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.
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