This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my beat-up copy in the scan. You can’t see it, but the upper third or so of the rear cover is gone, having been ripped off in an obviously haphazard manner. But the contents are complete. The cover is by H.W. Scott, I think.
FIGHTING WESTERN was part of the same line as SPICY/SPEED WESTERN, but unlike
the Spicies, there weren’t a lot of house-names used in it. The authors tend to
use their real names or regular pseudonyms. This issue, in fact, starts out with
a novella by a very well-known author (well-known to pulp fans, anyway), E.
Hoffmann Price. “Six-Gun Survey” has as its protagonist a young
cowboy-turned-surveyor who inadvertently becomes mixed up in an irrigation/land
development swindle and tries to set things right, even though it means a lot
of bullets coming his way and some bogus criminal charges that land him behind
bars. This is an excellent yarn, fast-moving and very well-written, with a
likable hero and a good supporting cast (including an Arab camel driver and
camel left over from the army’s experiments with them in Arizona). I really
enjoyed this one, which isn’t surprising considering how reliable a pulpster
Price was.
The next story is a novelette by an author who wrote even more than Price,
Victor Rousseau. He was a big name in early science fiction and then later on
became a stalwart in the Spicy line, often under his pseudonym Lew Merrill and
assorted other names. He’s writing under his own name in “Buffalo Trail”, which
finds six mountain men in New Mexico giving up fur trapping to become cowboys.
They run into plenty of trouble on a cattle drive to the railhead in Kansas.
This is a pretty good story. Rousseau wasn’t as skilled a writer as Price, but
he moves things along well and the action is very good. The only problems are
that there are so many characters we don’t get to know them very well, and the “yuh
mangy polecat” dialogue is really thick. Still, I enjoyed it, as I usually do
with Rousseau’s work.
Laurence Donovan is another well-known pulp author. I’ve read quite a bit by
him over the years and nearly always enjoyed the stories. His story in this
issue, “Brand of a Thief”, is a convoluted tale in which a ranch foreman frames
himself for a theft in order to save the girl he works for from the attentions
of a lowdown skunk. Only things don’t work out that way at all. This one reads
like it could have been intended for RANCH ROMANCES or one of the other Western
romance pulps, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s an entertaining, well-written
story.
John Jo Carpenter was the regular pseudonym of John Reese, which he used on dozens
of stories in various Western pulps during the Forties and Fifties and on at
least one Western novel that I know of. His story in this issue, “Gun-Wise and
Trail-Shy”, is a hardboiled tale about a young outlaw’s fateful encounter with
a slightly older but more experienced owlhoot. Reese was a fine writer, so it’s
not surprising that this is a good story.
The issue wraps up with “Beast of Pueblo” by “Paul Hanna”, the only use of a
house-name in this issue. I don’t know who wrote it, but it’s a good yarn about
a young man who runs a Wells Fargo station. He’s big and brawny, good with his
fists and a gun, but a crippling psychological fear keeps him from engaging in
violence. It’s a fairly offbeat angle for a Western pulp story, even though we
know from the start that before the story is over, our protagonist will have
been forced to overcome his fear and burn some powder and throw some punches.
That’s exactly what happens, but the author handles it very well and turns in
an excellent yarn to end this issue on a high note.
Now, here’s an interesting (I hope) sidelight: this issue was edited by Kenneth
Hutchinson and Wilton Matthews, the editors for Trojan Publications who got in
trouble with the law for fraud by taking stories from old issues, slapping some
phony author’s name on them, or using the name of a real author who had nothing
to do with the story, then reprinting them as new and collecting the checks themselves. Which means it’s possible some of the stories in this issue
were actually unacknowledged reprints that Hutchinson and Matthews used in
their scheme. The Paul Hanna story seems to be the most likely candidate for
that. For one thing, the story has an illustration with it that I really feel
like I’ve seen somewhere else before. However, all this should be taken with the
proverbial grain of salt. It’s certainly possible that all the stories in here
are on the up-and-up.
What’s important for our purposes as readers is that every story is a good one.
If you’d told me that the best Western pulp I’d read recently was an issue of
FIGHTING WESTERN, I wouldn’t have believed it. But that’s the case. This is a
really good one, and if you have a copy, it’s well worth reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment