Cat of Many Tails - Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee)

The older I get, the more I seem to turn back to the authors and series I loved when I was a kid. I read a bunch of Ellery Queen novels in junior high and high school, and one occasionally since then, but I’ll bet it’s been thirty years or more since I last checked in with Ellery and Inspector Queen. Being in the mood to do that, I picked up one I’d never read back in the old days, 1948’s CAT OF MANY TAILS.

I’ve seen this book referred to as the first great American serial killer novel. It’s probably the earliest serial killer novel I’ve ever read, and it’s one of the rare occasions when a traditional mystery strayed into that subgenre. Set in a long, tense summer and fall in New York City, the plot revolves around a mysterious murderer dubbed The Cat by the sensationalistic press. At irregular intervals, The Cat strangles seemingly random victims who have no connection with each other, causing the police to believe he’s a psychopath. The city goes crazy with fear, leading to riots. Ellery Queen is recruited by the Mayor to take on the job of special investigator. This goes against Ellery’s better judgment, as he’s already haunted by a failure in a previous case that caused a man’s death. But he sets out to solve the case anyway and slowly begins to uncover a pattern in the killings.

The keyword in that last sentence is “slowly”, because man, this book goes on and on. The Ellery Queen novels were never what you’d consider thrill-a-minute affairs, but I don’t recall ever reading one that drags as much as this one. Yes, the basic plot is clever—I never read an Ellery Queen story where this wasn’t the case—and Dannay and Lee pull a late plot twist that’s effective, if a bit predictable. But many of the scenes along the way go on at great length and seem to serve no real purpose. The writing (most of which was done by Lee, I recall) is overly literary at times and slows things down even more.

I have to admit that once things start moving at a faster clip in the second half of the book, it does generate a certain amount of suspense, and Danny and Lee do an admirable job of delving into the psychology of a serial killer. But there’s not much deduction involved—Ellery just stumbles over the two main clues that break the case open—and nothing approaching the famous Challenges to the Reader in the early books. No reader could have solved this one because the information simply isn’t there. Then, after that final twist, the book kind of just stops, which prompted me to say “Wait, that’s it?”

Well. When I started this book, I never anticipated panning it up one way and down the other. I love the Ellery Queen series; at least, I remember loving the books when I read them many years ago. But CAT OF MANY TAILS is a clear miss for me. However, in an odd way, it makes me want to read another one I never got around to back then, to see if my reaction to this one was just a fluke. Maybe I’ll find out soon.

Western Fictioneers Announces the 14th Annual Peacemaker Award Finalists and Lifetime Achievement Peacemaker Award

THE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT PEACEMAKER

John Legg

 

 

14th Annual Peacemaker Awards Finalists

For Western Novels and Stories Published in 2023

 

 

 

BEST NOVEL

 

GRAY’S LAKE, John Hansen (Summit Creek Press)

THE GOLD CHIP, Douglas Hirt (Wolfpack Publishing)

CHANGING WOMAN, Venetia Hobson Lewis (Bison Books)

RIDE A FAST HORSE, Kevin Warren (Kensington)

THE BOOT HEEL, Kevin Wolf (Thorndike)

 

BEST FIRST WESTERN NOVEL

 

THE GOOD TIME GIRLS, K.T. Blakemore (Sycamore Creek Press)

CHANGING WOMAN, Venetia Hobson Lewis (Bison Books)

. . . BY THE WAY THEY TREAT THEIR HORSES, M. Timothy Nolting (Austin Macauley Publishers)

THE PENITENT GUN, Rod Timanus (Thorndike Large Print)

RIDE A FAST HORSE, Kevin Warren (Kensington)

 

BEST WESTERN SHORT FICTION

 

“Clarence Flowers”, John Neely Davis (FORTITUDE, Five Star)

“Prairie Blossoms”, Sharon Frame Gay (FORTITUDE, Five Star)

“The Sound of Buffalo”, Lisa Majewski and Del Howison (FORTITUDE, Five Star)

“Next to the Last Chance”, John D. Nesbitt (BRIGHT SKIES AND DARK HORSES, Five Star)

“The Great Burro Revolt”, P.A. O’Neil (SADDLEBAG DISPATCHES, Summer 2023)

“The Would-Be Bounty Hunters”, Michael R. Ritt (FORTITUDE, Five Star)

 

Winners will be announced June 15, 2024 on the WF website (www.westernfictioneers.com) and on this blog.

Western Fictioneers (WF) was formed in 2010 by professional Western writers, to preserve, honor, and promote traditional Western writing in the 21st century. Entries were accepted in both print and electronic forms.

The Peacemaker Awards are given annually. Submissions for the Peacemaker Awards for books and stories published in 2024 will be open in August 2024. Submission guidelines will be posted on the WF website. For more information about Western Fictioneers (WF) please visit: http://www.westernfictioneers.com

Western Fictioneers would like to thank the judges for the excellent job they have done and James Reasoner for being Awards Chair. 

Lust Treasures - William Kane (Ben Haas)

Ben Haas, best known for his Westerns under the names John Benteen, Thorne Douglas, and Richard Meade, as well as thrillers and sword and sorcery novels under the Meade name, also wrote a number of soft-core sex novels in the early Sixties for William Hamling’s publishing empire, all of them under the name William Kane. I’ve read a couple of those William Kane books, and they were well-written, entertaining books. But the William Kane novel LUST TREASURES is something different, and it’s very much a precursor to the work that Haas would soon be doing.

The narrator/protagonist of this novel is Len Wolfe (any resemblance to the term “lone wolf” is probably not coincidental), a former Marine who currently works as a rather amoral soldier of fortune, taking any dangerous job that pays enough, anywhere in the world. As this novel opens, he’s recruited by a lawyer representing an American fruit company for a job in a South American country. The company, which has extensive banana plantation holdings in the country, hires Wolfe to deliver a $200,000 bribe to the leader of a rebel army. In exchange for the money, the man will call off the revolution that threatens the fruit company’s holdings. But the rebel leader insists on one condition: the money will be paid in the form of American silver dollars. So Wolfe’s job is to transport 200 grand in silver across a rugged jungle landscape teeming with bandits, while also dealing with the possibility of a double cross from the rebel leader. Not to mention the threat of the cruel dictator who runs the country and his beautiful but possibly unhinged sister, and the complication of the beautiful American girl who is the rebel leader’s mistress.

Now I ask you, move that plot back from the early Sixties to the early days of the Twentieth Century, and does that sound like one of Haas’s Fargo novels or what? That seems like exactly the sort of job Fargo would get mixed up in.

There’s enough sex in this book to justify it being published by Hamling, but LUST TREASURES is definitely more of an action/adventure novel than anything else. The setup is a little slow to develop, but once Wolfe starts through the jungle with a mule train loaded down with silver dollars, the pace ratchets up a notch and things barrel along to a final showdown in a dungeon torture room underneath the Presidential Palace. Haas was a master of colorful settings and great action scenes, and there are plenty of both of those things in this book.

I think anyone who’s a fan of Haas’s work would enjoy this novel, but unfortunately, it’s a little on the rare side and likely to be pricey if you find a copy. If you come across it, though, and it’s in your price range, don’t pass it up. This might be a good candidate for reprinting, one of these days.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ten Detective Aces, May 1935

You never know what you're going to find in a sarcophagus, as Rafael DeSoto illustrates on this cover. Over the years I've read quite a few stories that first appeared in TEN DETECTIVE ACES, but I've never read or even owned an actual issue of the pulp. Plenty of fine fiction appeared there. Authors in this issue include Frederick C. Davis (with a Moon Man story), Paul Chadwick (with a Wade Hammond story), Emile C. Tepperman (with a Marty Quade story), Tepperman again as Anthony Clemens (with a Val Easton story), Joe Archibald (with a Dizzy Duo story), and non-series yarns by Harry Widmer, Margie Harris, and J. Lane Linklater. There are a bunch of issues of this pulp available on the Internet Archive. I ought to read some of them.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Giant Western, February 1951

This issue of GIANT WESTERN sports a slightly cartoonish cover by Ed DeLavy, but it's yet another example of just how dangerous it was to go to the barber shop in the Old West. I kept telling my mother I didn't want to get my hair cut when I was a kid. I guess I sensed somehow that some ranny might start burnin' powder. Anyway, this issue (which I don't own) features stories by some fine writers including William MacLeod Raine, A. Leslie Scott, Leslie Ernenwein, Louis L'Amour (as Jim Mayo), T.C. McClary, and B.M. Bower (probably a reprint since Bower died in 1940 although it's not listed as such). 

A Rough Edges Rerun: The Hangmen of Sleepy Valley - Davis Dresser

Although he was a prolific author, Davis Dresser wrote only a few books under his own name, and I believe all of them were Westerns. Best known as Brett Halliday, the creator and principal author of the Mike Shayne series, Dresser wrote quite a few Westerns as well, some under the house-name Peter Field (the Powder Valley series), some as Don Davis (the Rio Kid books, reprinted by Pocket Books in the Sixties – but these are not about the pulp character known as the Rio Kid, whose adventures were chronicled by Tom Curry, Walker Tompkins, and others), and three under his own name, two of which feature good-natured cowboy/detectives Twister Malone and Chuckaluck Thompson. [I was wrong; there are four books in the series.]

THE HANGMEN OF SLEEPY VALLEY opens with Twister and Chuckaluck on their way to Mexico, but in West Texas they run across a bizarre scene: a man being hanged by a group of four masked vigilantes . . . and the hoods worn by the vigilantes have only one eye hole each. Twister and Chuckaluck exchange shots with the hangmen and then discover that the hanged man is still alive. They cut him down, take care of him, and find out that the gang of lynchers has been terrorizing Sleepy Valley for months, singling out ranchers and then hanging them if they refuse to heed the gang’s warnings to leave the valley.

Of course, being the heroes that they are, Twister and Chuckaluck aren’t going to stand for that and decide to hide out the man they rescued so the hangmen won’t realize that he’s still alive. They take over the fellow’s ranch and proceed to go after the gang, leading to plenty of ridin’ and shootin’ before the identities of the masked hangmen are uncovered.

While that basic plot is pretty standard, Dresser throws in some nice twists along the way. Nothing on the level of complexity to be found in his Mike Shayne novels, to be sure, but still, I didn’t see all of them coming. What I really liked about the novel are the bizarre little touches like the one-eyed masks worn by the hangmen (Dresser had only one eye, by the way, and his author photos always show him wearing a black eye patch and looking rakish) and the way that he plays against reader expectations with some of the characters. There’s more to Twister and Chuckaluck than you’d think at first, and that’s true of some of the other characters, too.

One word of warning: nearly everybody in this book speaks in heavy “pulp Western” dialect, what I sometimes call “yuh mangy polecat!” dialogue. That was the fashion of the times (the book was originally published by William Morrow in 1940 and reprinted by Pocket Books in 1952 – with an introduction by Erle Stanley Gardner), although some authors were more inclined to it than others. Dresser sort of overdoes it, but I got used to it. Some readers might not.

THE HANGMEN OF SLEEPY VALLEY is a solidly entertaining Western of its era, unreprinted since 1952 and surely forgotten by most. But as a friend of mine who also read the book recently told me, “You can’t go wrong with masked hangmen.” I agree. [The friend of mine who said that to me was, as some of you may have guessed, Bill Crider. Also, all four of the Twister and Chuckaluck novels are now available as e-books, which you can find here: THE HANGMEN OF SLEEPY VALLEY, DEATH RIDES THE PECOS, LYNCH-ROPE LAW, and MURDER ON THE MESA.]

(This post appeared in a somewhat different form on July 18, 2008.)

The Last Line - Stephen Ronson

I’m a little bit leery of any book where the protagonist is compared to Jack Reacher. That seems to have been an overdone trend in recent years. On the other hand, how many paperbacks did I buy back in the Sixties and Seventies with “In the Tradition of CONAN!” emblazoned across the front cover? (The answer: a lot.) So I didn’t worry too much about the blurb on THE LAST LINE, the debut novel from Stephen Ronson, and just plunged into the book. I’m glad that I did, because it’s a terrific thriller.

The title is a reference to the phrase “the last line of defense”, and that’s what narrator/protagonist John Cook becomes part of during the summer of 1940 when it appears that France is about to fall to the invading German army and everyone in England expects that Hitler will soon have them in his sights. Most people expect the bombers to show up any time, and no one really holds out much hope that the country will be able to withstand the Nazi onslaught for very long. So Cook, a middle-aged farmer and former soldier during the first World War, is recruited to become part of a planned resistance movement that will try to wreak havoc on the German occupiers. Cook has more skills than most at such things, having fought for British forces in Afghanistance following the end of the World War. He’s a lot more dangerous than he might appear to be at first glance.

