Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, December 1944

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my rather ragged copy in the scan. The cover art is by Sam Cherry, not one of his best, in my opinion, but still a decent cover.

Despite being called a novel on the cover, the lead story in this issue is more of a novelette. It’s “The Dude Wrangler” by William Polk. This is a contemporary Western, set on a dude ranch in West Texas during World War II. Young cowboy Tom Glenning rides in looking for a job. Tom’s family once owned the spread when it was a working cattle ranch, but when he inherited it, he lost the place because he was such a wastrel. Now he’s reformed and just looking for a job, with no hard feelings. Or so he says. It won’t take readers very long to realize that this is one of those stories where nothing is what it appears to be. And the author does a good job of spinning a highly entertaining yarn.

William Polk has ten stories listed in the Fictionmags Index. The first nine of them appeared in the Twenties and Thirties in various slick and literary magazines. “The Dude Wrangler” is the tenth story in that list, and it’s the only Western and the only pulp story. Which leads me to suspect that “William Polk” is a pseudonym, probably slapped on by a Thrilling Group editor who was unaware of the previous stories published under that byline. However, that’s pure speculation on my part. Maybe the other William Polk actually did have a pulp Western story in him. Chances are we’ll never know, and it’s a good story no matter who wrote it.

Bascom Sturgill appears to have been the real name of an author who published a dozen stories in various Western pulps during the Forties. His short-short in this issue, “Snake-Bite Justice”, is about an old prospector seeking to avenge his partner’s murder. It’s well-written, has a nice little twist in the end, and is a pretty good story.

I’ve always found the series about Alamo Paige, Pony Express rider, to be okay, some stories better than others (which is to be expected in a house-name series) but always readable. The novelette in this issue, “The Pony Express Pays Off”, finds Paige and another Pony Express rider trying to save a fortune in diamonds that will rescue the company from debt. There’s a considerable amount of action, but at the same time the story seems to meander around a lot, filling pages but not in a very compelling fashion. I’d say this is a below average entry in the series. I don’t have any idea who wrote it under the name Reeve Walker, but I did notice a couple of oddities in style that might help me identify him someday: characters have a habit of exclaiming “What in time!” and they carry their guns in “skin-holsters”.

I’ve come to be fond of the work of Archie Joscelyn, who was a prolific pulpster but wrote even more novels under his own name and several pseudonyms, most notable among them Al Cody and Lynn Westland. His story in this issue, “Out of the Horse’s Mouth”, is an entertaining tale about a circus performer who’s framed for a robbery and murder. It’s well-written, moves right along, and has just enough of a clever plot to be interesting. Joscelyn was a consistently good author.

I don’t know anything about Hal White except that he published about fifty stories in the pulps, a mixture of Westerns, air war stories, and detective yarns. His short-short in this issue, “Man on a Horse”, about an outlaw seeking revenge on a lawman, isn’t very good. I had to read the ending twice just to figure out what happened, and I wasn’t impressed when I did understand it.

Donald Bayne Hobart is another writer, like Archie Joscelyn, who was both prolific and consistently good. “Job for the Boss”, his story in this issue, is about a young cowboy trying to bring about peace between a couple of feuding old-timers, one of whom is the owner of the spread the cowboy rides for. It’s okay, reasonably entertaining but nothing more than that, and not one of the better efforts I’ve read from Hobart.

I’ve become quite a fan of the Navajo Tom Raine series, especially the novelettes written by C. William Harrison under the Jackson Cole house-name. I’m pretty sure that “Not By a Dam Site” is by Harrison, and it’s another in a run of top-notch stories that includes “Boothill Beller Box” in the previous issue and “Passport to Perdition” in the issue after this. “Not By a Dam Site”, as you’d probably guess, centers around government efforts to build a dam and flood a valley in Arizona, and the resistance to that plan from the townspeople, ranchers, and homesteaders who live in that valley. A couple of government surveyors have died under mysterious circumstances, and Arizona Ranger Tom Raine is sent in to get to the bottom of things. He does, of course, after some suitable action. However, the plot’s not quite as complex in this one and the action a bit more sparse than usual, so I wouldn’t put it in the top rank of Navajo Raine stories, but it’s still entertaining and well worth reading. Raine is an excellent character.

I’d say this is a pretty average issue overall of EXCITING WESTERN. It begins and ends very well with “The Dude Wrangler” and “Not By a Dam Site”. The stories in between are okay with the one exception, but none of them are outstanding. If you have a copy on hand, it’s worth reading, but I wouldn’t go to a lot of trouble to rustle one up.

