages that just about ruined it for me. So, was it worth reading? Sure, it’s a Western pulp. I consider reading them time well spent even when an issue isn’t top-notch. But as I’ve said before, don’t rush to your shelves to look for this one.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Love Me--and Die! - Day Keene and Gil Brewer

The origins of Day Keene’s 1951 novel LOVE ME--AND DIE! are a little murky. According to Gil Brewer’s stepdaughter, Brewer ghosted this novel for Keene, expanding one of Keene’s pulp stories to book length. One website identifies the source novella as “Marry the Sixth for Murder”, from the May 1948 issue of DETECTIVE TALES. This seems pretty feasible to me. Keene and Brewer were friends, and since Keene was already an established writer as the Fifties began, with more than ten years as a popular pulp author under his belt, I can easily see him farming out this expansion to Brewer. Whether LOVE ME--AND DIE! was written before or after the first two novels Brewer sold to Gold Medal, SATAN IS A WOMAN and SO RICH, SO DEAD (both of which also came out in 1951), I have no idea. But since Brewer probably used quite a bit of Keene’s original novella, I think the book-length version can be regarded as a true collaboration between two of the top suspense novelists of the Fifties. But the question remains, is it any good?

Well, yeah. What did you expect?

The narrator/protagonist of LOVE ME--AND DIE! is Johnny Slagle (not a great name for the hero of a book like this). Like W.T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox and Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner before him and Carter Brown’s Rick Holman after him, Slagle is a Hollywood troubleshooter, a private eye who’s on retainer to the movie studios to keep their big stars out of trouble. As such, he gets a call in the middle of the night from an aging, many-times-married screen idol who thinks he has just run over a woman while driving drunk in the middle of a rainstorm. He’s not sure, though, because he didn’t stop to check. That job falls to Slagle, who has to find out if his client is really a hit-and-run killer, and if so, figure out a way to cover it up.

Of course, things don’t stay that simple. Gamblers and starlets and thugs are involved, as well as a gun-toting cowboy from Oklahoma, and wouldn’t you know it, not only does Johnny get hit on the head and knocked out a couple of times, but there’s another murder and he’s framed for it, which means he has to dodge the cops while trying to find the real killer. Yes, it’s a standard plot, but Keene and Brewer throw in some nice twists on it, holding back two of them until very late in the book.

The key to a book like this is the writing, and the pace never slows down for very long in this one, which is all to the good. For the most part, it lacks the intensity of some of Brewer’s other books, but there are a few scenes that vividly capture the sweaty desperation that threatens to overwhelm most of his protagonists. I got the feeling that maybe Brewer was holding back a little on his natural voice as he expanded Keene’s novella, perhaps in an effort to make the book sound more like Keene’s work. I don’t know the details of their arrangement, so I can only speculate. As it is, the blend is a good one. LOVE ME--AND DIE! is no lost classic or anything – it’s just a shade too generic for that – but if you’re like me and grew up reading and loving books like this, I think you’ll thoroughly enjoy it.

Originally published as a digest-sized novel by Phantom Books, it was reprinted by Harlequin in the Fifties, Paperback Library in the Sixties, and Manor Books in the Seventies (the edition I stumbled across and read). A few copies of the earlier editions are available on-line, but they’re pricey. The Manor edition doesn’t show up at all. (A few years ago it was reprinted by Armchair Fiction in a double volume with YOU'LL GET YOURS by Thomas Wills (actually William Ard). I've seen claims that some of the Armchair Fiction books are abridged, but I don't know one way or the other. Just sayin'.) If you happen to have a copy of any of these editions on your shelves but have never read it, I think LOVE ME--AND DIE! is well worth the time.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on July 31, 2009.)

Review: The Sargasso of Space - Edmond Hamilton

I was in the mood for some classic, old-style science fiction, so I read “The Sargasso of Space”, a novelette by Edmond Hamilton first published in the September 1931 issue of ASTOUNDING STORIES, when it was still a Clayton pulp. The cover of that issue is by H.W. Wessolowski. I’ve never been a big fan of Wesso’s work, but I like this cover quite a bit. It’s taken right from Hamilton’s story, which is available on Amazon in an inexpensive e-book edition.

This is a near-space story, set entirely in our solar system, and it’s small in scope for a Hamilton yarn. No galaxy-busting epic here. The crew of the space freighter Pallas find themselves in dire straits indeed: due to a leak that wasn’t discovered until it was too late, the ship has lost its fuel and is adrift. It’s headed into the so-called Sargasso of Space, where the gravitational pull of all the bodies in the solar system is exactly equal, so powerless ships are stuck there. In fact, as our intrepid spacemen soon discover, thousands of dead ships have clumped together there, and the Pallas is soon added to this grim monument to gravitational forces.

But they also soon discover they’re not the only ones alive in this graveyard of spaceships. The stalwart second officer has come up with a plan that might save all of them, especially if they team up with the survivors of previously trapped ships. The question on which all their lives ride is—can those survivors be trusted?

