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.