Dark Dream - Robert Martin

When I was binging on private eye fiction in the late Seventies, one of the authors I discovered thanks to the great fanzine THE NOT SO PRIVATE EYE was Robert Martin with his series featuring Jim Bennett, an operative for the National Detective Agency who worked out of Cleveland. I read several of the later books in the series and recall enjoying them very much. Now Stark House Press is bringing back the Jim Bennett series and has just reprinted the first two novels, DARK DREAM and SLEEP, MY LOVE. Today I’m going to take a look at DARK DREAM, the novel-length debut of Jim Bennett, although he had appeared in pulp stories before this book was first published in hardcover by Dodd, Mead in 1951 and reprinted in paperback by Pocket Books in 1952.

Bennett is sent to the northern Ohio town of Wheatville to take on a case for a local lawyer who has hired the agency. It seems that somebody has been taking potshots at the lawyer as he plays on the local golf course. Bennett hasn’t been in town long, though, before he picks up another client: the owner of a beauty salon whose business is being sabotaged. Could it be that these apparently unrelated cases will wind up being connected?

That seems to be a foregone conclusion, especially if you know that DARK DREAM is based on two pulp novellas, “Death Under Par” (DIME DETECTIVE, May 1947) and “Death Gives a Permanent Wave” (DIME DETECTIVE, October 1947. I’ll give Martin full credit, though: the combining of these two stories may not be seamless, but it’s pretty darned good. If I hadn’t known about the pulp origins already, I might not have suspected it. Multiple murders crop up, a proverbial whirlwind of action takes place over the course of the few days Bennett spends in Wheatville, he kisses a number of beautiful women (some of whom are suspects), and gets hit over the head, knocked out, poisoned, and suffers a minor bullet wound. The guy stays busy!

In addition to the mystery angle, parts of this book read almost like a mainstream novel about small-town Americana, and northern Ohio towns in the early Fifties must have been a lot like Texas towns in the early Sixties because I felt some powerful nostalgia reading this book. The businesses and the people sound very similar to what I grew up with.

I, of course, had a wonderful time reading this book. It’s pure hardboiled private eye, one of my favorite subgenres in all of fiction. I’m glad Stark House is reprinting this series. It’s a really good one and well worth being back in print. It’s available on Amazon in a nice trade paperbackdouble volume.

The pulp stories featuring Jim Bennett are also being reprinted, by the way, by Steeger Books, and I intend to check those out, as well.

BONUS RAMBLING: To clarify what I said in the first paragraph of this post, I don’t mean to make it sound as if I discovered private eye fiction in the late Seventies. The first private eye novel I ever read was either THIS IS IT, MICHAEL SHAYNE or SHILLS CAN’T CASH CHIPS, one of the Donald Lam/Bertha Cool books, both of which I checked out from the bookmobile around 1964. Yeah, sixty years ago. Where does the time go? By the late Seventies, I had read all of Dashiell Hammett available at the time, all of Raymond Chandler, most of the Mike Shayne, Shell Scott, and Ed Noon novels, and assorted other private eye books. I’ve talked before about how I started reading THE NOT SO PRIVATE EYE and how it introduced me to a number of PI writers I hadn’t been aware of, as well as allowing me to make the acquaintance of Bill Crider, Joe Lansdale, and Tom Johnson. Glory days, as they say.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Becky (2020)

Well, this movie is just about the polar opposite of the one I wrote about last week. Instead of a heart-warming, inspirational sports movie like THE BASKET, BECKY is a bloody, extremely violent thriller about a family caught in an isolated cabin by four vicious escaped convicts on a mission.

The title character, Becky, is a 13-year-old girl who’s still mourning the death of her mother a year earlier. She’s the broody, angsty sort who’s angry with her father because he’s going to get married again. The last thing she wants to do is spend a weekend at the family cabin with him and her new stepmother and stepbrother to be. Maybe not the last thing, because then the escaped convicts show up and make the situation even worse. And Becky gets a perfect opportunity to demonstrate just how mean a 13-year-old girl can be as she escapes and MacGyvers the bad guys into one deadly situation after another.

A movie like this with some plot holes in the script and a bunch of stuff that really stretches credibility relies on its cast to carry things through. Lulu Wilson, who I’d never heard of, plays Becky and does a great job of being both vulnerable and unexpectedly bad-ass. Kevin James, who I’ve liked in all his comedic roles, is cast against type as the leader of the convicts, and he’s even better as a thoroughly despicable villain. He surprised me and probably enjoyed playing evil for a change. Towering former wrestler Robert Maillet is the most sympathetic of the convicts and is also good. Joel McHale, who I usually like, plays Becky’s dad and isn’t given much of anything to do except be a jerk.

I’m not a big fan of movies that are overly violent and gory, and BECKY certainly fits that description. But it generates some genuine suspense and made me want to find out what was going to happen despite my reservations. I wound up kind of liking it and can recommend it if you don’t mind a lot of blood and if some lapses of logic don’t bother you too much. As I said about THE BASKET, I wouldn’t want a steady diet of movies like this, but BECKY is basically okay.