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.