I don’t think you’ll have much trouble figuring out what’s going to happen in this story. What matters is how much entertainment value Hamilton generates from it. Some of the reviews I’ve read online complain about the science. Hamilton makes it sound plausible, and it works for the story he wants to tell, and the story was published nearly a hundred years ago, so what do I care if the science is accurate? As Neal Barrett once said to me, “Who do I look like? Mr. Wizard?” (Those of you of a certain age will understand that reference.) Other reviewers point out the lack of characterization. Yeah, there’s not much, but I doubt if the readers of ASTOUNDING STORIES in 1931 cared about that. The wooden dialogue probably didn’t bother them much, either.

But what you get instead is a graveyard of wrecked spaceships! And guys in spacesuits fighting! And a beautiful girl to be saved! Did I want anything else when I sat down to read this story? No. No, I did not. I wanted action, adventure, and a sense of wonder, and that’s exactly whe I got. If you’re ever in the mood for the same things, you could do a lot worse than “The Sargasso of Space”.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: The Basket (1999)

As you know if you’ve read this blog for very long, I’m a sucker for inspirational sports movies. THE BASKET, from 1999, has the added appeal of being a historical movie about an era and setting that haven’t been done to death. The time is shortly after World War I, the place the wheat-farming country of eastern Washington state where a small community is still feeling the effects of the war. The son of one of the local families who lost a leg during the war returns home. A new teacher takes over the local school, bringing with him some opera records and a game that’s new to most of these farming families: basketball. And two youngsters, brother and sister, who are German refugees, come to live with the local doctor.

THE BASKET is pure fiction, not based on or inspired by true events, but that won’t stop you from being able to predict everything that’s going to happen in it. Tragedy strikes, people learn and grow, and it all comes down to a big game at the end as a team of local amateurs takes on an undefeated team from the big city, Spokane. The appeal of a movie like this with a script that doesn’t contain any surprises is how well it’s executed.

In that respect, THE BASKET is pretty good. The cast is led by Peter Coyote as the new teacher and Karen Allen as the mother of the boy who loses a leg in the war. Eric Dane, who went on to star in GREY’S ANATOMY and THE LAST SHIP, looks impossibly young as one of the students. Ellen and Joey Travolta, John’s sister and brother, show up in minor roles. Nobody else is anybody you’ve ever heard of, but the whole cast does a good job. And the movie looks great, really capturing the agricultural landscape and the feel of the times.

THE BASKET isn’t a lost gem. But it’s a pleasant, relatively heartwarming way to spend a couple of hours. The older I get, the more I feel that sometimes that’s plenty for me.

#425

I wrapped up my 425th novel yesterday. I think that's a milestone worthy of a blog post and something I never seriously dreamed of achieving when I started out in this business all those years ago. I'm more convinced than ever that writing 500 novels is out of reach for me. Even 450 seems like a stretch considering how much I've already slowed down and how much I'd like to slow down even more. But that's one thing about life . . . you never know. For now, I'm proud and happy to have gotten this far, and I appreciate all readers and editors and publishers who have made it possible, and special thanks, as always, to my daughters who have helped so much, and to Livia, without whom it never would have happened.

Now I have another book to write, so I'd better get at it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1948

This issue of THRILLING WONDER STORIES has a good, if somewhat offbeat, cover by Earle Bergey. I don't think I've ever seen a Bergey cover that I didn't like. And the lineup of authors inside can't be beat: Arthur Leo Zagat, Henry Kuttner, Arthur J. Burks, Carl Jacobi, Frank Belknap Long, George O. Smith, and a couple of pseudonyms, Matt Lee (who was really Sam Merwin Jr.) and Kenneth Putnam (who was really Philip Klass, much better known under his pseudonym William Tenn). I don't own this issue, but if you want to check it out, the whole thing is online here.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 5 Western Novels Magazine, June 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. My copy isn’t in the greatest shape, but that’s it in the scan, featuring a nice, evocative cover by Clarence Doore. You can feel the sweltering heat just looking at it, can’t you? One oddity of note is that it’s 5 WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE on the cover and the masthead on the title page, but FIVE WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE on the spine, the indicia, and the page headers. I’m going to make the arbitrary decision to use the version with the number when I refer to it in this post.

Calling this 5 WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE was something of an exaggeration, of course. The contents actually consist of three novellas, two novelettes, and a bonus short story. This title was, for the most part, a reprint pulp. There’s only one original story in this issue, and that’s the novella that leads things off, “Pistol Partners” by Lee Floren.

Now, Lee Floren has never been one of my favorite Western authors, but I’m coming to enjoy his work more over time. Also, this story features his longest-running series characters, Buckshot McKee and Tortilla Joe, a couple of drifting cowpokes who always manage to wind up in the middle of dangerous situations and sinister mysteries. I’ve read several novels starring Buck and Joe and enjoyed them. In “Pistol Partners”, they’ve come to New Mexico to answer a call for help from an old friend who is sick and has to go to the hospital. He wants Buck and Joe to take care of his pet cat for him.

That cat turns out to be a tame mountain lion named Madagascar Jones. The “hospital” in which the old friend is holed up is a boarding house run by a beautiful former madam, and all the boarders are beautiful saloon girls, one of whom is the unlikely bride of the old codger who summoned Buck and Joe. A ruthless cattle baron wants the old-timer’s land, several men have been killed, supposedly by the mountain lion Madagascar Jones, and Buck and Joe get shot at several times. This is the goofiest Lee Floren story I’ve read, rivaling W.C. Tuttle’s Sheriff Henry yarns in places. But it’s also full of action, well-plotted, and a lot of fun. There are a few examples of the slapdash writing common in Floren’s work—a guy rides up on horseback, for example, and in the very next paragraph he came up on foot and his horse is hidden in the brush—but if you can forgive that, and I can, “Pistol Partners” is pretty darned enjoyable.

William Hopson’s novelette “Trail Drive Boss” first appeared in the September 1945 issue of POPULAR WESTERN. As you can tell from the title, it’s a trail drive yarn in which a young cattleman butts heads with a crooked town boss who controls the only water in the area and uses exorbitant prices to steal herds. There’s also a beautiful woman involved, of course, and not everything is as it seems at first. Hopson was inconsistent but mostly very good, and this is an excellent tale that I enjoyed.

“Sixgun Sweepstakes”, a novella by Walker A. Tompkins, is a reprint from the June 1948 issue of POPULAR WESTERN. Tompkins is a long-time favorite of mine, and he doesn’t disappoint in this story about a town-taming lawman from Texas who’s the marshal of a town in Washington state. He throws in an intriguing angle about the friction between ranchers and wheat farmers but never really does anything with that plot element. Instead, this is a Fourth of July story with a rodeo and a big celebration highlighted by a stagecoach race. One of the marshal’s old enemies shows up in town before the shindig begins, and the romantic triangle between the two of them and the beautiful daughter of a state senator complicates matters before the villain’s true plan is revealed.

Tompkins is in good form in this story. There’s plenty of action, a fight on a train, the stagecoach race, and a few plot twists. It would have been better if the fight had been on top of the train (anybody who’s read much of my work knows I love those scenes), and a running shootout during the stagecoach race would have been nice. But that’s just me. “Sixgun Sweepstakes” is a solid yarn that would have made a good 1950s Western movie.

The novella “Dead Man’s Gold” by Larry A. Harris first appeared in the June 1948 issue of THRILLING WESTERN. A young man’s search for a fortune in gold supposedly hidden by his crazy uncle in the Devil’s River country of Texas puts him in conflict with a crooked banker and a corrupt lawman. The story moves right along and there’s plenty of action, but the writing is pretty flat and bland and the protagonist is so stupid that it stretches the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief too far. He does one dumb thing after another just to keep the plot going. Harris wrote hundreds of stories for the pulps but only a few novels, all of them featuring the Masked Rider. One of those was reprinted in paperback, Harris’s only book publication that I know of. I’ve read a few things by him in the past and found them okay at best. This one is a clear misfire.

The short story “Reunion at Amigo” is by veteran Western writer Allan K. Echols and originally appeared in the June 1948 issue of MASKED RIDER WESTERN. It’s about an old outlaw who has escaped from prison and is searching for his son. It’s pretty well-written overall, but the final twist is so obvious that it detracts quite a bit from the story’s appeal.

This issue wraps up with “The Necktie Party”, a novelette by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson from the July 1948 issue of EXCITING WESTERN. At first glance, this is a cavalry vs. the Apaches yarn, but as it turns out, there’s more to it than that as a young lieutenant tries to save a civilian scout from being lynched, prevent a new Indian war, and round up the bad guys, all at the same time. As always, Wheeler-Nicholson brings an undeniable air of authenticity to a story with a military background. This is an enjoyable tale weakened by an ending that’s not very dramatic and resolves things too easily.

As far as I remember, this is the first issue of 5 WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE, so I don’t have any basis to compare and say how it stacks up against the others in the series. Just as a Western pulp, though, I think it’s a little below average. I was surprised at how good the Floren story is, and there’s nothing wrong with the Hopson tale, but the entries by Tompkins, Wheeler-Nicholson, and Echols were good but could have been better, and the one by Harris just isn’t very good. I really like the cover by Clarence Doore, though. Overall, probably worth reading, but don’t rush to your shelves to see if you have a copy.

Review: Kit Sloan, Texas Bounty Hunter #1: Wolf's Crossing - Jamie Mason

I’ve edited several of Jamie Mason’s novels in the past, but these days I read them as a fan of his work. His recent novel KIT SLOAN, TEXAS BOUNTY HUNTER: WOLF’S CROSSING is the first book in a new Western series from Dusty Saddle Publishing, and it promises to be a very good one.

