Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, November 1948

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, complete with a slam-bang cover by Sam Cherry. I’ve said it many times before, but I really like his work.

I also consistently enjoy the adventures of range detectives Tombstone Jones and Speedy Smith as penned by W.C. Tuttle. This issue’s novelette is called “Lovable Liars”, and as it opens, the pair of them are a-foot, having sold their horses and saddles anticipating that their boss at the Cattleman’s Association will send them to their next assignment via train. The boss expects them to ride horseback to the settlement of Smoke Tree, however, and since they sold their mounts and Tombstone then lost all their money trying out his supposedly foolproof system for blackjack . . . Well, the boys wind up riding the train, but they have to hop an illicit ride on a boxcar to do so. And then what happens? Why, the train gets held up, of course, and through a series of coincidences, Tombstone and Speedy are blamed for the robbery!

Clearing their names and corralling the actual train robbers complicates their original mission, which was to solve a murder for which the son of an old friend of their boss has been arrested. Our intrepid duo manage to accomplish all of that, of course, through a combination of luck, banter, fast action, and detective work that’s more clever than anyone gives them credit for. This is a consistently entertaining entry in a series I really like.

Cliff Walters, a prolific contributor to the Western pulps who’s all but forgotten these days, is next up with a story called “Bone Bonanza”, in which a young rancher who fancies himself an artist goes east in search of a career in fine art, only to have things work out differently than he expected. This is a very mild, lightweight story with a few interesting angles, and it’s an easy read that I don’t think will linger very long in anyone’s mind. But it’s a pleasant enough way to pass 15 minutes.

I sometimes wonder if the readers who bought these pulps realized that A. Leslie, Bradford Scott, and Jackson Cole (part of the time) were all the same guy. Some of them must have suspected. Under the A. Leslie name, Leslie Scott contributes the novelette “Washed in Blood” to this issue. The first part of the tale is fairly standard as young cowboy Jim Wayne clashes with three crooked brothers who run almost everything in the county. A saloon shootout leaves one of the brothers dead and Jim on the run as a fugitive. It’s when he holes up in an abandoned mission still being tended to by an old priest that the story becomes one of ghost pirates and hidden treasure. As always with a Scott story, the action is plentiful and well-written, and the settings are vivid. I really enjoyed this one.

I’ve read a couple of stories by Harold R. Stoakes, another forgotten writer, and enjoyed them. “The Red Stallion” in this issue is a modern-day Western about a horse that can’t be ridden and the relationship between a young man and his stepfather. Honestly, this seems less like a Western pulp story and more like something that would have appeared in a slick or even a literary magazine. It’s got enough angst to it that it could have been mawkish, but Stoakes keeps things pretty low-key and makes it work in a well-written story that reminds me of something Larry McMurtry might have written early in his career.

“One Man Wrecking Crew” is a short (maybe 2000 words, tops) story by the always dependable Donald Bayne Hobart. There’s not much plot to it, just some conflict between a young cowboy and a crooked saloon owner and his henchmen, and that’s just an excuse for a brutal fistfight scene. Hobart probably didn’t spend much time on this and picked up a quick 20 bucks or so, but he was enough of an old pro to make it fun to read.

The Navajo Tom Raine series has become one of my favorites. The novelette in this issue, “Ranger Out of Bounds” drops the reader down in the middle of the action as the Arizona Ranger investigates a land-and-water swindle that also involves the kidnapping of a beautiful young woman. The only break in the action comes when Raine is knocked out cold for a while. It’s a bit more complicated plot than usual for Lee Bond, who wrote this entry under the house-name Jackson Cole. Bond’s stories are pretty easy to identify: at least once in the story, the villains will stand around and explain the plot to each other, and the hero will face multiple enemies in a big, final gunfight. I thought this was an excellent story, and as usual, when I finished it I was eager to read more adventures of Navajo Tom Raine.

I don’t know anything about Clark Gray except that he published more than a hundred stories in various Western pulps and that he wrote the two worst Jim Hatfield novels in the whole series, “Lobo Colonel” (TEXAS RANGERS, January 1952) and “Warpath” (TEXAS RANGERS, June 1952). His story in this issue, “Tortilla Tenderfoot”, is about Pedro Gonzales, a reformed rustler who has lived a law-abiding life for years, only to be drawn back into a life of outlawry by the return of his former partner. This is a decent plot, but Gray plays it for laughs and the actual humor to be found in the story is pretty sparse. However, the writing isn’t bad, and although unimpressive, this is a much better story than either of Gray’s Hatfield novels.

All in all, this is a good solid issue of EXCITING WESTERN, due to top-notch series entries by Tuttle and Bond, a very good stand-alone by Scott, and some interesting short stories. It’s worth reading if you have a copy on your shelves.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, December 1945

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my brittle, battered, and tattered copy in the scan. The dramatic, eye-catching cover, as usual, is by Sam Cherry, who never painted a bad cover as far as I’m concerned, although of course I like some better than others.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue, “The Timber War”, has been attributed to Tom Curry, but I believe that’s incorrect. I’m convinced this one is actually by Leslie Scott. The terms “skalleyhooting” and “big skookum he-wolf”, common in his work, are used numerous times. There are quite a few vivid descriptive passages, although maybe not as many as you often find in a Scott novel. My theory is that Scott could always fill a few pages with description when he needed to, but also that whenever an editor needed to cut a few pages, those lengthy portraits of the landscape would be his first target. The plot, which finds a hidden criminal pitting two opposing forces—in this case, loggers and cowboys—against each other for his own benefit, is also classic Scott. To be fair, that’s a common Western plot no matter who the author is. I’ve written a few loggers vs. cowboys yarns myself. But this one, including the villain’s identity and the motivation for his scheming, is pure Scott and easy to see coming if you’ve read as many of his novels as I have. As further evidence, most of Curry’s Hatfield novels feature a proxy hero who winds up with the pretty girl. That happens in “The Timber War”, too, but it’s pretty much an afterthought, not a major part of the plot like it usually is with Curry. That’s my reasoning, but basically it boils down to knowing a Scott novel when I read one, and that’s what I think this is.

