Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, August 7, 1937

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The beautifully painted and rather sedate (by WILD WEST WEEKLY standards) cover is by Tom Lovell. That’s Sonny Tabor, long-running series protagonist and the hero of the lead novelette in this issue.

Sonny Tabor, for those of you who don’t remember, is a young outlaw who was unjustly forced onto the owlhoot trail, but now he’s the most wanted man in Arizona Territory. In “Sonny Tabor’s Oregon Boot”, he’s captured by the law after suffering minor wounds in a shootout. To insure that he doesn’t escape, he’s locked into the Oregon Boot of the title, a special shackle that makes walking very difficult. But does that stop Sonny for very long? What do you think? Of course he gets away, but then he finds himself smack-dab in the middle of a scheme by outlaws to take over a couple of ranches owned by a pair of brothers. Sonny, despite being on the wrong side of the law, is really a good guy, so naturally he risks his own freedom to protect the innocent and deal out justice to the real evildoers. Author Paul S. Powers, who wrote this series and others under the pseudonym Ward M. Stevens, was great at spinning these fast-moving, action-packed yarns, and I always thoroughly enjoy them. Sonny really has problems piled up on him in this one, but he comes through, of course. I also found myself wondering if Stan Lee ever read WILD WEST WEEKLY, because Kid Colt seems very much influenced by Sonny Tabor.

George C. Henderson was a pretty good but now completely forgotten Western pulpster. He has two stories in this issue, the first being “The Jail Break at Big Horse” under the house-name Andrew A. Griffin. In it, two outlaws escape from custody. One of them is a hardened rustler and killer, the other a young man new to the owlhoot trail. The older man takes the younger one into his gang, but eventually the law is bound to catch up to them. This one has a twist ending and I saw part of it coming, but not all of it, and any surprise is a welcome bonus. Other than a slightly rushed ending, this is an entertaining yarn with some well-written action.

The Whistlin’ Kid is actually range detective Pete Prentiss, and he stars in a very long-running series in WILD WEST WEEKLY published under the house-name Emery Jackson. J. Allan Dunn wrote more of them than anyone else, although Guy L. Maynard and Ronald Oliphant contributed to the series, too. Dunn wrote this issue’s “The Whistlin’ Kid Plays Injun”, in which Prentiss, who hunts rustlers, is mistaken for one himself and almost strung up, and when he gets out of that mess, he disguises himself as an Indian to track down the real outlaws. Dunn was an old pro who always turned in a competently written story with some nice action, but there’s really not much to this one and I’d say it’s one of the weaker stories by him that I’ve read.

I’m a fan of T.W. Ford’s work, but I’ve also known for a long time that he could be inconsistent. His novelette in this issue, “Vengeance of the Peacemaker”, reads like it’s part of a series, but as far as I can tell, this is the only appearance of drifting adventurers Ben Hobbs, known as the Peacemaker, and his sidekick Poison Hellson. The two of them save a young cowboy from being gunned down by a crooked gambler who’s an old enemy of the Peacemaker’s, and that catapults them into a Save the Ranch story in which circumstance makes them wind up working with the rustlers, at least for a while. But you know they’ll straighten everything out eventually. I wasn’t sure I was going to like this one at first. The writing seemed a little rushed, to the point that I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I stuck with it and wound up liking it okay, although I wouldn’t rate it as high as most of Ford’s Silver Kid stories, the series for which he’s best remembered.

I’ve become a fan of the Shorty Masters series by Allan R. Bosworth, who was one of the best writers to contribute to WILD WEST WEEKLY. Mule driver Shorty, along with his gunslinging partner Willie Weatherbee, also known as the Sonora Kid, also run afoul of cattle thieves in “Rustlers on Wheels” and are mistaken for outlaws themselves, which seems to be kind of a probably unintended theme of this issue. Naturally, they figure out a way to clear their names and corral the real rustlers. It’s a well-written tale with touches of humor and plenty of action, another good entry in a consistently good series.

George C. Henderson makes his second appearance in this issue, this time under his name, with the novelette “Crazy Q’s Gunpowder Jamboree”. Unfortunately, this is part of a series of linked novelettes that amounts to a serialized novel, and so much of it depends on what has gone before that I never could get into it and wound up not finishing it. Henderson was pretty good, as I mentioned above, and I’m sure if I had all six parts, I would enjoy reading about the adventures of Buckaroo Boone and the other cowboys from the Crazy Q ranch. I’ll pass for now, though.

There are some features and a comic strip, all of which I just glanced at, as usual. For the most part, I’m just interested in the stories, and this issue, none of them rise above the level of pretty good and some are fairly weak, making this a slightly below average issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY in my opinion. The stories by Paul S. Powers and Allan R. Bosworth are well worth reading, though.