Despite the title, WOLF’S CROSSING takes place in Arizona, not Texas, but Kit Sloan, who rode as a guerrilla with Quantrill during the Civil War, is a bounty hunter. However, in this book he’s not after a wanted fugitive. Instead, he’s hired by a wealthy rancher to track down and recover a very valuable bull that’s been stolen. The rancher sends one of his sons along to accompany Sloan, a stipulation that the bounty hunter doesn’t like but has to accept if he wants the job.

Sloan and the young man pick up a third member of their group in short order: an Apache woman whose family has been wiped out by the same vicious outlaws who stole the bull. Sloan doesn’t like taking her along, either, but again he has no choice. He’d rather have her where he can keep an eye on her.

Their quarry is a young Mexican bandit known as Kid Danny, who is accompanied by his grandmother, who’s just as ruthless and dangerous as he is, and an Irish mercenary. Sloan and his companions catch up to them at Wolf’s Crossing, an isolated settlement near the Arizona-Mexico border, and as you might expect, all hell breaks loose.

This is a very entertaining, action-packed Western. Kit Sloan is plenty tough and hardboiled, but he’s also a likable protagonist. Kid Danny is a great villain, as despicable as they come despite his youth and innocent appearance. There are a few plot twists to liven things up, and the plentiful action scenes are top-notch. This isn’t as bloody as, say, a Piccadilly Cowboys Westerns, but it’s got plenty of bark on it. I had a really good time reading WOLF’S CROSSING. If you enjoy hard-edged Westerns, there’s a good chance you will, too. It’s currently available as an e-book on Amazon with a print edition in the works.

Review: Conan the Barbarian: Thrice Marked for Death - Jim Zub and Doug Braithwaite

When the latest incarnation of the Conan comic book series began being published, I decided to read the individual issues as they came out, just like I did in the old days—the difference being that I read them digitally instead of on cheap newsprint. (For the record, I prefer cheap newsprint over digital, but I prefer digital over slick paper.) After finishing the first story arc, however, I decided to wait for the collected edition of the next arc. It just seemed simpler that way, plus I get to read the stories one right after the other.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN: THRICE MARKED FOR DEATH reprints issues #5-8 of the series and deepens Conan’s involvement with the mysterious and deadly Black Stone. It’s written by Jim Zub and the art is by Doug Braithwaite. The story begins with Conan in the city of Shadizar, mourning the death of Belit, the pirate queen and great love of his life, who Conan met in Robert E. Howard’s classic story “Queen of the Black Coast”. Short flashbacks to Conan’s time with Belit run throughout these stories. The main storyline, however, involves Conan being hired along with several other thieves to steal an artifact from one of the local temples. Things go wrong. Evil ensues. Lot of people die. And Conan is left in a heap of trouble.

Despite the dreaded “To Be Continued” at the end of this book, I enjoyed THRICE MARKED FOR DEATH quite a bit. Jim Zub’s script is fast-paced and packed with action, and more importantly, he writes a version of Conan that is recognizably REH’s character. Really, that’s what you’re looking for in a Conan pastiche. Doug Braithwaite’s art is excellent, with good storytelling and a gritty quality that really works well with the story.

All of this is leading up to a big crossover event featuring numerous Howard characters besides Conan. I’m not that fond of the idea of doing that, but given Zub’s track record, I’m cautiously optimistic that he can pull it off. I certainly intend to continue reading in order to find out. In the meantime, THRICE MARKED FOR DEATH is an entertaining yarn and is available in e-book and trade paperback editions.

Bibliography of Jim Hatfield/Walt Slade Novels and Stories by A. Leslie Scott

I'm happy to announce that the A. Leslie Scott bibliography Anders Nilsson and I have been working on is available for free download on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/lesliescott_bibliography_nilssonreasoner_2024/mode/1up

This includes a brief biography of Scott, a detailed listing of all his Jim Hatfield and Walt Slade novels and stories, and information about all the rewritten and expanded versions of the stories when they were published later as hardback and paperback novels. There's also the most complete listing to date of Scott's non-series novels and many excellent cover scans of various publications. Putting this together has been a real labor of love, and Anders has done all the heavy lifting, make no mistake about that. But I'm proud to have been able to help and to be included in this project. If you have any interest in Leslie Scott, the Western pulps, or Western fiction in general, I'm sure you'll find it entertaining and informative, and I hope you'll check it out.

Review: Killer Tarmac - T.W. Ford (Sky Birds, September 1934)

I read a Western pulp story by T.W. Ford a while back and enjoyed it, as I nearly always do with his Westerns, but being in the mood for something different, I decided to try one of his air war stories. I’d never read anything but Westerns and the occasional detective yarn by Ford.

In “Killer Tarmac”, originally published in the September 1934 issue of SKY BIRDS, stalwart young replacement pilot Art Crain arrives at an aerodrome in France with two things in mind: fighting the Boche, and getting revenge on the two men he blames for the death of his best friend, who was shot down battling the deadly German ace von Kunnel, also known as the Black Tiger. In addition to wanting vengeance on von Kunnel, Art also blames the squadron commander, Major “Bloody” Doll, who accused Art’s friend of cowardice and shamed him into facing von Kunnel alone.