The looming threat of the Germans isn’t all Cook has to contend with, however. A young woman is murdered on his property, and he’s the leading suspect in her murder. In the course of trying to clear himself of that charge, he uncovers two dangerous conspiracies that may or may not be linked. Children who have been evacuated from London to the countryside to protect them from the expected bombing have gone missing, and then there’s the matter of what’s being hidden in a locked barn on a neighboring estate. Tragedy, romance, and a lot of gritty, well-written action ensue.

You wouldn’t know this was Ronson’s first novel because he keeps the story racing along with the sure hand of a longtime professional. I’m not an expert on the location or the time period, but the setting and background certainly ring true to me. John Cook is a great narrator/protagonist, plenty tough and smart and sympathetic even though at times he’s not all that likable. The supporting cast is good and the villains suitably creepy. Not everything plays out exactly as I suspected it would, and that’s always good, too.

I stayed up later than usual to finish THE LAST LINE, and as I mentioned recently, it takes a really good book to make me do that. I thoroughly enjoyed this one and hope it’s the first of a series. It’s available in hardback and e-book editions on Amazon.

Now Available: Arizona Bounty - James Reasoner

A tough bounty hunter haunted by a tragic past … a beautiful woman with demons of her own … a brutal outlaw with a history of killing … a ruthless swindler determined to grasp a fortune no matter who gets in his way … These and more find themselves delivered by fate to the mining boomtown of Plata in the silver-rich Superstition Mountains of Arizona Territory. As their destinies play out, the settlement is rocked by death and fiery destruction, and bounty hunter Reid Dawson will need all the deadly skills his violent life has given him to survive and protect those he cares about.

Now available from Amazon, ARIZONA BOUNTY is the latest action-packed Western novel from bestselling author James Reasoner, a legendary storyteller who has been spinning exciting yarns for almost half a century. With its fast pace, compelling characters, and white-knuckle suspense, ARIZONA BOUNTY is sure-fire entertainment for Western readers!

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Marvel Stories, November 1940

J.W. Scott didn't do a lot of covers for science fiction pulps, concentrating instead on Western, detective, and sports titles, but the SF covers he did were good ones, like this issue of MARVEL STORIES. Raymond Z. Gallun and John Russell Fearn are the best-known authors in this one. The other authors on hand are Henry Haase, A. Fedor, Richard O. Lewis, D.D. Sharp, and John L. Chapman. If you're like me, some of those names make you go, "Who?" If you'd like to check out this issue, you can find it online here.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, May 1967

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. As usual with RANCH ROMANCES during this era, calling it a pulp is a wee bit of a stretch (it has trimmed edges and slightly smaller dimensions than a traditional pulp), but it’s certainly not a digest so pulp is the term that fits it the best, I think. And it’s certainly in the pulp tradition, having been published, at that time, for 43 years as the masthead indicates. I don’t know who did the cover, but it’s a good one.

By the time RANCH ROMANCES’ run ended in 1971, it was pretty much all reprint, but four years earlier in this issue, there are only two reprints and most of the stories were new. The issue leads off with one of those new entries, a short story by William Heuman called “Lady Killer”. Heuman was one of the great hardboiled Western pulpsters and paperbackers, but this story isn’t hardboiled at all. It’s a lighthearted tale about the town handyman courting the new schoolmarm and having to fight one of the other townies in order to take her to a dance. I don’t think Heuman was capable of writing a story that wasn’t entertaining, so this one is enjoyable to read, although a very minor piece in his body of work.

Next up is “Perris” by Lee Martin, an author who contributed several dozen stories to RANCH ROMANCES and other magazines during the Sixties. It’s about a young, pregnant woman trying to escape from the father of her child, a gunslinging killer recently released from prison. The fact that she’s pregnant and unmarried is a definite nod to the loosening of moral strictures in the Sixties, I think, although a venerable pulp like RANCH ROMANCES is kind of an odd place for that to show up. This story is okay at best. There’s not much to it and it never generates much suspense or drama.

The first reprint in this issue is the novelette “Where the Hangman Waits” by Eric Allen. It appeared originally in the First July Number, 1954 of RANCH ROMANCES. I recognize Allen’s name as the author of several Western novels set in Arkansas that I haven’t read. This story takes place next door in Indian Territory, where a town-taming lawman returns to his old stomping grounds to find out the truth when his brother is accused of murder and save him from Judge Parker’s gallows. This is the first thing I’ve read by Allen, and I found it to be okay without being overly impressed by it. He does a good job with the setting, but he has a habit of having his characters constantly call each other by name when they’re talking, a stylistic touch that always annoys me. I enjoyed this story enough that I would read more by Allen, but I’m not going to seek out his work, either.

The short story “Golden Girl” is the only credit in the Fictionmags Index for author Ken Clayton. The prose is fairly polished, though, leading me to suspect that name may be a pseudonym. This is a good contemporary Western about a former G.I. who’s prospecting for gold in Arizona. He comes across a beautiful young female rancher and her foreman, and eventually the two men clash over the girl, as you’d expect. The contemporary setting and the good writing make this one worth reading.

Gordon Redmond published four stories in RANCH ROMANCES in the mid-Sixties. That’s all I know about him. His story in this issue, “Kirby’s Woman”, is the last of those four. It’s a tale about a drifting cowboy who encounters a notorious outlaw’s woman and falls for her even though he’ll be risking his neck to do so. I thought this was going to be one of those stories with a really obvious twist ending—and it is, but it wasn’t the ending I was expecting. That elevates it a little from the average to the slightly above average.

This issue wraps up with the cover-featured novel “Fury at Painted Rock” by Will Cook. This is also a reprint, appearing originally in the Third September Number, 1954. For much of its run, RANCH ROMANCES had an odd dating system, usually two issues a month called the First and Second Numbers for that month. It’s rare for the dates to work out so that there was a Third Number some months. But to get to the story itself, which is actually a novella, I think this is the first thing I’ve read by Will Cook, although I’ve seen his name on paperbacks and in pulp TOCs for many years. He also used the pseudonyms James Keene, Frank Peace, and Dan Riordan. Like Eric Allen’s story, this one is also about a lawman returning to his hometown. In this case, the protagonist is a U.S. Marshal sent in to try to keep the peace between an old cattle baron and a bunch of homesteaders who are moving in. I wanted to like this one since it would have been good to find another new-to-me author whose work I like, but I’m afraid I found it pretty disappointing. The plot just kind of trudged along, and the writing never seemed to generate much excitement. I think I must have missed something because Cook was a popular author for a long time, and I might try something else by him, but I won’t be in any hurry to do so.

