This is a pulp that I own and read recently. I don’t know who did the cover, but I’m not fond of it. It seems too drab and murky to me. But in this case, since the stories inside looked promising, I didn’t really care that much about the cover. It was just good to get a chance to read a Western pulp again after being away from them for a while.
I’m a long-time fan of William Hopson, although I’ve always found his work inconsistent. He wrote some great books, some not very good ones, and a lot in between that were still entertaining. The lead novel in this issue of GIANT WESTERN is one of those rare cases where a pulp novel actually is novel-length. And in fact, “Cow Thief Empire” was published as a hardback novel by Arcadia House, also in 1953. It might have been expanded some for book publication, but my hunch is that it wasn’t, at least not in any significant way. The pulp version is long enough to have been an Arcadia House Western.
But what is it about, you ask? Stony Burns, a rancher who has a spread in Indian Territory on land leased from the Indians, rides down into the Texas Panhandle to the ranch where his late father worked. When he got word of his father’s death, Stony decided to visit the ranch and put up a gravestone. But when he gets there, he immediately clashes with the beautiful young woman who inherited the ranch and winds up making an enemy out of the ranch manager, as well. The stove-up old cowboy who serves as the ranch cook has a beautiful daughter, too, and before you know it, we have a tension-filled romantic rectangle that results in several brutal fistfights.
This is far from being a Western romance, though. Before you know it, a Comanche war party jumps the reservation and follows the buffalo south through the Panhandle, and “Cow Thief Empire” turns into an Indian fighting yarn, with Stony Burns and the young woman who owns the ranch holed up in an isolated line shack, trying to survive a blizzard and an attack by that war party. Up until then, Stony has hated the girl, but now he sees her in a new light.
But wait, the cook’s daughter is captured by the Comanches, and Stony has go after her, joining up with a cavalry patrol to do so, and “Cow Thief Empire” becomes a cavalry vs. the Indians story. If that’s not enough, an army of rustlers descends on the Panhandle after the Indian threat is dealt with, and those rustlers are led by an old enemy of Stony’s, which makes “Cow Thief Empire” (finally, the title fits) a Save the Ranch tale, with some Texas Ranger action thrown in to sweeten the pot.
Whew! You get the idea. “Cow Thief Empire” has the same sort of epic sweep and kitchen sink plotting as TO TAME A LAND, my favorite Louis L’Amour novel. L’Amour was a better writer overall than Hopson, and Hopson’s Texas geography is a little shaky at times, but although I wasn’t sure at first, I wound up really enjoying “Cow Thief Empire”. I love big, sprawling Westerns like this, and Hopson keeps things moving along briskly. The characters are interesting, and they actually evolve over the course of the story. The protagonist, Stony Burns, is pretty unlikable at the start. In fact, he’s downright rotten, but he grows into a sympathetic hero. This isn’t the best novel I’ve read by William Hopson, but it’s right up there. (My two favorites by him, for what it’s worth, are THE RANGE CAT and GUNFIGHTER’S PAY, and I go back and forth on which one is better.)
Thomas Calvert McClary published hundreds of Western, detective, and adventure stories in the pulps and digests in a long career that lasted from the early Thirties to the mid-Sixties. His story in this issue, “Frontier Post”, published under the name T.C. McClary, is a cavalry yarn, as you might guess from the title. The captain in command of the post has to deal not only with a horde of Blackfeet on the warpath but also an overbearing Senator on an inspection tour of the West. It’s not a bad story, but the writing isn’t very good and I struggled a little to get through it. I haven’t read a lot by McClary, but I think this is the weakest story of his I’ve encountered.
I don’t know much about Marc Miller. “A Bride Comes to Dry Gulch” was his first published story, and he went on to do about a dozen more Western and detective stories for various pulps. This is a mail order bride story, as you can guess from the title, and it’s told in the sort of folksy, humorous, first-person narration that often doesn’t work for me. I actually liked this story better than I expected to, but it’s not really that funny and it comes to a very abrupt ending, as if it’s just the first part of what should have been a longer story.
G. Davisson Lough is one of the pseudonyms of Glenn Dale Lough, a West Virginia writer whose career started in the Western and detective pulps in the mid-Forties, but who is best remembered today as the author of dozens of softcore novels, most of them for lower-rung publishers, under the names Glenn Low and John Furlough. I’ve read several of his novels and enjoyed them. I think “The Damned Die Old”, his novelette in this issue, is the first Western by him that I’ve read. It has an unlikely protagonist, a cowardly misfit who takes on the job of delivering the ex-wife of an outlaw who escaped from prison to a ghost town where the fugitive plans to take his revenge on her. Or does he? There’s also a fortune in hidden loot in play, as well as numerous other hardcases who want to get their hands on it. Lough drops the reader down right in the middle of this complicated plot. He tends to play up basic emotions in his work, so there’s plenty of lust, greed, and brutality in this one, but some admirable traits emerge from the characters as well, even the unlikely ones. The writing is gritty and raw and works very well. This is a terrific story that I thoroughly enjoyed. Lough’s fiction has a distinctive voice, and I really need to read more of it.
I don’t know anything about Fred Delano except that he published a few stories in various Western pulps in the mid-Fifties. “The Glass Ball” in this issue is about a down-on-his-luck rancher who decides to go after the reward on a bank robber because some clever deduction has clued him in on the thief’s identity. It’s an okay story, not at all surprising in its resolution but decently written.
Caddo Cameron, whose real name was Charles Richard Beeler, was a prolific contributor to the Western and general fiction pulps from the mid-Thirties to the early Fifties. His novelette “A Devil on the Cattle Trail” in this issue is his last published story. It’s about a trail drive and a young wrangler who gets a reputation as a hoodoo, or jinx. The actual protagonist is one of the cowboys who sticks up for the youngster. I don’t know anything about Beeler’s background, but I’ve read several of his stories and the air of authenticity about them always strikes me. I suspect that like Walt Coburn, J.E. Grinstead, Chuck Martin, Eugene Cunningham, and others, he worked as a cowboy at some point in his life. This story lacks a dramatic resolution, but it’s a very likable yarn despite that.
With so much of this issue being taken up by Hopson’s novel, the overall quality sort of has to rise and fall with it, and it’s a good one so I’d say this is a pretty good issue of GIANT WESTERN. The story by Glenn Lough is also excellent and the others are all right, with McClary’s cavalry yarn being the weakest. If you have a copy on your shelves, it’s worth reading.
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