I featured this issue of FRONTIER STORIES several years ago, but I’ve since acquired a copy and just read it. Unfortunately, that copy is completely coverless, including the spine, but I’m not a fan of that Sidney Reisenberg cover anyway and all the pages are complete and easily readable, so I’m all right with that. Once again, the scan is from the Fictionmags Index, but my comments below are new.
Les Savage Jr. is one of my favorite Western writers. His mountain man novella “Queen of the Long Rifles” leads off this issue. That title is somewhat deceptive, and I suspect editor Malcolm Reiss may have come up with it. The story features a strong female character in Mira Phillips, the daughter of a trading post owner in the Big Horn Mountains during the fur trapping era. The actual protagonist is Batteau Severn, a French-Canadian trapper who clashes with a ruthless New Englander trying to take over the fur trade. This winds up as an out-and-out war between the two factions, which provides Savage with the opportunity for plenty of big, sweeping action scenes, as well as some brutal fistfights and one-on-one showdowns. This is a terrific story, full of excitement and a vividly portrayed, historically accurate setting. Batteau is a tough and very likable hero, Mira is a fine heroine, there are several top-notch sidekicks, some thoroughly despicable villains, and several surprisingly poignant moments. Savage could just write the heck out of a yarn like this. I loved it.
Tom W. Blackburn was also a consistently excellent Western author. His novelette “Devil’s Cache” starts with a freighter following the trail of whoever stole four of his horses. Not very far along, though, the story takes an abrupt turn and appears momentarily that it’s about to turn into a lost race yarn. That’s not how things play out, but the plot is still fairly off-beat for a Western pulp tale. This one is very well-written and I enjoyed it a lot, too.
Sometimes reading a pulp is educational. “Red Reckoning” is about a stagecoach trying to make it across the country to San Francisco before a ship can sail around South America and reach the same destination. An enormous wager is riding on the outcome. The protagonist is a frontier scout hired to help the stagecoach make the journey safely. Naturally, there’s a lot of trouble and treachery along the way, as well as romance with the daughter of the stagecoach line owner who made the bet. It’s a well-written yarn that moves along at a nice pace. I had never heard of the authors, Frankie-Lee Weed and Kelly Masters, so I did a little research on them, and that’s where the educational part comes in. My first thought was that they might be a husband-and-wife writing team, but nope, turns out they were just occasional writing partners who had much more prolific careers on their own. Kelly Masters published a few stories under his real name, but most of his work, which consisted mainly of slick magazine stories and boys’ adventure novels, was published under the pseudonym Zachary Ball. A couple of his novels were adapted as episodes of the original Walt Disney TV show. Frankie-Lee Weed published quite a few stories in the Western romance and love pulps under her real name, as well as the pseudonym Saliee O’Brien. Under the O’Brien name she went on to publish numerous historical romance novels in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. I remember seeing those books when they were new. So both authors went on to bigger (not necessarily better) things but got their start in the pulps.
Curtis Bishop was a Texas newspaper reporter who followed the rodeo circuit while also writing scores of Western and sports stories for various pulps, along with a number of juvenile sports novels and some well-regarded Western novels. I haven’t read much by him, but everything I’ve read has been very good. So I expected to enjoy “Turning Trails”, his novelette in this issue set in Texas during the days right after the Civil War. It starts off strong with a former Confederate officer having left his home and headed west after the war, as many actually did. He arrives in San Antonio and gets mixed up in the clash between the beautiful blond owner of a nearby ranch and the brutal, corrupt Reconstruction authorities who run things in Texas at this point. Then it becomes a trail drive story as the protagonist tries to help the young woman get a herd of cattle across the Red River into Indian Territory before the crooked sheriff can seize them. Bishop writes with a nice sense of time and place, but this story goes off the rails in the second half as he makes a number of geographical errors (I mean, I understand dramatic license, but that only goes so far, especially when you’re a Texan writing about Texas), and the plot twist that fuels the story’s resolution stretches willing suspension of disbelief ’way past the breaking point. I just didn’t accept that things could ever happen that way—and I’m a guy who has no problem with, say, Jim Hatfield’s almost super heroics. So this story, despite having some good stuff in it, wound up being a major disappointment.
This issue wraps up with the novella “The Conestoga Pirate” by another of my favorite authors, Dan Cushman. It’s an important story in Cushman’s career because it introduces his series character, the good guy outlaw Comanche John, although in this story and the next one in the series, he’s called Dutch John. This story was reprinted in the Leisure Books collection NO GOLD ON BOOTHILL, but since I have the original pulp version, that’s what I read. I hadn’t read any of the Dutch/Comanche John stories until now, although I think I own them all in one form or another.
Something about “The Conestoga Pirate” struck me as familiar right away, and a glance at the story intro in NO GOLD ON BOOTHILL explained why. Cushman used parts of this novella in his later novel NORTH FORK TO HELL, which I read several years ago, although he dropped Dutch John from that version. In this one, Dutch John is more of a supporting character, although an important one. The protagonist is young Wils Fleming, who, along with the old-timer Bogey and the disreputable gunfighter/outlaw Dutch John, encounter a wagon train full of immigrants being duped by a group of villains pretending to be guides and scouts. This leads to drama, gunplay, ambushes, and attempted lynchings. It’s a good, fast-moving story, with a little bit of an off-kilter tone, as many of Cushman’s stories have. He wrote a lot of Western and adventure stories for the pulps that were firmly in those traditions yet just a little different at the same time. It took me a while to understand that and appreciate his work, but as I said above, he’s now one of my favorites. I guess I need to read the rest of the Comanche John stories and novels.
There are also two Western history articles in this issue, one about the outlaw Black Jack Ketchum by Harold Preece and one about the Bannock War by Fairfax Downey. As usual, I just skimmed these. I like Western history and have read a bunch of it, but when it comes to pulps, I’m there for the fiction. And despite my ultimate disappointment in Curtis Bishop’s novella, this is an excellent issue of FRONTIER STORIES overall, with outstanding yarns from Savage, Cushman, and Blackburn. If you have a copy, it’s well worth reading.
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