Considering that the best story in the issue is a short, very lightweight entry by William Heuman, I’d say this is a below-average issue of RANCH ROMANCES. However, I’m glad I read it because I came across something very unexpected in it. For most of its run, RANCH ROMANCES had a feature entitled “Our Air Mail” in which readers wrote in seeking pen pals. They would describe themselves and their interests and say whether they were seeking male or female pen pals, or both. The second letter in this issue’s column is from a young lady named Charlene, who was 20 years old, 5’5”, and 125 pounds, and interested in all sports including boxing and car racing. Since it really was a different world back then, people didn’t think twice about having their home addresses published in a national magazine. Our young friend Charlene was, in fact, from the same little town where I grew up and still live. Her street is about three miles from where I’m sitting at this moment. And since she was 20 years old in 1967, it’s entirely possible she’s still alive. Charlene, if you’re out there, I hope you found some good pen pals.

A Rough Edges Rerun: Green Ice - Raoul Whitfield

A number of Raoul Whitfield’s stories from BLACK MASK have been reprinted and anthologized over the years. I’ve read quite a few of them and enjoyed them all, going back to one of his Jo Gar stories that was reprinted in the anthology THE HARD-BOILED DICKS, which I bought at The Book Oasis in Seminary South Shopping Center in Fort Worth on a December evening in 1967. (Yes, I remember that. Just don’t ask me what I had for lunch yesterday.)

Anyway, I’d never read any of Whitfield’s novels until now. GREEN ICE was his first novel, published in 1930 and based on a series of five linked novelettes published in BLACK MASK from December 1929 through April 1930 that are put together pretty seamlessly. It’s the story of what happens when ex-con Mal Ourney gets out of Sing Sing after having served a two-year sentence for manslaughter. Mal wasn’t really guilty; he took the rap for his girlfriend at the time, who was really behind the wheel in a fatal car crash. She comes to meet Mal when he’s released, but he’s no longer interested in her and refuses to go with her. A good thing, too, because a short time later, she’s dead, the first of at least a dozen murder victims in this novel.

While in prison, Mal has made friends with several small-time crooks who were drawn into the rackets by the big bosses, the men Mal refers to as the crime breeders. He decides that when he gets out, he’ll go after these big bosses and try to bring them down. Before he can even get started on his crusade, though, he finds himself up to his neck in murder after murder, all of them tied together by some missing emeralds, the green ice of the title. This is one of those early hardboiled novels where the plot gets incredibly complicated, to the point that Whitfield has to stop the action every so often to have his characters explain to each other everything that’s happened so far. He even manages to save one last major twist for the very end.

Plots so complex that they get a little far-fetched are a hallmark of hardboiled fiction from that era, though, as is terse, staccato prose. Whitfield delivers on that score, too. There’s a little snappy patter and considerable tough guy slang, along with plenty of fistfights and tommy-gun massacres, before Mal finally untangles all the various interwoven strands of plot. As you can imagine, I thoroughly enjoyed it, too. These days, GREEN ICE would have to be considered a historical novel, but if you’re interested in the genesis of hardboiled crime novels or just looking for a good yarn, I recommend it.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on April 17, 2009.)

The Wild Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Volume Four - Will Murray

The fourth volume in Will Murray’s continuing series THE WILD ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES returns, for the most part, to more traditional yarns featuring the esteemed detective and his friend and colleague Dr. Watson. The previous volume presented stories with a supernatural and/or science fictional angle, but there are only two such in this collection.

Murray, of course, has nailed the style of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original tales, or at least it seems so to me although I’m no real expert on the subject. I really enjoyed every story in this volume, but here are a few favorites:

In “The Improbable Misadventure of the Blackish Bottle”, Holmes discovers an unexpected murder weapon hidden in his own quarters at 221B Baker Street. This ties in with Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Holmes story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual.”

“The Conundrum of the Absent Cranium” has Holmes seeking to solve the mystery of a murder victim found without, you guessed it, his head.

“The Second Adventure of the Five Orange Pips” is a sequel to “The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips”, of course, and is a worthy successor to that classic tale.

Also in the original Five Orange Pips story, Doyle makes mention of an unrecorded Holmes case involving something called the Paradol Chamber. In “The Difficult Ordeal of the Paradol Chamber”, Will Murray records that adventure, and a truly creepy and harrowing one it is. Holmes himself narrates most of it since the action took place without Dr. Watson’s presence. This is a great story, my favorite in this volume, and the basis for the fine cover art by Gary Carbon.

The supernatural does figure in the final two stories, “The Impossiblity of the Premature Postmortem Message” and “The Disquieting Adventure of the Murmuring Dell”. Algernon Blackwood’s occult detective character Dr. John Silence is mentioned in the first of these and appears in the second one. “The Impossibility of the Premature Postmortem Message” involves spiritualism, a subject of much interest to Doyle that formed the basis for his third Professor Challenger novel THE LAND OF MIST. I remember reading that book many years ago, and after the hard-headed scientific adventures of Challenger in the first two books, the mysticism of THE LAND OF MIST really took me by surprise. I recall enjoying it a great deal, though, as I did all of Professor Challenger’s appearances. Murray having Sherlock Holmes tackle the subject is intriguing and very effective. “The Disquieting Adventure of the Murmuring Dell” is another very creepy tale. Disquieting, indeed.

If you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan, this is a fine addition to a very good series. I give this fourth volume of THE WILD ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES a strong recommendation. It's available in trade paperback and e-book editions on Amazon.

Taggart (1964)

I last saw this movie at the Eagle Drive-In in 1964 when my dad and I watched it along with some other movie. I’m afraid I don’t remember the second feature. It was probably a beach movie, an Elvis movie, or a John Wayne movie. I can’t consider TAGGART a Movie I’d Missed Until Now, but sixty years is a long time ago. Even so, there were scenes in it that I still remembered, so I suppose that means they were pretty effective. I recall that at the time I really enjoyed it.

This was also my introduction to the work of Louis L’Amour, although that name didn’t mean anything to me then and it would be three or four years before I read my first L’Amour novel (THE SACKETT BRAND). In 1964, L’Amour was already a successful Western writer with good sales and a number of movies based on his novels, but he wasn’t the bestselling icon he became a decade or so later.

TAGGART, like all of L’Amour’s work, makes use of a traditional Western plot, or in this case, several of them. As the movie opens, an evil cattle baron and his equally evil son stampede a herd of cattle through the camp of a smaller rancher who’s encroaching on range the cattle baron considers his own. The small rancher, his wife, and their cook all wind up dead, and the couple’s son, Kent Taggart, is wounded. So is the evil cattle baron. Taggart catches up to them in town and kills the cattle baron’s son. Before dying, the cattle baron sends for three hired killers and sends them after Taggart.

From that point, TAGGART becomes a revenge Western—until it becomes a fight the Apaches Western. Taggart winds up at an abandoned Spanish mission where an old prospector has found a gold mine. The prospector has a beautiful daughter and a beautiful second wife. Emotional turmoil ensues. Two of the hired killers show up. (Taggart has already killed one of them during the pursuit.) Double-crosses, Indian attacks, and more Indian attacks eventually lead to a showdown at an army fort.

The movie makes considerable use of stock footage from earlier Westerns, something I didn’t notice at all in 1964, but it all works and the pace is excellent.

So is the cast, which includes Emile Meyer as the evil cattle baron (the same sort of role he played in SHANE), Dan Duryea as a charming but evil hired killer, Tom Reese and David Carradine (his film debut) as the other hired guns, Western veteran Dick Foran as the old prospector, and even good old Bob Steele in an uncredited role as the camp cook who gets gunned down early on. In the lead as Kent Taggart is Tony Young, who a year earlier had starred in a short-lived TV Western called GUNSLINGER, which I watched regularly and have fond memories of. Young should have been a bigger star than he turned out to be. He wasn’t really a polished actor, but he looked great and handled the action scenes well. He starred in one other Western feature, a movie I haven’t seen called HE RIDES TALL, but after that he played supporting roles and did guest star shots on numerous TV shows. He should have gone to Italy and made Spaghetti Westerns. He had the right look for them.

As I mentioned above, I loved this movie when I saw it in 1964. Then, eventually, I began to wonder if I’d imagined it because it never showed on TV and I never read anything about it. A few years ago I looked it up and found that it does, indeed, exist, and when I saw that it was playing on Grit TV, I had to watch it again after all that time. I’m happy to report that it holds up okay. It’s not the great film I thought it was back then, but it’s a solid, low-budget Sixties Western with a good cast and script. If you’re a fan of the genre, it’s well worth watching.

And for what it’s worth, at some point I did read the L’Amour novel in which it’s based. It’s okay, too. Being one of L’Amour’s earlier novels, it’s shorter, faster paced, and better written than most of his books from the late Sixties on.

Gunsmoke Reckoning - Joseph Chadwick

Texas rancher Cole Mowbrey arrives in Montana on the trail of Matt Kerrigan, who ran off with Cole's sister and then abandoned her to die in a mining camp. He finds that his quarry has a stake in a big ranch, and Kerrigan and his partner are trying to run off all the smaller ranchers and homesteaders in the basin. So Joseph Chadwick’s novel GUNSMOKE RECKONING, published in 1951 by Gold Medal, is both a vengeance quest story and a range war story.

Those are, of course, very traditional plot elements for a Western, and we’ve probably all read books like this dozens, if not hundreds, of times. The appeal of a book like this is in the execution, and Chadwick does a fine job of that in this book, manipulating his plot with great skill and achieving a headlong pace that kept me turning the pages past my usual bedtime, which, let me tell you, at my age is quite a feat of storytelling. He also handles the characterization with a sure hand, so that not everyone in this novel turns out exactly like you might think they would. There’s a romantic rectangle, as well, that’s done about as well as you can do that sort of thing.

Not long ago, I had some pretty harsh things to say about Chadwick’s contributions to the Jim Hatfield series in the pulp TEXAS RANGERS, but as unsuited as I think he was to that series, he’s a great Western writer in his stand-alone novels. GUNSMOKE RECKONING is the best of those I’ve read so far and one of the best traditional Westerns I’ve read in a long time. If you’re a Western fan, I give it a very strong recommendation. As far as I know, it was never reprinted after this 1951 edition with its great A. Leslie Ross cover. That’s my copy in the scan, by the way.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, June 1947

This is a pulp that I own and recently read most of. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover art is by Peter Stevens, who did quite a few covers for ADVENTURE during this era.

This issue starts off with the initial installment of an espionage serial set in post-war China entitled “He Who Rides the Tiger” by James Norman. As I usually do with serials if I don’t have all the installments on hand, I skipped this one. It may be an excellent yarn, but I don’t see any point in starting a story I can’t finish. Some of the other installments can be found in issues posted online. Maybe I’ll get around to reading it someday. To be honest, though, that’s not very likely.

Next up is a Western short story by the always dependable Frank Bonham. “Last Drive” is about the final run of a stagecoach. The former driver who is almost completely blind goes along as a passenger, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s forced into taking over the reins when Apaches attack the stagecoach. This is a well-written story with a nice final twist.

It's unusual to find a Dan Cushman story in a pulp that’s not published by Fiction House. He was a regular contributor to LARIAT STORY, ACTION STORIES, and JUNGLE STORIES. His long novella in this issue of ADVENTURE, “The Cask of Khabar”, which is set in the Congo, would have been right at home in JUNGLE STORIES, and again to be honest, it’s the main reason I picked this issue to read. Because of his resemblance to a dead man, American trader and self-professed “jungle tramp” Craig Thebes finds himself mixed up with a gang of ruthless criminals. A couple of beautiful women are involved in the scheme, too, of course. At times in this story, it seems like Cushman is trying to do a jungle version of THE MALTESE FALCON. Thebes is certainly hardboiled, and his banter with the evil Sir Roger Humphries reads like Sam Spade and Casper Gutman trading veiled quips. I think the ending is a bit less dramatic than it could have been, but that’s the only drawback in an otherwise superb pulp yarn that just makes me eager to read more by Cushman.

Samuel W. Taylor wrote a lot of Western, detective, and adventure stories for a wide variety of pulps. His story in this issue is called “Do Not Molest the Miracles” and is billed as an “Off the Trail” story. That fits it pretty well. It’s a whimsical tale of elves building houses for needy veterans during the post-war housing crisis, only to run afoul of government red tape. As a general rule, whimsy isn’t something I really enjoy, but this story is well-written and mildly amusing. It would have made a good, lighter-than-usual episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

Steve Hail wrote Westerns and nautical adventures. His story story “Doghole Circuit” in this issue definitely fits into the latter category. It uses the old “disgraced skipper is forced by a catastrophe to redeem himself and pull of a daring stunt” plot. In this case, the catastrophe is an erupting volcano and a passenger liner that’s run aground just off the Big Island of Hawaii. To a confirmed landlubber like me, this plot probably doesn’t resonate as much as it would with somebody who likes and knows something about ships. But I still thought it was a pretty good story anyway.

