This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know who painted the cover. It’s not a great cover, in my opinion, but it’s not really a bad cover, either. And the map of Texas has El Paso not quite in the right place. They didn’t think they could slip that past a born-bred-and-forever Texan like me, did they? But on to the stories.
Seven Anderton is an unjustly forgotten writer who had a decent career in the Western, detective, and sports pulps from the late Twenties to the late Fifties, producing around a hundred stories during that run, many of them novellas or novelettes. But he never wrote an actual novel as far as I know, which is probably one reason he’s forgotten. His novella “Her Name is Battle” leads off this issue, and the title is literal: the heroine is named Esther Battle. She’s a Western girl born and raised who has been at an Eastern school the past few years, but as the story opens, she’s returning to claim the ranch she’s inherited from her uncle. During the trip, she makes some allies: a giant Swede who wants to become a cowboy, and an actual down-on-his-luck cowboy who winds up being hired as Esther’s foreman. Naturally, there’s an evil banker who wants to take over the ranch, even if it means kidnapping or killing Esther before she arrives.
As far as the set-up goes, there’s nothing in this story we haven’t read many times before, but Anderton populates his yarn with distinctive, well-developed, and even colorful characters. His writing is smooth and funny at times, tough and gritty at others. “Her Name is Battle” is just a well-written, very entertaining story with a few welcome twists. Unfortunately, it kind of limps to an ending that’s not as satisfying as it could have been, which is something I’ve noticed in other stories by Anderton. It’s like he pulls back rather than going for a big finish. However, that didn’t stop me from enjoying this story, and I won’t hesitate to read more by him.
During the Thirties, Cliff Campbell was a personal pseudonym for writer and editor Abner J. Sundell. In the Forties, it became a Columbia Publications house-name used by numerous authors on Western, detective, and sports stories. The actual author of “Killer From Texas”, a novella in this issue by-lined Cliff Campbell, hasn’t been determined as far as I know, but whoever it was did a pretty good job. Drifting cowpoke Homer Kale rides into a Wyoming settlement figuring on having a quiet drink, but before you know it, he’s been accused by a beautiful girl of murdering an old prospector, and he’s locked up in jail before being taken out by a lynch mob. Homer barely escapes that necktie party and goes on the run from the law, knowing that the only way he can save his life is by finding the real killer. It’s a time-worn plot, to be sure, but “Campbell” spins his yarn with skill and enthusiasm, combining some surprisingly lighthearted scenes with a grotesque and suitably evil villain, some other colorful characters, and enough gritty action to keep things interesting. I couldn’t even make a guess who actually wrote this one, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.
I’d read a couple of stories by W. Edmunds Claussen before and had a mixed reaction to them. One I thought was kind of okay, the other I didn’t like. His novelette in this issue, “Gun-Smuggler Trail”, falls into the kind of okay category. It has a pretty good plot: fiddlefooted adventurer Burt Moffat returns to his family’s ranch in New Mexico to find that his father and his brother (a U.S. marshal) have both been murdered, and outlaws are using the ranch to smuggle guns across the border to Pancho Villa in Mexico. The smuggling gang uses an old ghost town as its headquarters. The story is atmospheric and violent, but Claussen’s convoluted style can be hard to read and follow. So this is sort of a miss, but an interesting one that might have been a really good story in different hands.
“Gunslick Trio From Hell” is by Charles D. Richardson Jr., another author whose work I’ve found to be okay at best. In this story, a reformed outlaw who has become the respected mayor of a frontier settlement has his past crop up to haunt him in the form of three members of his old gang. Things play out about like you’d expect them to, but in rather bland fashion and nobody in the story is really all that likable. And overall, I didn’t like the story much.
Lee Floren’s work is hit-and-miss with me, but mostly I like his stories. “Triggers for a Texan” in this issue is another interesting yarn that’s not particularly well-written, but I liked it considerably better than Claussen’s novelette. It’s about a Texan who has sworn off using a gun because of violence in his past, but when he gets involved in a Wyoming range war, he has to choose whether to pick up a Colt again. We’ve all read this plot many times before, but Floren does a decent job with it, attempting a few stylistic tricks that don’t quite come off but don’t keep it from being an entertaining yarn.
Chuck Martin, who often wrote as Charles M. Martin as well, is another dependably entertaining Western pulpster. His story “Gun or Gallows” in this issue is about a young marshal working for Judge Isaac Parker, the famous Hanging Judge. He has to arrest an old friend of his for murder, but he doesn’t believe the man is guilty, so the two of them set out together to find the real killer. I didn’t like this one as much as the other stories I’ve read by Martin, but it’s not bad. The ending is a considerable stretch, though.
Lon Williams is a pretty well-regarded author because of his series of Weird Western stories about Deputy Sheriff Lee Winters. I’ve read a few of those, though, and I’m not really a fan. His contribution to this issue is a short stand-alone story called “Stolen Waters” about a crooked lawyer and forger getting his comeuppance. It’s a very minor story but reasonably well-written.
Overall, this issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN is probably a below average Western pulp, with the best story being the “Cliff Campbell” house-name yarn, and the Seven Anderton story is good, too. None of the others are terrible, but they’re not very memorable, either. Don’t rush to your shelves to see if you have this issue. If you do read it, go in with low expectations and it’ll probably provide at least some entertainment.
3 comments:
"Making bricks without straw" was the consistent metaphor, apparently, for the no-budget magazines Robert Lowndes would edit for Columbia in the '50s and the even more-poorly budgeted Health Knowledge digest-sized fiction magazines in the '60s...always readable, sometimes surprising, but rarely more than spottily first-rate, if even that good.
I've read a lot more of the Lowndes-edited Western pulps than any of the others he did for Columbia. Plenty of good stories but more not-so-good, so the better ones definitely stand out. I wonder if the SF pulps he edited might have been better because he had more connections in that genre and could get better authors to write for him. Although I suspect the pay was bad enough that Columbia was almost entirely a salvage market whether a writer was friends with Lowndes or not.
At the same time, I'll bet there were authors who wrote specifically for Columbia and never sent their stories anywhere else because they knew it would be a sure sale.
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