Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, August 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with a cover by Arthur Mitchell, an almost forgotten but consistently pretty good artist who did most of the covers for ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE. This was Dell’s flagship Western pulp (maybe its only Western pulp, I don’t really know), and although I haven’t read many issues, they’ve all been good so far.

This issue leads off with the novella “Deuce of Diamonds”, the second in a short-lived series by Charles M. Martin about a drifting cowboy and troubleshooter known as Roaming Reynolds. There are three stories in the series. I don’t have the first one, but I do have the third one in addition to this one and will be getting to it soon, I expect. In this one, Reynolds and his sidekick, a 16-year-old cowpoke called Texas Joe, drift their way into a range war when they interrupt a setup by two hardcases intended to result in the death of a rancher’s son. This leads to a bunch of action in the next twenty-four-hour span, including ambushes, fistfights, the discovery of a rustled herd, and a stampede.

Martin, who also wrote a lot for the pulps as Chuck Martin, has a distinctive style that I enjoy, although he does get pretty heavy-handed with the “Yuh mangy polecat” dialect. And his plots are very traditional, nothing that Western pulp readers haven’t encountered many times before. But he spins his yarns with such enthusiasm that I can’t help but enjoy them. Martin was a colorful character who supposedly made little grave markers for the villains he killed off in his stories and planted them in his backyard. I like his work, but reading it is always a slightly bittersweet experience for me because, like Walt Coburn, he eventually committed suicide. Making a living in the pulps definitely took a toll on some writers.

Sam H. Nickels was another Western pulp author who turned out hundreds of stories, many of them in a long-running series in WILD WEST WEEKLY about a couple of cowboys nicknamed Hungry and Rusty. He also wrote many stand-alone stories under the house-names common in that pulp. Now and then he published a story under his own name in a different pulp, such as “Mud in Mooney’s Eye” in this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE. The protagonist is known as Mournful Mooney because of his sad disposition, which is caused by his habit of running afoul of the law. Mooney, despite not looking like much, is hell on wheels when it comes to shooting and fighting. He seems like he ought to be a series character, too, but as far as I know, this is his only appearance. In it, he’s hired as a lawman to tame a wild town. The results are entertaining, if not particularly memorable. Nickels was a decent writer.

Harry F. Olmsted is one of my favorite Western pulp writers. He’s almost completely forgotten because he never wrote any novels, but he turned out more than 1200 pieces of shorter fiction. His story in this issue, “Empty Shells”, is about a sinister gunfighter who turns up in a frontier town looking for the son of a local rancher who has just taken over the spread after his father passed away. Clearly, the gunman is there to settle a score with the young man, who was something of a shady character himself, running with outlaws, before coming home and trying to settle down. Of course, Olmsted is too good a writer not to put a twist on what seems apparent. The prose is spare and clean, the dialogue isn’t overloaded with dialect (although there is a little), and the suspense builds steadily throughout this one. “Empty Shells” is an excellent story and a good example of why I enjoy Olmsted’s work so much.

Carson Mowre is better remembered as a pulp editor rather than a writer, but he turned his hand to fiction, too, now and then, and published several dozen stories, most of them Westerns. He contributes a novelette, “One Night in Ten Sleep”, to this issue. As the title indicates, all the action takes place in one night in the frontier settlement of Ten Sleep, where a stranger called Tennessee Parker rides into town and finds himself in the middle of a war between a crooked judge on one side and a crooked sheriff and deputy on the other. Parker plays the two sides against each other (I was reminded a little of Hammett’s RED HARVEST) because he has an agenda of his own that doesn’t become clear until the end of the story. This one features some of the most brutal and graphic violence I’ve encountered in a Western pulp yarn. It has interesting characters, the pace is swift and never really lets up, and I really enjoyed it. I’ll have to keep an eye out for more of Mowre’s fiction.

I normally don’t read the non-fiction features in Western pulps, but one in this issue caught my attention. It’s “The Blond Cossack” by Ed Earl Repp, whose work I usually enjoy. This is an interesting article about an outlaw known as Russian Bill, who was part of the Cowboy faction in Tombstone along with the Clantons and Johnny Ringo. Russian Bill claimed to be the son of a princess and told people he was forced to flee from Russia for political reasons after being a Cossack there. Whether there was any truth to that story remains unknown, but Repp’s recounting of it is vivid and interesting. Repp was known to use ghostwriters and the prose in this is a little toned down from his fiction, so another writer may have had a hand in it, but the Cossack parts of it read like Repp’s work to me.

I love S. Omar Barker’s cowboy poetry and the non-fiction columns he wrote for RANCH ROMANCES and TEXAS RANGERS, but his fiction usually isn’t to my taste. For ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, he wrote a series of humorous stories about a yarn-spinning old cowboy named Boosty Peckleberry. In this issue’s “All Ears”, Boosty is telling his bunkhouse mates about an alcoholic mule named Napolean. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t make it all the way through this one. This sort of stuff just doesn’t resonate with me, but I’m sure plenty of readers found it funny and charming because Barker was very popular for a long time.

Like Charles M. Martin, J.E. Grinstead was an actual cowboy at one time in his life, and his stories have a ring of authenticity. “Six-Gun Music” begins with a violent encounter in a saloon between a down-on-his-luck stranger and a local gunman/bully, and that leads to rustling and ambushes. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read by Grinstead in the past, and this is one of his best stories.

Galen C. Colin is another very prolific pulpster who’s mostly forgotten today. His story “Death Takes the Trail” is actually a dying message mystery, although not a very complicated or clever one. It leads to a good action scene, though. While I’ve read better by Colin, this is an okay yarn.

Overall, this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE is a solidly entertaining Western pulp. The stories by Olmsted, Mowre, and Grinstead are the best, and the others are all enjoyable with the exception of the S. Omar Barker tall tale, and other readers might like that a lot better than I did. I have several more issues of ALL WESTERN on hand and will be getting to them soon, I hope.