Being an Oklahoman, Clifton Adams knew the oilfields pretty well and could spin a good yarn using that setting. “The Crazy Kind” is about a prizefight between two oilfield workers with a rich new lease as the stakes. This is a lighter-weight, more humorous story than most of Adams’ work, but it’s still well-written and very entertaining. I never worked in the patch, but I had relatives who did and have been around that world some, so I’ve always had a fondness for novels and stories set there.

I’ll sometimes make an exception to my policy of not reading serial installments. If it’s the final installment, or by an author I particularly like, and the story wasn’t published later as a novel that I might read someday, I’ll give one a try. The final installment (of three) of “Salmon Sweepstakes” by Robert E. Pinkerton wraps up this issue. Pinkerton wrote a lot of stories and serials for the adventure fiction pulps, but I don’t recall ever reading anything by him before. This story is about the rivalry between salmon fishermen in the Pacific Northwest following World War I. I started it but couldn’t get interested in it, so I wound up setting it aside. If I’d been able to read the whole thing, I might have liked it better.

The stories by Cushman, Bonham, and Adams are good enough that I have to consider this a pretty solid issue of ADVENTURE. None of the other stories are bad, and I can't count off for serials because they're just the nature of the beast, so to speak. So I'd say that if you have a copy of this one, it's worth pulling off the shelf and giving it a shot.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Complete Western Book Magazine, February 1952

I don't own this pulp, but it looks like a fine issue of COMPLETE WESTERN BOOK MAGAZINE, starting with the usual excellent cover by Norman Saunders. Inside are stories by a really strong group of authors: D.B. Newton (twice, once as himself and once under the house-name Ken Jason), Philip Ketchum, Dean Owen, H.A. DeRosso, Frank Castle, and Kenneth Fowler. An issue that's almost certainly worth reading if you're fortunate enough to have a copy.

A Rough Edges Rerun: Sin is a Redhead - Steve Harragan (William Maconachie)

Observant readers of this blog with a good memory [like since last Friday] may recognize this cover art. That's because it was used, with some minor modifications, on the cover of Orrie Hitt's novel PUSHOVER, which I wrote about a while back. That comes as no surprise, since the publisher of SIN IS A REDHEAD, Universal Publishing and Distributing, later published sleaze novels under the Beacon Books and Softcover Library imprints, and smaller publishers like that often reused cover art. (UPD also published a wider variety of paperbacks in the Sixties and Seventies under the Award Books imprint, including scores of the Nick Carter, Killmaster novels before that series moved over to Ace/Charter and eventually Berkley.)

I've finally gotten around to reading SIN IS A REDHEAD. Great cover, great title, okay book. "Steve Harragan", the author, is also the main character. Harragan the character is a former crime reporter who hit it big playing the ponies and retired to become a man about town/hardboiled amateur detective. Some websites refer to him as a private eye, but he's not, at least not in this book. In SIN IS A REDHEAD, Harragan is driving down the street in New York City when he spots the beautiful Flame Tilson. He makes her acquaintance, finds out that she's the girlfriend of jazz trumpeter Siggy Houston, and regretfully decides that there won't be any romance with the gorgeous Flame.

But then she calls on him for help, Siggy winds up dead, Flame disappears, and Steve (who, to be honest, is not the brightest guy in the world) winds up on the spot for the murder. So off he goes, galloping around the New York underworld trying to find the real killer and rescue Flame from the bad guys. Along the way he winds up in a couple of pretty diabolical death traps, which he barely escapes.

There's not much detective work in this book. It's more of a straight-ahead thriller, and while it's not particularly good overall, there are some nice scenes here and there and some surprisingly funny lines. It's written in that breezy Carter Brown style, and again, it's no big surprise to find that like Alan G. Yates, the author of the Carter Brown books, "Steve Harragan" the author is also an Englishman, William Maconachie. In fact, SIN IS A REDHEAD is actually a reprint of a British novel, REDHEAD RHAPSODY!, originally published by Hamilton & Company in London, probably in 1950, and reprinted in the States by Uni-Books in 1952. In the original version, both character and author were named "Bart Carson". The name was changed for the American edition, and the character was also given an eye-patch. All this information is courtesy of the top-notch British researcher and bibliographer Steve Holland, author of the indispensable history of post-war British paperbacks THE MUSHROOM JUNGLE. More details about Maconachie and the Bart Carson/Steve Harragan series can be found on Holland's excellent blog Bear Alley.

SIN IS A REDHEAD and the other Harragan paperbacks (which are actually digest size) seem to be pretty easy to come by, although some of them are a little pricey. [There are eight of them on Amazon as I write this, and the cheapest is $30, with prices going up to $195.] I'm not going to run right out and order the others [not at those prices!], but I found enough to like in this one that if I ever come across other books in the series I won't hesitate to pick them up if the price is reasonable.

[This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 11, 2011.]

Bait - William Vance writing as George Cassidy

I’ve seen William Vance’s by-line on a number of Western novels over the years, but as far as I recall I’ve never read any of them. I had no idea that he also wrote soft-core books under the pseudonym George Cassiday until Black Gat Books reprinted one of them entitled BAIT, originally published by Beacon Books in 1962 with a fine cover by Jack Faragasso, who is still with us, by the way, and active on Facebook.

The title refers to beautiful, seventeen-year-old Melody Frane, who lives a hardscrabble existence as a migrant farm worker. The only family she has is a drunken mother, and Melody has to take care of her, as well. She’s working at a cantaloupe farm in Arizona when she meets Kenney Ward, a pilot who works for Harry Ransome, the ruthless tycoon who owns not only the farm but also radio stations, hotels, electronics plants, and other enterprises. Melody and Kenney are attracted to each other, but before a real romance can develop between them, she falls under the sway of Ransome, who beds her, takes her under his wing, and sends her to Los Angeles so she can be educated at a school for aspiring starlets and models run by a beautiful former silent movie star. Ransome claims he wants to hire Melody as his secretary, but in reality he plans to pimp her out to various important businessmen he wants to blackmail.

Although there are crimes in this book, it’s not a crime novel. BAIT is more of a domestic drama as every man Melody encounters, as well as some of the women, try to seduce her. The thread of her developing relationship with Kenney runs all the way through, and anybody who’s read very many of these soft-core books can make a pretty good guess how things are going to turn out.