But is “The Timber War” any good, you ask? Oh, heck, yeah. Hatfield is sent to get to the bottom of the trouble brewing between Justin Flint’s logging crew and Clyde Cranley’s Double C ranch outfit. Sabotage has taken place on both sides. Tensions are running high and threaten to break out into open warfare. Hatfield gets ambushed a few times, helps out both sides, and figures out what’s really going on. There’s plenty of well-written action, and the pace never lets up for long. It’s formulaic, but nobody ever worked that formula better than Scott. I had a great time reading this, as I nearly always do with his work.

“Tenor on Horseback” is the only credit in the Fictionmags Index for Matt Sprague. Was that a pseudonym, or just the only story that Matt Sprague managed to sell? I don’t know, but I can say that this story about a couple of ranchers getting mixed up with an opera company touring the West is pretty polished and entertaining. It’s a humorous yarn without ever descending into slapstick, and there’s a nice twist at the end. I liked this one more than I expected to.

The issue wraps up with a story by an author I always expect to enjoy, Johnston McCulley. “Merry Christmas, Ranger” is about a Texas Ranger’s encounter with two outlaws when all he wants to do is make it home for Christmas so he can propose to the girl he wants to marry and then resign from the Rangers. The plot is pretty simple, but McCulley executes it very well and his fast-moving prose is always fun to read. The holiday is just a minor plot device; the story could have been written just as effectively without it. But the whole thing is enjoyable, and I’d say it’s another winner for McCulley.

This whole issue is a winner, in fact. All three stories are top-notch, and I greatly enjoyed reading this pulp. It’s well worth your time if you have a copy.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, February 1945

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat tattered copy in the scan. The dramatic cover is by Sam Cherry, who never painted a bad one.

“Guns of the Haunted Hills” is another fine Jim Hatfield novel by Leslie Scott writing as Jackson Cole. In this one, Hatfield is sent to the San Benito Valley in Texas’s Big Bend country to tackle some trouble brewing there, but in a nice twist, one reason Cap’n Bill McDowell gives him the job is get him away from some mysterious assassin who has been sending ominous drawings of a rattlesnake to Hatfield, before making an attempt to blow him up with a message doctored with explosive. It’s an odd touch for a Hatfield novel, but Scott makes it work.

The trouble in San Benito Valley centers around a coal mining company that has moved in, bringing a lot of Eastern European miners to dig out the coal. The local cattlemen aren’t happy about this, except for one young rancher, and a range war is brewing between him and the local cattle baron. The railroad is building a spur line into the valley as well, complicating matters even more. Hatfield barely shows up before somebody is trying to kill him. Are the attempts on his life connected to the job that’s brought him here, or has his mysterious enemy followed him to the Big Bend?

As usual, there’s quite a bit of trouble for Hatfield to untangle, and also as usual, Scott puts his mining and railroading background to good use. I don’t know how accurate his geology is, but a fella could learn a lot about a lot of things by reading these stories. I’m just out to be entertained, though, not educated, and Scott never fails to deliver on that score. I raced right through “Guns of the Haunted Hills” and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Due to wartime paper restrictions, this is one of the thin issues of TEXAS RANGERS, so it has only three short back-up stories. “Sweet Are the Uses of Sorghum” is a semi-humorous, entertaining tale by Allan K. Echols about an encounter with a Mexican café owner and a bank robber. E.E. Halleran, an author whose work I’m usually not fond of, contributes “Lawman’s Chance”, about a local star packer regarded as a big dummy who gets to use his detective skills to solve a murder. I liked this one all right. Ben Frank (real name Frank Bennett) is the author of two humorous series I don’t like at all, Doc Swap and Deputy Boo Boo Bounce, but his story in this issue, “Singing Bullets”, is a traditional Western yarn about a good-guy outlaw known as The Dodge City Kid catching a killer and clearing a friend’s name. This is the first of a short, four-story series, and I liked it a lot better than the other stories I’ve read by Frank. It reminded me a little of the Rawhide Kid and Kid Colt comic book stories, and I was always a big fan of those series.

This is a good issue overall, not surprising because although TEXAS RANGERS evolved over its 21-year run, I think it stayed consistently good. The mid-Forties issues are excellent with Leslie Scott and Tom Curry at the top of their games, soon to be joined as regular authors on the series by Walker A. Tompkins. Well worth reading if you have this issue on your shelves. It’s on the Internet Archive, too, if you’d prefer to read it there.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, July 1946

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my rather tattered copy in the scan, with a fine action cover painted by Sam Cherry.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue is by A. Leslie Scott writing under the Jackson Cole house-name, as is obvious from the vivid descriptions right from the start. The Lucky Hammer of the title is the name of a silver mine in Texas’s Big Bend region, so-called because the two old prospectors who discover the vein also find an ancient Aztec carving of a snake that’s shaped in the form of a hammer. Oh, and the hammer just happens to be lying next to the body of a dead man who appears to have guzzled down a drink from a poisoned waterhole.