However, once Art finds out more about what happened to his friend, he discovers that not everything is as it seems. While mixing in some top-notch dogfight action, Ford creates some memorable characters who don’t turn out at all like I expected. He does a masterful job of yanking the reader’s sympathies back and forth with each new plot twist. Art Crain is our protagonist, no mistake about that, but as for everyone else in this novella, we’re not sure who to root for, and as Ford leads up to a very suspenseful climax, I had no idea what was going to happen.

“Killer Tarmac” is a fabulous story, just a tad melodramatic and over-the-top now and then but in a good way, and told in terse, hardboiled prose that races along like a Nieuport in the middle of a dogfight. A PDF of it can be downloaded from the Age of Aces website. If you’ve never read an aviation/air war pulp story before, this would be a great place to start.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947)

I’ve been a big fan of Cary Grant’s movies for a long time, but there are some I’ve just never gotten around to watching. I’m not sure how I missed THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBY-SOXER, from 1947, since it ran endlessly on TV when I was a kid, but I’ve seen it now. Probably most of you have, too, so bear with me.

Grant plays Richard Nugent, a famous painter who’s also something of a ladies’ man. After a nightclub brawl, he comes up in front of Judge Margaret Turner (Myrna Loy, who will always be Nora Charles to me), who lets all the participants go with a warning not to get into any more trouble, especially Nugent. Later, he gives a lecture on art at the high school where Judge Turner’s younger sister Susan (Shirley Temple, no longer a child star but a cute 19-year-old in real life) is a student. Susan falls in love with Nugent, sneaks into his apartment, and is caught there with him the next morning by her sister and the assistant district attorney (Rudy Vallee, of all people). Nothing happened, but the impropriety of the situation lands Nugent in trouble, as does the punch he lands on the ADA’s jaw. After that, the court psychiatrist, who happens to be the uncle of the Turner sisters and is played by Ray Collins, who will always be Lt. Tragg from PERRY MASON as far as I’m concerned, hatches the crazy scheme of having Nugent pretend to date Susan so that she’ll grow tired of him naturally and realize he’s much too old for her.

If you’ve followed all that convoluted set-up so far, you’ll know that it’s all just a flimsy excuse for Grant to act like a teenager, spouting slang and driving a jalopy and being his usual charming but flustered self. It’s a well-worn bit, but let’s face it, nobody was ever better at it than Cary Grant. And there are no bonus points for anticipating that a real romance will develop between Grant and Loy, who admittedly have some pretty darned good screen chemistry together.

The cast is top-notch, no doubt about that. I think the director, Irving Reis, could have kept things moving at a bit faster pace at times. This movie was written by Sidney Sheldon, long before he created I DREAM OF JEANNIE and became a best-selling novelist, and it won the 1947 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. I didn’t think this was my idea of an award-winning script at all. It’s consistently pleasant, mildly amusing now and then, but not all that funny and the cast has to work hard to achieve the laughs they do. Don’t get me wrong. THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBY-SOXER is not a bad film. I enjoyed it and am glad I finally watched it. But I don’t think it lives up to its reputation.

Review: Hunter at Large - Thomas B. Dewey

I’ve been reading Thomas B. Dewey’s books off and on for close to 60 years since discovering his series about the private eye known only as Mac while I was in high school. He’s never failed to entertain me. He’s one of those writers who never achieved huge success but published steadily for 25 years and was always well-regarded by readers and critics. Black Gat Books has just reprinted one of his stand-alones, HUNTER AT LARGE, published originally in hardcover by Simon & Shuster in 1961 and reprinted in paperback by Pocket Books in 1963—an edition I owned for many years but never got around to reading.

The protagonist of this one is Mickey Phillips, a police detective in an unnamed Midwestern city, who is home one night with his wife Kathy when two men show up at the house, take Mickey by surprise, make him a prisoner, and torture and kill his wife in front of him. They leave thinking that they’ve killed Mickey, too, but he survives, which is a bad mistake for them to make.

After months of recuperation, Mickey is well enough to set out on the trail of the killers. He has to resign from the police force to do it, but he doesn’t care. He just wants revenge for Kathy’s murder. The trail leads him across the country with stops in Kansas City, Denver, and a small town in Nevada. Mickey puts his training to good use in conducting a dogged, methodical investigation which ultimately leads him to his goal with a few surprises along the way.