That predictability in plotting and resolution doesn’t really detract from the appeal of BAIT. It’s a well-written book with some excellent scenes and a pace that never lets up for very long. The sex scenes are frequent but not very graphic, as if Vance wasn’t all that comfortable writing them and got more enjoyment out of developing the characters, the most well-rounded of which is Melody. (No pun intended, honest.) Harry Ransome is also a thoroughly despicable villain. I raced through BAIT and really enjoyed it. I’m not going to drop everything and search for the other “George Cassidy” books Vance wrote, but I am going to check my shelves and see if I have any of his Westerns. The paperback edition of BAIT can be pre-ordered on Amazon, and I’m sure there’ll be an e-book edition as well once it’s published.

25 Years of WesternPulps

On April 23, 1999, I posted the first message on the WesternPulps email group, which I created that day on a platform called OneList. A couple of years before that, while attending a mystery convention in Dallas called Cluefest, I heard Bill Crider and Steve Brewer talking about something called Rara-Avis. That was my introduction to the concept of email groups, and shortly after that, I subscribed to Rara-Avis.

Eventually, I got the idea that there ought to be a group devoted to the Western pulps, and so I started one. That first message seems to have been lost in the group's migration from platform to platform over the years, but here's a quote from the second one:

Now that the list is growing a little, we need to get some posts on it. I recently read two Western pulp novels, both of them Jim Hatfield stories from TEXAS RANGERS: "Renegade Roundup" from the July 1937 issue, and "Terror Stalks the Border" from the September 1937 issue. Both are supposedly by A. Leslie Scott, writing under the Jackson Cole house-name. "TSTB" is definitely by Scott, who has such a distinctive style. Most of the time, "RR" reads like Scott, too, but there are a few passages that sound like someone else's work, perhaps an editor's. Or perhaps Scott rewrote another author's story that failed to pass muster. At any rate, they're both good stories and very enjoyable.

Now, a question, or actually a request. In reading Western pulp stories, please be on the lookout for an author who uses the word "Coltmen" instead of "gunmen". Whoever this author is, he wrote at least a couple of Hatfield stories ("Gun Harvest" and "Brand of the Lawless"), but I've never been able to identify him. His use of "Coltmen" is probably his most distinctive stylistic feature; I've never encountered it anywhere else except in the two stories mentioned above.

This list is wide open for discussion of anything related to Western pulps, including current Western novels that have pulp elements or influences. I'm a Western writer myself, and I know that many of my books have been influenced by my pulp reading.

In case you're wondering, the "Coltmen" author mentioned above was soon identified by my friend Jim Griffin as J. Edward Leithead, and I've read many of his stories since then and adopted several of his catchphrases as my own, an example of that pulp influence in my writing that I mentioned. Over the years, many, many such questions about authors have been answered on the list.

In its early years, the group was pretty busy, hitting its high in messages with 705 in February 2002. But this was just as interest in blogs was rising, and the activity tailed off. Then a few more years went by and Facebook and other social media took up even more of people's time and interest. WesternPulps became a fairly low-traffic group averaging less than a hundred messages per month, although there are still flurries where a topic engages the members' interest and the messages flow faster again for a while.

Early in the group's history, a reader named Kent Johnson joined and really added a lot of energy to the proceedings with many questions and comments, and he also uploaded a wealth of lists and other information to the group's files section. Sadly, Kent passed away after a few short years. Other early contributors who brought a great deal to the list were Todd Mason and Juri Nummelin, both of whom were also members of Rara-Avis, and the above-mentioned Jim Griffin, Western author and friend of long-standing. And they still contribute to the list, making them the longest active members other than myself.

OneList, the group's original platform, was taken over by E-Groups, which was in turn acquired by YahooGroups, which was WesternPulps' home for many years. Back in 2018, seeing that YahooGroups was soon going to be discontinued, I migrated the group to a new platform called Groups.io, where it continues to this day. (Rara-Avis, which has been around even longer, is currently on Groups.io as well.) By this point in social media history, email groups are practically pre-historic, of course, but I don't care. When I started WesternPulps 25 years ago, I never gave any thought to how long it would be around. I wouldn't have guessed that it would still exist two and a half decades and almost 30,000 posts later. But I decided several years ago that it will continue as long as I'm able to maintain it and there's a platform for it, even if it gets back to the point where I'm just sending messages to myself, as I was in the beginning. It's been a labor of love for a long time now, and I still love it. If any of you are interested in joining, it won't take up much of your time or clutter your inbox (it's low-traffic, like I said), and you'll have access to the group website with a huge amount of information about Western pulps and Westerns in general in the message archive, the files section, and the photo section. And you might have the answer to the next question somebody posts about a particular author or pulp.

The STAR WESTERN cover at the top of this post isn't a great scan, but it was one of the first, if not the first, image uploaded to the group. Thank you for reminiscing with me today.

Delilah Was Deadly - Carter Brown (Alan G. Yates)

It’s been too long since I read a Carter Brown novel, so I decided to pick up where I left off in Stark House’s reprinting of the original versions of the Al Wheeler novels published in Australia. DELILAH WAS DEADLY is the third book in the series and was never reprinted in the United States until this collection from several years ago.

In this one, Al is still developing into the character known so well to those of us who grew up reading the Signet paperback versions of the novels in the Sixties and Seventies. He still works for the police department of the unnamed city where the story takes place, and he reports to Commissioner (not Sheriff) Lavers. We have Sergeant Podeski giving him a hand instead of Sergeant Polnick. And Al is actually in charge of the Homicide Bureau in this one, having been promoted since the previous book.

Those differences are fairly minor. The case is the same sort that Al has tackled before and will again, many times. The body of a man who works as the social editor for a fashion magazine is found stuffed in a safe in the magazine’s office. He’s been strangled with a girdle. (If you’re wondering why a fashion magazine has a safe on the premises, it’s so that top-secret dress designs can be locked up.) Al decides to investigate the killing himself when one of the detectives assigned to the case is also murdered when he goes to search the victim’s apartment. More killings follow, as Al navigates a complicated plot involving a nightclub owner, a department store tycoon, an eccentric artist, and, of course, numerous beautiful young women, some of whom succumb to Al’s attempts at seduction.