Naturally, the silver strike results in the founding of a boomtown, and a boomtown always brings owlhoots, and eventually things get so lawless in the area that a call for help goes out to the Texas Rangers. And who’s going to respond to that call? I think we all know the answer to that question.

“The Lucky Hammer” is a dandy Jim Hatfield yarn full of the things that make Leslie Scott’s stories so enjoyable: a historical background, a terrible sandstorm on the desert, underground scenes in a mine, exploding dynamite, a missing archeologist, rustlers, smugglers, and gunfights galore. The big twist in the plot is fairly obvious, but to be honest, I would have felt cheated if it hadn’t been there. Sure, I knew it was coming, but I liked it anyway. Actually, there’s nothing in this novel that we haven’t seen in numerous other Hatfield novels by Scott, but he puts the various elements together so well, I still greatly enjoy reading them. He was at the top of his game in these mid-Forties Hatfield novels.

Bennie Gardner, who wrote as Gunnison Steele, turned out some excellent novels for the Thrilling Group Western character pulps, but he was also very prolific when it comes to short-short stand-alone stories. “Cold Creek Killer” in this issue is probably about 1500 words long, but in those words Gardner packs rustling, murder, and a canny sheriff bringing a killer to justice. The twist ending to this one is a little weak, I thought, but Gardner’s fast-moving prose still makes it fun to read.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t make it very far in Ben Frank’s “Doc Swap’s Powder Puff”. I just don’t like this series. I’m not sure why. The author, whose real name was Frank Bennett, puts words together well enough, but the Doc Swap stories just don’t work for me.

On the other hand, I really like the Long Sam Littlejohn stories by Lee Bond, and they’re every bit as formulaic as the Doc Swap yarns. In “Long Sam Collects a Bounty”, the good-guy outlaw is trying to corral a notorious outlaw and collect a reward, when he’s usually the one who’s the quarry in a situation like that. Naturally, his long-time nemesis, Deputy U.S. Marshal Joe Fry, shows up, too. Quite a few of the Long Sam stories, like this one, take place in the Big Thicket in East Texas, and that makes for a nice change-of-pace. I wish Bond had done a little more with the character, but I still enjoy the series and am always glad to read another one.

And the same holds true for most issues of TEXAS RANGERS. Even with Doc Swap and a slightly below-average Gunnison Steele story, this one is well worth reading if you have a copy on your shelves.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, March 1948

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with another fantastic cover by Sam Cherry. He was really at his peak during this era. Earlier this year when I reviewed the April 1950 issue of TEXAS RANGERS, one of the members of the WesternPulps email group commented that the Jim Hatfield novel in it, “The Rimrock Raiders”, sounded similar to the Hatfield novel in the March 1948 issue, “The Black Gold Secret”. So I had to find my copy and read that one, too. Now I have.

“The Black Gold Secret” and “The Rimrock Raiders” are both by A. Leslie Scott writing under the Jackson Cole house-name, so it’s not surprising that they’re similar. The basic concept—clashes between cattlemen and oil drillers who have moved into what was previously a ranching area—are the same, and Scott used that plot foundation in other novels, as well. But the details in “The Black Gold Secret” are different and it’s an equally entertaining yarn. Early on in this one, Hatfield extinguishes a burning oil well, something that he also does in “The Rimrock Raiders”, but does so in a totally different manner—and it makes for a slam-bang, very exciting scene, too. Scott layers in some geology and behind-the-scenes stuff about the oil industry and also provides plenty of shootouts and fistfights along the way. The vivid descriptions that are a Scott trademark are there but rather limited, as he keeps this one really racing along. Of course, there’s more going on than is apparent at first, but you know Hatfield will untangle all the villainy by the end, and it’s a pretty spectacular climax, too, as the main bad guy meets his end in an unexpected way. I had a great time reading this novel, and I’m sure I’ll be reading another by Scott before too much longer.

Tom Parsons was a Thrilling Group house-name, so there’s no telling who wrote “Gun Trail”, a short-short about a Texas Ranger doggedly tracking down a horse thief and murderer, only to find that things aren’t exactly what he thought they were. There’s not a lot to this story, but it’s short and punchy and enjoyable.

I started out not liking Joseph Chadwick’s work very much, but he’s won me over and become one of my favorite Western writers. I think he’s one of the best of the more hardboiled Western authors who rose to prominence in the postwar years. His novelette in this issue, “The Blizzard and the Banker”, is excellent. It’s about a small town in Dakota Territory trying to survive a hard winter. The local banker is the hero of a Western story, for a nice change, but there are several other good characters including an outlaw who’s maybe not quite as bad as his reputation would have you believe, a beautiful female faro dealer, and assorted villains. Chadwick does a fine job with the interactions of these characters as well as his depictions of the harsh weather. Just a really, really good story all the way around.

Allan K. Echols was one of those workmanlike writers who filled up the pages of Western, detective, and aviation pulps with hundreds of stories during a 30-year career (mid-Twenties to mid-Fifties; he passed away in 1953 but still had new stories coming out a couple of years later). He also wrote more than a dozen Western novels. And yet I’ve never run across anybody who proclaims themselves a big Allan K. Echols fan. His story in this issue, “Brother’s Keeper”, is an unacknowledged reprint from the January 1938 issue of ROMANTIC WESTERN. It’s not romantic at all, though. Instead, it’s about an apparently dull-witted sheriff who’s trying to figure out which of two rancher brothers is responsible for the murder of one of their enemies. It’s a well-written, solidly plotted story, and I enjoyed it, but I doubt that it’ll stick with me. Which probably helps to explain why Echols is pretty much forgotten even among devoted Western readers.