This is a fine suspense novel written in Dewey’s usual smooth prose with well-developed characters, especially Mickey Phillips. He never comes across as hysterical or overwrought, just very, very determined. The mystery angle is well-constructed. It’s a very bleak, humorless book, but given the plot, I don’t see how it could have been anything else. If you’ve never read Dewey’s work before, HUNTER AT LARGE isn’t really representative of his private eye novels featuring Mac or his other series protagonist Pete Schofield, but it’s well worth reading and it gets a solid recommendation from me. It’s available in paperback and e-book editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: 10 Story Mystery Magazine, February 1942

Popular Publications' 10 STORY MYSTERY MAGAZINE lasted only nine issues, a lot shorter run than the much more successful 10 STORY WESTERN MAGAZINE. But that doesn't mean the stories weren't good. I have no idea who did the cover on this one, but I know you can't trust a skeleton in a top hat. That's just common sense. There's a good, if somewhat odd, mix of authors inside, several of them better known in other genres: Western writer Lee E. Wells, Weird Menace author John H. Knox (to be fair, Knox wrote a lot of mysteries, too, but it's his Weird Menace stuff that's still in print), science fiction author C.M. Kornbluth (under the pseudonym Walter C. Davies), WEIRD TALES stalwart Carl Jacobi, and prolific aviation/air war author O.B. Myers. Also on hand are Francis K. Allan, Jackson Gregory Jr. (the son of Western and adventure author Jackson Gregory, I suppose), house-name Ray P. Shotwell, and two single-sale authors, Adam King and Scott Coudray. I don't own a copy of this pulp, but it certainly looks like something I'd be interested in reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, July 1955

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with a cover by Sam Cherry, as usual. This one doesn’t depict an actual scene in the story, as some do.

The Lone Wolf has a partner in this issue’s Jim Hatfield novel, “Ranger Law for Ladrones”. Thankfully, it’s not one of the numerous sidekicks Roe Richmond saddled Hatfield with in his entries in the series. This time it’s a young Ranger on his first assignment. Al Rich is pretty full of himself and not very bright, but Hatfield thinks he might have the makings of a decent Ranger eventually—if he lives long enough. That’s in doubt because Al’s big mouth tips off the bad guys that he and Hatfield are in the West Texas town of Ladrones to investigate a robbery of the local Western Union office in which a $50,000 payroll was stolen. That loot is still missing because one of the robbers was killed after he buried the money, and nobody knows where it is. Hatfield and Al are captured by the villains, but they escape and round up the varmints about halfway through the story.

Of course, there’s more to it than that, as they soon discover. But the real mystery is who wrote this one. The Fictionmags Index attributes it to Walker A. Tompkins, and there are places where it reads like Tompkins’ work. But there are also places where it doesn’t. For much of the story, it’s pretty talky and light on action, although the big gun battle at the end between Hatfield and the villains is excellent. That part really does read like Tompkins. My thinking is that maybe some other author wrote and turned in a draft of this one, and then the editor, seeing that it wasn’t very good, sent it to Tompkins to rewrite and salvage it. We’ll almost certainly never know if that’s what happened, but it seems feasible to me.

George H. Roulston is an author who’s new to me. He published only half a dozen Western pulp stories in the mid-Fifties. His story “The Fighting Tinhorn” fits its title. It’s about a drifting gambler who’s always been on the shady side, until he has to step up and stop a gun-running scheme that will plunge the Arizona frontier into bloody chaos. This is a well-written, suspenseful story that I enjoyed quite a bit.

Ray G. Ellis wrote several dozen stories for various Western pulps in the Fifties and Sixties. His story in this issue, “A Long Ride to Santa Fe”, is a stagecoach yarn in which a deputy U.S. marshal tries to deliver three desperate outlaw prisoners to the authorities in Santa Fe, a job that’s complicated by a beautiful female passenger from back east who sympathizes with the owlhoots because she doesn’t know any better. And there’s a blizzard, too. Ellis does a good job with a very traditional Western story.

Eric Allen specialized in stories set mostly in Arkansas, Missouri, and Indian Territory. His novelette in this issue, “Ambush”, finds a former Confederate guerrilla returning to his old stomping grounds in Arkansas only to find that a vicious gang of carpetbaggers led by an old enemy of his is terrorizing the people in the area. I had a little trouble warming up to this one at first, but it won me over and I wound up enjoying it quite a bit. Its biggest problem is that the main villain doesn’t show up until very late in the story. Still, it’s the sort of yarn that would have made a good 1950s movie.

Ed Montgomery published about twenty stories split evenly between the Western pulps and the slicks, mostly THE SATURDAY EVENING POST. “A Girl Named Mike” is a range war story featuring a rather lighthearted romance between a roguish rustler and a rancher’s beautiful tomboy daughter. It reads to me like it was probably aimed at the POST, but Montgomery sold it to the Thrilling Group Western line when it failed to click elsewhere. Which is not to criticize it. It’s an entertaining if very lightweight story.

The final story in the issue, “Blood on His Star”, is by-lined L.J. Searles, but that’s Lin Searles, of course, who wrote a few pulp stories but is better remembered as a Western novelist from the Sixties. The protagonist of this one, a former town-taming lawman, is clearly based on Wild Bill Hickok, right down to accidentally killing a deputy during a shootout. It has a nice hardboiled tone to it and some good action, but I wasn’t overly impressed by it.

That pretty much sums up my impression of the entire issue. None of the stories are bad. They’re all entertaining, some more than others. But none of them reach any special heights, either. This is a below-average issue of TEXAS RANGERS. I’m still glad I read it, of course, but I hope the next one I pull off the shelf will be better.

