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.