There’s also a Doc Swap story by Ben Frank in this issue. I’m sorry, but I didn’t even try to read it. I used to say that the Swap and Whopper stories by Syl McDowell in THRILLING WESTERN were my least favorite Western pulp series, but I’ve surprised myself by kind of warming up to them recently. Not so Doc Swap, which by this time had taken over from Lee Bond’s Long Sam Littlejohn as the regular backup series in TEXAS RANGERS. I just don’t find these appealing at all.

However, I’d still say this is a good issue of TEXAS RANGERS. The Hatfield novel and Joseph Chadwick’s novelette are both excellent, and the stories by Echols and Parsons are entertaining. If you have a copy, it’s well worth reading, as far as I’m concerned. And hey, you may actually like Doc Swap, you never know.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: West, January 1949

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my well-worn copy in the scan, featuring a fine dramatic cover by Sam Cherry.

I bought this issue mostly for the Leslie Scott novel, of course. It’s a bit unusual that he’s billed under his real name here and not Bradford Scott, A. Leslie, or even A. Leslie Scott. “The City of Silver”, which is long enough to be considered a novel even in this pulp version, was rewritten and expanded into the hardcover novel SILVER CITY, published by Arcadia House in 1953 and also appeared in paperback from Harlequin. The protagonist is Jim Vane, who is working as a stagecoach station agent in Nevada when the story opens but soon finds himself in the mining boomtown of Virginia City working for Adolph Sutro, one of several historical characters who figure in this novel, much like a Rio Kid yarn. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve read a Rio Kid novel that takes place in Virginia City and features some of the same characters and historical developments.

In this one by Scott, we get ambushes and stagecoach robberies, Jim Vane and some other men are trapped underground by a disaster, and there’s a big shootout at the end in which Vane uncovers the identities of the men who are behind all the villainy in this story. Those are all standard plot elements for a Scott novel, but he mixes them together with such skill that I always enjoy the story he tells. In addition, the ending of this one is a little different from most I’ve encountered in his work, which is a nice bonus. “The City of Silver” is a good novel and a fine example of Scott writing at the top of his game, with plenty of action and some nice turns of phrase.

“Cow Country Jury” is one of ten Western and detective stories that John Di Silvestro wrote for various pulps in the late Forties. That’s all I know about the author. This short-short is about a young cowboy who decides to become an outlaw, only to encounter several unexpected obstacles to his plan. It’s a fairly light-hearted yarn and has a definite oddball quality to it. For one thing, all the characters have unusual names. The young cowboy is Sorne Dangler, the stagecoach driver he tried to hold up is Brad Nunoon, and the local lawman is Sheriff Lork. The ending is abrupt and unsatisfying. This is a story with some promise, but it doesn’t really deliver.

Steuart Emery started writing romance and mainstream stories for the general fiction pulps in the early 1920s and then wrote hundreds of air war stories (with a few detective yarns mixed in) from the late Twenties to the late Forties. In the late Forties he began writing for the Western pulps and was a fairly prolific contributor to them throughout the Fifties. Most of his Westerns were cavalry yarns, but his novelette “Wall of Silence” in this issue doesn’t feature the cavalry, although it does have some Indian fighting in it. Instead of some young officer, Emery’s protagonist is a stagecoach driver in Arizona who used to drive a fire wagon in New York. He had to go on the run after killing a man in a barroom brawl, but a police detective from New York has tracked him down and offers him a choice: go to prison for the killing—or go back to New York testify against an Irish mobster. Unusual characters, an offbeat plot, and plenty of excellent action make this a terrific story with a very satisfying ending. I really enjoyed this one, and it made me even more of a Steuart Emery fan than I already was.

Larry A. Harris wrote hundreds of stories for the Western pulps. I’ve read a number of them and always enjoyed them, finding them competently written and dependably entertaining. That’s a good description of his short story “Killer Bait” in this issue. An old rancher sets a trap for the outlaws responsible for his son’s death. The writing has a nice hardboiled tone and the story moves right along. Maybe nothing special overall, but I had a good time reading it.

The same can’t be said for “No Decisions” by Francis H. Ames. I’d read several stories by Ames before and liked them okay, but this one is just awful. It’s a present-tense, burlesque comedy with characters named Highpockets and Knothole, and it’s about a boxing match between the champions of the settlements of Sandstone and Gumbo Flats. I made it through three pages before saying nope, not for me.

Johnston McCulley wrote more than 50 stories featuring his iconic creation Zorro for WEST between 1944 and 1949. These short adventures play much like episodes of the famous Zorro TV series, although that series was still some years in the future when these stories were written and published. “Zorro Starts the New Year” in this issue has Don Diego Vega and his famous alter-ego clashing with another aristocrat during a New Year’s party at the Vega rancho. The plot is pretty thin, but McCulley’s writing is so smooth and entertaining that the story is quite enjoyable anyway. All of McCulley’s Zorro stories, from his debut in the novel THE CURSE OF CAPISTRANO to his final pulp yarns, are available in six beautiful reprint volumes from Bold Venture Press.