Then, fairly late in the book, author Carter Brown, who was really Alan G. Yates, springs a pretty effective plot twist. The Carter Brown books were nearly always well-plotted, especially considering their length (around 40,000 words, I’m guessing). This one isn’t quite as complex as some but works well. Everything rockets along with lots of snappy banter, plenty of sexy hijinks, and enough action to keep things interesting. The title isn’t really justified until very late in the book and comes off as a bit of an afterthought by the author, but that’s it’s biggest weakness and it’s nothing to quibble about.

I had a fine time reading DELILAH WAS DEADLY and getting reacquainted with Al Wheeler. Luckily, I have plenty more of those Stark House triple volumes on hand, so I plan to get back to the series without much delay this time. These days, short, entertaining books are just what I’m looking for most of the time. If you want to give these a try, they’re available in e-book and trade paperback editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Science Fiction Quarterly, February 1955

I don't think I've ever run across an issue of SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY. This looks like a pretty good one. I like the dramatic cover by Kelly Freas, and there are some good writers inside: C.M. Kornbluth, Frank Belknap Long, L. Sprague de Camp, and a couple whose names are only vaguely familiar to me, Charles V. De Vet and Winston Marks. I don't own this issue, but if you want to check it out, it's available on the Internet Archive here. There are a lot of other issues of SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY posted there as well. I might have time to read some of them if anybody ever comes up with a thirty-hour day.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, October 1952

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, featuring the usual excellent cover by Sam Cherry. That guy must have been tireless. He turned out a ton of pulp and paperback covers, all of them fine work.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue of TEXAS RANGERS has been attributed to Joseph Chadwick. It begins with Hatfield receiving a mysterious assignment from not only his regular Ranger boss, Cap’n Bill McDowell, but also from the governor of Texas his own self. In a clandestine meeting at the Capitol in Austin, the governor tells Hatfield to go to Fort Worth, check into a hotel there, and wait for someone to contact him and use the code word “Alamo”. It’s an intriguing opening.

Before you know it, there’s a beautiful girl involved, too, and Hatfield finds himself on a vast ranch in the Texas Panhandle impersonating the grandson of the owner and trying to get to the bottom of a deadly plot against the old-timer.

Having read a number of Chadwick’s non-series stories, I can easily believe that he wrote this Jim Hatfield novel. The story is extremely violent and hardboiled, and Hatfield comes in for a considerable amount of punishment, both physical and emotional. Chadwick always put his protagonists through the wringer, so this fits right in with his work. With a different character, this would have been a terrific novel.

But as a Jim Hatfield novel, it’s terrible. Chadwick’s grasp of the character and the series is fine up to a certain point: there are appearances by Cap’n Bill and Hatfield’s horse Goldy, and he refers to Hatfield as the Lone Wolf fairly often. But again and again, especially in the second half of the story, Chadwick has Hatfield doing things that he just doesn’t do in the stories by most of the other authors who wrote as Jackson Cole. He’s slow on the draw, he gets beaten up too easily, he gets too involved with the girl in the story, and he even talks about maneuvering one of the bad guys into a position where it’ll be easy to kill him. Quite a few years ago, I read another of Chadwick’s Hatfield yarns, “Death Rides the Star Route”, and while I don’t recall the details, I remember being displeased with it, too. I suspect it was for the same reasons. I believe he wrote only one other Hatfield novel, and I have a hunch I won’t be reading it any time soon, if ever.

“Spring Storm” is a short story by the prolific pulpster Giff Cheshire. I haven’t read a great deal by him, but I’ve found his work to be a little inconsistent, with a lot of it on the bland side. This yarn about a cattleman trying to drive off a nester fits that description, despite the fact that there’s some action. One of the supporting characters, an old cowboy, is very well-written and also redeems the story to a certain extent.

“The Sheriff Buys a Ring” is by Julian Hammer, one of only two stories credited to him in the Fictionmags Index. The title makes it sound like a comedy, but it’s actually a fairly hardboiled tale about a secret in a lawman’s past coming back to haunt him. It’s no lost classic, but it’s not bad.

“Double Dick and the Widow Woman” also sounds like a comedy, and it is. The author is Lee Priestly, and it’s the fourth and final story in a short series about old prospector Double Dick Richards, who roams around his with burro and pet cat getting into various scrapes. This one features a young cowboy who trades in his horse for a motorcycle and an attractive widow woman who owns a ranch plagued by rustlers. Hijinks, romantic and otherwise, ensue. This story isn’t particularly funny, although it’s supposed to be, but it’s mildly amusing in places and a lot more readable than some Western pulp humor I’ve encountered.

Not surprisingly, the best story in this issue is by Gordon D. Shirreffs. His novelette “Apache Ambush” is set in New Mexico and Arizona during the Civil War and finds a young Union army lieutenant battling Confederate spies and marauding Apaches. There’s a beautiful young woman to rescue and a massacre of Union troops to prevent. A colorful old-timer who is a civilian scout is on hand to help out, too. Shirreffs keeps things racing along with plenty of gritty action scenes and does his usual excellent job with the southwestern setting. This is a suspenseful, thoroughly entertaining yarn.

Charles A. Stearns wrote mostly science fiction for the pulps and digests in the Fifties, but he turned out a few Western stories as well. “Duel at Sundown” in this issue is a short but well-written story about a young man, the son of a legendary lawman, trying to work up the courage to face his first gunfight. It’s an effective tale with a twist ending that I didn’t see coming.

Finally, “Men of Steel” is a late pulp story from the prolific A. Leslie Scott, writing here as A. Leslie. He had already started writing paperbacks and would concentrate on that for the next two decades. In this one, set on the Texas coast along Matagorda Bay, the hero is Sheriff Neale Ross, who is trying to track down a gang of sheep rustlers believed by the local Mexican herders to be ghosts because they wear Conquistador armor. It’s a similar plot to ones that Scott used many times, but the descriptive writing is vivid and the action scenes are great. It’s a minor but very enjoyable yarn. And it got a new life when Scott rewrote it as the first chapter and a half of his Walt Slade novel BULLETS FOR A RANGER, published by Pyramid Books in 1963. The hero in that version is Texas Ranger Walt Slade, of course, with Sheriff Ross becoming a supporting character. I own that novel but I don’t think I’ve ever read it. Maybe now I should.

I’d say that, judged as a whole, this is a below-average issue of TEXAS RANGERS because the Jim Hatfield novel just doesn’t work very well, and only the stories by Shirreffs and Scott are really outstanding among the backup stories. As always, I’m glad to have read it, but I hope the next issue I pick up off the shelves will be better.