The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 1 - Frederick Nebel

In 1931, after a very successful run in BLACK MASK with several series, Frederick Nebel began selling to DIME DETECTIVE, BLACK MASK’s main rival over at Popular Publications. Having chronicled the adventures of a private detective named Donahue for BLACK MASK, Nebel created a new one (or revived an old one from one of his Northerns, some say) in Jack Cardigan, an operative for the Cosmos Detective Agency. The adventures of Cardigan proved to be Nebel’s longest-running series. Having read and really enjoyed the Donahue stories, I was eager to move on to the Cardigan yarns, since they’re very similar.

THE COMPLETE CASEBOOK OF CARDIGAN, VOLUME 1 includes the stories published in DIME DETECTIVE in 1931 and ’32. The first story, “Death Alley” (DIME DETECTIVE, November 1931) involves Cardigan in a murder that at first seems tied up with a labor dispute but may have its origins in something else. It’s a good introduction to the tough, smart Cardigan.

In “Hell’s Paycheck” (December 1931), Cardigan arrives in an unnamed city (Kansas City, maybe, but that’s just a guess) on a job, and as soon as he gets off the train he’s picked up and taken for a ride. The guys planning to rub him out don’t succeed, of course, so he winds up tackling a case of political corruption, a reformer, and a blackmail racket.

“Six Diamonds and a Dick” (January 1932) finds Cardigan on the trail of some stolen diamonds, obviously. This story is important because it introduces Patricia Seaward, a female Cosmos operative who appears frequently in the series. I like her. She’s petite, according to Nebel, but plenty tough and smart.

“And Then There Was Murder” (February 1932) is a sequel to “Six Diamonds and a Dick”, as some of the repercussions from that case put Cardigan’s life in danger. The attempt to kill him goes awry, however, and results in an innocent’s death, which means Cardigan is going to go all-out to deliver justice.

In “Phantom Fingers” (March 1932), Cardigan is summoned to a meeting with a potential client, but when he gets there he finds the man dead in bed, strangled. That’s not the only strangulation murder in this fast-paced tale of jewel robberies and missing emeralds.

After several years in St. Louis, Cardigan moves back to New York City in “Murder on the Loose” (April 1932). He’s still working for the Cosmos Detective Agency, but not for long. After a clash with his boss, George Hammerhorn, he resigns. The case involves a dead man Cardigan finds in his room one evening when he returns to the hotel where he’s living. Cardigan straightens everything out, of course, and mends fences with Hammerhorn so that he’s still a Cosmos op by the time the story ends.

“Rogues’ Ransom” (August 1932) is the first time the Cardigan series is mentioned on a DIME DETECTIVE cover, although not by title in this case. Cardigan, Pat Seaward, and a couple of other Cosmos operatives are sent to Ohio to retrieve the kidnapped three-year-old daughter of a rich man. Naturally, things get violent and complicated. Although Nebel’s writing is as terse and hardboiled as ever in this one, the plot is driven by some unlikely coincidences which make this the weakest entry in the series so far, although still entertaining to read.

In “Lead Pearls” (September 1932), the job is to recover a valuable necklace stolen daringly in the street right from the neck of the rich woman wearing it. But then her butler is killed, a Cosmos Agency dick is bumped off, and the case becomes a lot more complicated and personal for Cardigan, culminating in a great rooftop shootout.

“The Dead Don’t Die” (October 1932), the title of this story says, but an acerbic drama critic known for his vicious reviews certainly does, his throat slashed from ear to ear. But since he’d hired the Cosmos Detective Agency the day before the murder, Cardigan is determined to find the killer and doesn’t back down, even when Pat Seaward is kidnapped.

As “The Candy Killer” (November 1932) opens, Cardigan is being given a new assignment: bodyguard a beautiful Polish movie star who is taking the fortune she made in Hollywood and going back to her European home. But before the boat can sail, the movie star is kidnapped and Cardigan is off another wild, violent case.

“A Truck-Load of Diamonds” (December 1932) wraps up this first volume. Cardigan is hot on the trail of a valuable diamond bracelet that’s stolen from a jewelry store messenger in broad daylight. This story is cleverly plotted but also winds up being the bleakest in the book.

One thing that really struck me in reading these stories is that although Cardigan does do some detecting and crimes get solved, these aren’t really mysteries in the way we usually think of that term. They’re action/adventure yarns in which the protagonist happens to be a private detective. The mystery is just the impetus for all the action in which Cardigan gets involved. I’m not complaining about this at all, mind you. These are wonderful stories, and if you’re a fan of hardboiled fiction, THE COMPLETE CASEBOOK OF CARDIGAN, VOLUME 1 gets my highest recommendation. It's available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions. I’m glad there are three more volumes to go in this series. Lots of good reading ahead!

Review: Perdition: Four Navajo Tom Raine Stories - Jackson Cole (C. William Harrison, Lee Bond?)