Despite the presence of the one story I disliked, this is a very good issue of WEST. The Steuart Emery novelette is my favorite, but Scott’s novel “The City of Silver” is very solid and entertaining, too. The presence of McCulley and Harris is just a bonus. If you have this one, or happen to stumble across a copy, it’s well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, April 1950

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with one of my favorite Sam Cherry covers and maybe the single best depiction of Jim Hatfield that I’ve ever seen. That’s definitely the way Hatfield looks in my head as I read these pulps.

The Hatfield novel in this issue, “The Rimrock Raiders”, is by A. Leslie Scott writing as Jackson Cole. It centers around the conflict between some cattlemen in West Texas and the oil wildcatters who are moving into the region. One of those wildcatters strikes a gusher, resulting in an oil boom town and even more trouble. Naturally, it’s going to take a Texas Ranger to clean things up and expose the true villain behind all the problems, and of course that Ranger is Jim Hatfield.

In addition to knowing a lot about mining and railroading, Scott was also well-versed in geology and the oil business, and that knowledge comes through in this novel. I’m a long-time fan of oilfield yarns and this is a good one with a real sense of authenticity. There are two great scenes, one in which Hatfield comes up with a unique way of dealing with an oil rig that’s on fire, the other being the literally explosive climax that’s one of the best I’ve read in the series. Scott was at the top of his game in this one, which he rewrote and expanded a few years later into the Walt Slade novel GUNSMOKE OVER TEXAS, published by Pyramid in 1956. I read that version when I was in high school. I remembered the cover but nothing about the plot, so it didn’t spoil “The Rimrock Raiders” for me.

This novel, with its oilfield element, also reminds me of a strange discrepancy in the Hatfield series. Scott’s entries seem to be set around the turn of the 20^th Century, based on historical references, while the Hatfield novels by Tom Curry, the other main writer on the series for many years, read more like they’re set about twenty years earlier, around 1880. The novels by Walker A. Tompkins and Peter Germano are harder to pin down as to time period, but most of them seem to me to be set in the 1880s or 1890s. I find these continuity glitches, if you want to call them that, interesting, but they absolutely don’t bother me. I just enjoy the stories.

Tex Holt was a house-name used by Leslie Scott, Archie Joscelyn, and Claude Rister on novels. It also shows up on a dozen or so stories in various Thrilling Group Western pulps. That’s the by-line on “Ghost Riders of Haunted Pass” in this issue, a lightweight tale about a couple of drifting cowboys named Jim Norton and “Hungry” Hill who encounter a couple of phantom owlhoots. The banter between the protagonists reminded me a little of Syl McDowell’s Swap and Whopper stories, but not as silly and the story’s action doesn’t descend into slapstick comedy. It’s an okay story, but I have no idea who wrote it.

“Long Sam Crowns a King” is another entry in Lee Bond’s long-running series about the good-guy outlaw Long Sam Littlejohn. In this one, set in the South Texas brush country, Long Sam clashes with an old enemy, a former carpetbagger turned would-be cattle king. There’s some nice action, and for a change, the characters don’t stand around explaining the plot to each other. Long Sam’s nemesis, U.S. Marshal Joe Fry, is mentioned but doesn’t make an appearance. This is a solid story in a formulaic but consistently entertaining series.

“Red Butte Showdown” is by Jim Mayo, who we all know was actually Louis L’Amour. This story centers around a mysterious stranger who protects a couple of orphans (one of whom is a beautiful young woman, of course) from a villain who’s after the mine they’ve inherited. That plot sounds pretty well-worn, and to tell the truth, most of L’Amour’s plots were pretty standard stuff. But he was really, really good at them most of the time, and “Red Butte Showdown” is no exception. Not only that, but he throws in a pretty good plot twist at the end of this one. I’ve said for a long time that I think L’Amour was a better short story writer than he was a novelist, and this is a good example. I enjoyed this story a lot. It’s probably been reprinted in one of the many L’Amour short story collections, but I don’t know which.

Barry Scobee’s “Good Country for Murder” is a modern-day Western in which a park ranger in West Texas’s Big Bend encounters a vicious criminal. It’s a suspenseful, very well-written yarn that I thoroughly enjoyed. As I’ve mentioned before, Barry Scobee is the only pulp writer I know of who has a mountain named for him. It’s just outside Fort Davis, Texas, and was named after Scobee to honor his efforts in preserving the old military fort there. In addition to writing for the pulps, he was a newspaper reporter and editor in West Texas and his work really rings true when it’s set in that region. This is another very good story by him.

And this is a very good issue of TEXAS RANGERS, as well. A top-notch Hatfield novel, and four out of the five back-up stories are very good to excellent. The one story that’s weaker than the others is still entertaining. If you’re a fan of this pulp, have this issue on your shelves, and haven’t read it, I give it a high recommendation. (If you want to read the rewritten, Walt Slade version of the novel, GUNSMOKE OVER TEXAS, it’s available as an e-book on Amazon and would be well worth your time, too.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: West, November 1940

This is a pulp that I own. That’s my copy in the scan, complete with store stamp. I’m not sure who did the cover art. The most likely suspect is Richard Lyon, but I’m not confident enough to say it’s his work.

The lead novel in this issue (and it’s actually long enough to be considered a novel this time) is “Black Diamonds” by A. Leslie, who was really A. Leslie Scott. This novel was published in hardcover in 1942 under the title THE COWPUNCHER, as by Bradford Scott, another of Leslie Scott’s pseudonyms. In this century, it was published in paperback and as an e-book by Leisure, a large print hardcover by Center Point, and remains available as an e-book and trade paperback from Amazon Encore. I read the e-book edition a couple of weeks ago, and you can find my review of it here. It’s an excellent Western novel. I think I like the title “Black Diamonds” a little better than THE COWPUNCHER, though. I suspect Scott changed it for the story’s book publication because he thought it didn’t sound enough like a Western.

I decided to go ahead and read the three short stories from the pulp. The first, “Fugitive”, is by Frank Carl Young, a forgotten pulpster who wrote more than a hundred Western stories for various pulps between 1931 and 1952. I don’t recall ever reading anything by him until now. “Fugitive” is about a young cowboy on the run from the law who makes a home for himself working on a ranch owned by a friendly young couple. Naturally, his past catches up to him and causes trouble. The slight plot twist in the end of this one won’t catch many readers by surprise, but the writing is very good and it’s an entertaining story.

Scott Carleton was a house-name used primarily on the long-running Buffalo Billy Bates series in POPULAR WESTERN, but it appears on a few stand-alone stories, too, like this issue’s “Necktie Party”, about a young cowboy falsely accused of rustling and facing a lynching. This is a pretty well-written story for the most part, but the bit of business on which the plot ultimately turns is just too far-fetched for me to buy it. Willing suspension of disbelief got stretched to the breaking point in this one.

I don’t know anything about William Mahoney except that, according to the Fictionmags Index, he published 19 stories between 1931 and 1942, most of them in the gang pulps but with a few Westerns scattered among them. His story “Trouble Rider” in this issue reads a little like a hardboiled crime yarn with a pretty complicated plot and a harrowing torture scene that’s pretty strong stuff for a Western pulp. The protagonist is a cowboy framed for the murder of a mining tycoon in Arizona. He has to venture south of the border and get mixed up in a scheme involving blackmail, an old crime, and Mexican politics in order to clear his name. It’s a little offbeat, but I enjoyed it quite a bit and would be interested in reading Mahoney’s other Western yarns, or some of his gang pulp stories, for that matter.

Overall, I’d say this is a very good issue of WEST, but that’s due mainly to the fact that 80% of its pages are occupied by a top-notch Leslie Scott novel. But two of the three back-up stories are entertaining, too, and the third one has some nice lines in it even though in the end I thought it was a little ridiculous. If you happen to have a copy of this one, it’s well worth reading.

Review: The Cowpuncher - Bradford Scott (A. Leslie Scott)

Alexander Leslie Scott is best remembered for his novels starring Texas Rangers Jim Hatfield and Walt Slade, of course, and rightly so. But he wrote quite a few stand-alone Western novels as well, most, if not all, of them rewritten and expanded from novellas he wrote for various Western pulps. His novel THE COWPUNCHER was published under the pseudonym Bradford Scott in hardcover in 1942 by Gateway Books, one of the lending library publishers, then reprinted in paperback by Leisure in 2009 and large print hardcover by Center Point in 2010. It’s still available in e-book and trade paperback editions on Amazon, and used copies of the Leisure paperback are easily found for sale on-line.

The original version of this story was published under the title “Black Diamonds”, as by A. Leslie, in the pulp WEST in the October 1940 issue. The black diamonds of the title refer to coal, which leads to a nice twist because this novel is about coal mining rather than gold or silver, as most Western mining yarns are. The hero, a cowboy named Huck Brannon, goes on a bender in Kansas City after the crew he belongs to delivers a trail herd there, and as a result he misses the train back home to Texas, where a rancher’s beautiful daughter is waiting for him. Circumstances forces him to hop a train to Colorado in the company of a couple of hoboes who become his friends and sidekicks.

Once there, they wind up hunting a lost treasure supposedly hidden by an evil Spanish nobleman a hundred years earlier. What they find is a coal deposit that they’re soon mining, a successful operation that makes good money and leads to a friendship with railroad magnate James G. “Jaggers” Dunn, a supporting character who often makes appearances in Scott’s novels. Of course, there are also villains who have their sights set on ruining Brannon.

THE COWPUNCHER is more epic in scope than most of Scott’s Westerns, with its action spanning a couple of years rather than a few days. It has the same vivid settings and dramatic action scenes, though, including a great one where our hero Huck has to ride a makeshift raft down a raging river in an attempt to stop a runaway train. Scott had a lot of experience with both mining and railroading, and he brought a definite air of authenticity to his stories concerning those endeavors. At times, the technical jargon gets so thick I had trouble keeping up with what was going on, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the story.

This is a really good Western novel, the sort of yarn that would have made a great big-budget, late Forties movie from Republic Pictures. I had a fine time reading it and give it a high recommendation for fans of traditional Westerns centered around mining. By the way, I have the pulp in which the original version, “Black Diamonds”, was published, and other than changing the hero’s name from Chuck Brannon to Huck Brannon and the rancher’s beautiful daughter from Millie Doyle to Sue Doyle, Scott doesn’t appear to have revised it. Either version is well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, May 1952

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The cover art is by Sam Cherry. The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue has some historical significance in the series as it’s the first one attributed to Peter B. Germano (best remembered for his novels under the pseudonym Barry Cord). Germano would go on to be one of the primary authors of the series during the Fifties, contributing 16 Hatfield novels, behind only Walker A. Tompkins (24 Hatfields during the Fifties, 28 overall) and Roe Richmond (22 Hatfields).

In “Secret of Dry Valley”, the plot finds Hatfield traveling to the Texas Panhandle in answer to a summons for help from an old friend of his boss, Captain Bill McDowell. When he gets there, he finds that the old friend (and former Ranger) has disappeared, and there’s a war brewing between the local cattle baron and a saloon owner who carry old grudges against each other. Working undercover, Hatfield survives a couple of bushwhackings, a pair of fistfights, and showdowns against fast on the draw gunslicks. Along the way to figuring out what’s really going on, he rescues a beautiful young woman (yes, she’s the cattle baron’s daughter) from quicksand. (In the immortal words of Bill Crider, quicksand makes any story better.) Hatfield triumphs in the end, of course, after some nice action scenes.

“Secret of Dry Valley” reads in some ways like an author’s first novel in an established series. It seems to me to be influenced by the work of the series’ two primary authors before this point, Leslie Scott and Tom Curry, and it’s likely that Germano read at least a few of their entries before tackling a Hatfield novel of his own. There’s a proxy hero whose job is to help Hatfield and wind up with the girl, a character type who shows up in nearly all of Curry’s Hatfield novels. The main plot point revolves around geography and an engineering problem, as in many of Scott’s Hatfield novels. There’s no mention of Hatfield’s engineering training in college before he became a Ranger, but he demonstrates such knowledge in solving the mystery.

At the same time, indications that this yarn is by a new author show up here and there. Hatfield is often referred to the narrative as “Jim”, something the other authors hardly ever do. He’s dressed in a suit, white shirt, and string tie throughout the novel, very different from the range clothes he usually wears. I can see doing that if there’s a good reason for it in the plot, but there’s not. He’s supposed to be working undercover, and yet he gives his real name to everybody he encounters. Eventually, some of the other characters remember there’s a famous Texas Ranger known as the Lone Wolf whose name is Jim Hatfield, but it takes a long time.

Despite those quibbles, “Secret of Dry Valley” is a pretty entertaining story. It has a little of the terse yet poetic, hardboiled prose that will become more common in Germano’s later entries in the series. The action is good, the settings are rendered fairly vividly, and there are a few small but effective plot twists. Germano’s Hatfield novels got better as he went along, but “Secret of Dry Valley” is a good solid start and well worth reading.

“El Soldado” is a short story by the always reliable Gordon D. Shirreffs. It's a Civil War tale set in New Mexico, in which a lone Union soldier tries to prevent a gang of Confederate irregulars from making off with a bunch of vital supplies. Shirreffs wrote several novels about the Civil War in the West, and while the plot in this story is a little thin because of its length, the writing is excellent.

The novelette “The Unholy Grail” is a Prodigal Son story by Roe Richmond. After his older brother is gunned down, Mike Grail, a fast gun and hellraising drifter dubbed by his father The Unholy Grail, returns home to help his family survive a feud with some old enemies. This is also a Romeo and Juliet story since Mike is in love with the daughter of his father’s arch-nemesis, and one of the sons from the rival family is in love with Mike’s sister. Richmond’s work is usually hit-or-miss with me, but this one lands squarely in the middle. The characters are interesting and there are some good action scenes, but the writing often seems rushed. I think this story might have been better as a novella or even a novel. It needed more room to develop.

“William and the Contract Buck” by Jim Kjelgaard is a bit of an oddity, a short story about some city slickers trying to put one over on a dumb hillbilly—but is he? This is well-written, as Kjelgaard’s stories always are, but there’s really not much to it and it’s out of place in a Western pulp. I think it must have been aimed at the slicks, or possibly at ADVENTURE, and sold to the Thrilling Group when it was rejected elsewhere. But that’s just a guess on my part.

Jim O’Mara was the pseudonym of Vernon Fluharty, who also wrote Westerns under the name Michael Carder. His story in this issue, “When the Sun Goes Down”, is about a looming showdown between a brutal town-taming lawman and a young former outlaw who’s trying to go straight. There’s some very nice action in this story, but it doesn’t come until after Fluharty has explored the complex personalities of several well-rounded characters. This is a superb story, extremely well-written, and it comes to a very satisfying conclusion. Fluharty is another writer who’s pretty inconsistent, in my opinion, but he really nailed this one. I loved it.

The issue wraps up with “Riddle of the Wastelands” by A. Leslie, who was really our old friend Alexander Leslie Scott, of course. This tale is about a young cowboy trying to figure out how the cattle stolen by rustlers are mysteriously disappearing. He does so, of course, and sets a trap for the wideloopers that results in a big gun battle. It’s the sort of thing Scott did countless times, but he does it very well in this one and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Overall, I’d say this is an average issue of TEXAS RANGERS, but you have to remember, “average” for this pulp is pretty darned good. The Hatfield novel is enjoyable, although Germano did better work later on in the series culminating in “Rendezvous at Quito” in the next-to-the-last issue, January 1958, which is one of my all-time favorite Hatfield yarns. The stories by Shirreffs and Scott are dependably good, the ones by Richmond and Kjelgaard somewhat disappointing. But I had a good time reading this one and look forward to reading another issue of TEXAS RANGERS in the near future.

Review: Silver River Ranch - Leslie Scott

In addition to several hundred novels featuring Texas Rangers Jim Hatfield and Walt Slade, A. Leslie Scott wrote dozens of stand-alone novels, although some of these were rewritten and expanded from either Hatfield or Slade novels with the protagonist changed. But quite a few of them appear to be original stories not based on any of Scott’s pulp work. One such novel is SILVER RIVER RANCH, published by Arcadia House under the name Leslie Scott in 1961 and reprinted a couple of times in large print editions since then. I read the original Arcadia House edition. That’s my copy in the scan.