I’ve enjoyed all the Navajo Tom Raine stories I’ve read in the pulp EXCITING WESTERN and have written about several of them in various posts. But it occurs to me that many of you may not own any issues of EXCITING WESTERN. However, you can still read four of the Navajo Raine novelettes in an e-book collection entitled PERDITION that’s available on Amazon. I had already read one of them, so I decided to check out the others.

This collection leads off with “Boothill Beller Box”, the story I’d read before. Here’s what I said a few weeks ago when I posted about the October 1944 issue it’s in.

“The novelette “Boothill Beller Box” is a notable one. It’s part of a long series starring Arizona Ranger “Navajo” Tom Raine, and this story features Raine teaming up with Wayne Morgan, the Masked Rider, and Morgan’s sidekick, the Yaqui Indian Blue Hawk. As far as I know, this is one of only two such crossover stories between Thrilling Group Western characters. Steve Reese from RANGE RIDERS WESTERN appears in an earlier Navajo Raine story, “Rawhide Ranger”, in the April 1944 issue of EXCITING WESTERN. The title “Boothill Beller Box” refers to a telephone line being strung from a cowtown to a nearby logging camp. This is a loggers vs. cattlemen story in which Wayne Morgan is framed for murder. Just like in 1960s Marvel Comics, the two heroes meet and fight at first before realizing they’re on the same side, after which they team up to defeat the bad guy. The author of this one packs quite a bit into it and it’s a really good yarn. Unfortunately, a proofreading and/or typesetting error almost ruins the story by completely invalidating the big twist in the plot. I salvaged it by editing it in my head back to what it should have been.”

I went on to speculate about who actually wrote this story under the house-name Jackson Cole. My guess of Chuck Martin turned out to be wrong. The actual author is C. William Harrison, a dependable and prolific pulpster who also wrote paperbacks under his own name and as Coe Williams and Will Hickok. I wasn’t surprised to find out he wrote this novelette because I almost always enjoy his work. Also, the person who put this e-book together fixed the editing mistake from the original pulp version, so if this is the only one you read, you’ll never know that glitch was there.

Next up is “Ride Your Hunch, Ranger” from the May 1950 issue of EXCITING WESTERN. A notorious outlaw and gunfighter has sent word that he’s going to give up his guns and turn himself in to a local sheriff. Raine is on hand when that unexpected development occurs, but not surprisingly, there’s more to the plot that than and everything leads to a big showdown between the Arizona Ranger and a gang of killers. This story is by a different author, and once again I’m going to make a guess who was behind the Jackson Cole name: Lee Bond. This story has several similarities to Bond’s style in his long-running Long Sam Littlejohn series in TEXAS RANGERS. The characters spend a lot of time explaining the plot to each other so the reader can follow along, and during those conversations they almost always address each other by name. The story’s climax, with Raine facing off in a shootout against several men, is also reminiscent of the Long Sam stories. Bond has been identified as the author of the first nine Navajo Raine stories, so I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to believe he came back for some of the later ones, as well. But, again, this is just an educated guess and could be wrong.

“Passport to Perdition”, from the February 1945 issue, is another one that’s been attributed to C. William Harrison. When I saw that title, my first thought was that maybe Bennie Gardner wrote it. Gardner, best known under his pseudonym Gunnison Steele, wrote hundreds of stories and novels for the Western pulps, among them a Rio Kid novel called “Passport to Perdition” (THE RIO KID WESTERN, August 1948). But maybe this was just a case of two authors coming up with the same admittedly catchy title. This story opens with Raine being on hand for the ghost town showdown between a wealthy mine owner and an outlaw gang led by the mine owner’s former partner, who turned bad after his partner cheated him out of his share of the bonanza. The resulting gun battle would be the climax in many pulp Western stories. In this one it takes place early on and leads to an unexpected aftermath. Harrison is really at the top of his game in this one: vivid, evocative prose, great action, and genuine moral complexity in the characters, including Navajo Raine. This is easily the best story from this series that I’ve read so far.

This collection concludes with “Take a Rest, Ranger”, from the July 1949 issue. Raine is on his way to the town of Wagon Gap to take on a new assignment, but he doesn’t know the details. He’s supposed to collect a letter from his boss, Captain Burt Mossman, when he gets there that will tell him what to do. But before he can do that, he’s ambushed and finds himself mixed up in a dangerous scheme that involves the murder of a sheriff. Of course, he gets that sorted out and finally finds out what his new orders are, and they’re not what he expected at all. I think this one is by Lee Bond, although I’m not nearly as sure of that attribution as I was with the earlier “Ride Your Hunch, Ranger”. The big shootout at the end between Raine and several foes certainly smacks of Bond’s work, but that’s not definitive. I’m going to have to let this one go with a guess and nothing more.

I enjoyed this collection quite a bit. The two stories by Harrison are clearly superior, and I’m definitely going to seek out more of his contributions to the series. But they’re all entertaining and have increased my fondness for Navajo Tom Raine’s adventures. If you want a good sampling of Western pulp action, I give PERDITION a high recommendation.