This novel opens with a vicious and bloody knife fight between the protagonist, stalwart young rancher Val Dixon, and brutal Blount Roberts, part of a trouble-making family that owns a rival ranch. Neither man dies in this encounter, but the fight solidifies the position that Dixon and the Roberts family are bitter enemies.

Except for Rosalee Roberts, a beautiful redheaded cousin of Blount and his brothers. Dixon is in love with her and hopes that someday she may return that feeling, but it seems unlikely given the rivalry between the ranches.

Complicating things is that everybody in the West Texas valley where this novel takes place has been losing stock to rustlers. Dixon hires a gunslinging young cowboy named Billy Flint, who may or may not actually be Billy the Kid, rumored to have survived his shooting by Pat Garrett over in New Mexico a while earlier. Together, Dixon and Flint set out to track down the rustlers, who they figure will turn out to be the Blount brothers.

SILVER RIVER RANCH will seem very familiar to anyone who’s read very many novels by Leslie Scott. There’s plenty of action with assorted bushwhackings and clashes with the rustlers, plus some tentative romance between Val Dixon and Rosalee Roberts and a lot of riding back and forth, sleeping, and eating. However, there’s nothing about mining or railroading, two of Scott’s favorite themes, and the descriptions of the landscape are a lot less detailed. This is Scott in pared-down mode, which makes for a very fast-moving book. The action scenes are consistently good, although the great knife fight that opens the book is the high point in that respect.

If you’re already a fan of Leslie Scott’s work, you’ll certainly enjoy this novel. It’s not fully representative of his usual yarn-spinning but close enough that if you’ve never sampled any of his stories before, you could start with this one just fine. I’ve enjoyed every one of Scott’s stand-alone novels I’ve read over the years, and this one is no exception.  

Bibliography of Jim Hatfield/Walt Slade Novels and Stories by A. Leslie Scott

I'm happy to announce that the A. Leslie Scott bibliography Anders Nilsson and I have been working on is available for free download on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/lesliescott_bibliography_nilssonreasoner_2024/mode/1up

This includes a brief biography of Scott, a detailed listing of all his Jim Hatfield and Walt Slade novels and stories, and information about all the rewritten and expanded versions of the stories when they were published later as hardback and paperback novels. There's also the most complete listing to date of Scott's non-series novels and many excellent cover scans of various publications. Putting this together has been a real labor of love, and Anders has done all the heavy lifting, make no mistake about that. But I'm proud to have been able to help and to be included in this project. If you have any interest in Leslie Scott, the Western pulps, or Western fiction in general, I'm sure you'll find it entertaining and informative, and I hope you'll check it out.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, July 1949

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover art is by Sam Cherry and illustrates, although not with complete accuracy, a scene from the Jim Hatfield novel featured in this issue.

The last Hatfield novel by A. Leslie Scott that I read, “The Wasteland Empire”, was a mining story, with barely a mention of ranches and cattle. The one in this issue, “The Spoilers’ Trail”, is also a little unusual because it’s a railroad yarn through and through. Scott put his mining experience to good use in the previous tale, and the time he spent as a railroader gives this one an undeniable air of authenticity.

In “The Spoilers’ Trail”, Jim Hatfield, ace of the Texas Rangers, is sent in to discover who’s behind the sabotage and outright attacks plaguing the construction of a railroad line through West Texas. The C&P Railroad is run by an old friend of Hatfield’s, James G. “Jaggers” Dunn, who appears in numerous stories by Scott, sometimes as the protagonist of stories published in RAILROAD STORIES, often as a supporting character in Jim Hatfield novels. Dunn doesn’t show up until late in this one, but he’s the reason Hatfield is on the case to start with. Hatfield starts out working undercover as a railroad guard but winds up bossing most of the construction project, since in addition to being a Ranger he’s also an expert engineer.

There’s a subgenre of pulp adventure stories centered around construction projects, and this one actually fits more in that category than it does as a Western, although there are some ambushes and shootouts. Much of the plot is concerned with engineering problems, and that culminates in a long, suspenseful scene in which Hatfield and some of the workers battle to save a partially completed bridge during a flood. At one point, Hatfield and some companions are trapped underground by a cave-in (never go to the opera with Ellery Queen, or into a mine or a railroad tunnel with Jim Hatfield) and saves the day with an unusual and dramatic way of breaking out.

Scott is in top form in “The Spoilers’ Trail” even though it’s not very representative of the Hatfield series as a whole. It’s a fast-paced yarn with an interesting background, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The first of three back-up short stories in this issue is “A Badman’s Dog” by Dupree Poe. A vicious outlaw murders the lawman who discovers his hideout, but he adopts a puppy that the sheriff had with him at the time of the killing. This isn’t the heart-warming tale you might expect but rather a story of justice and retribution. It also seems to be lacking a plot twist that might have made it more effective. Even so, it’s a fairly entertaining story, and I’ll venture far enough into spoiler territory to say that the dog does not die.

“The Return of Dave Kilbane” is by Walt Morey, an author I don’t recall reading before. Something about his style was a little off-putting to me at first, but I got used to it and wound up enjoying this tale of a young ex-convict returning to his hometown and his lawman father, just in time to help back his dad’s play in a showdown with three killers. The question is, will he, since his father is the one who sent him to prison? It’s an interesting moral dilemma solved by some well-done action. This isn’t a good enough story to make me run out and look for more by the author, but I liked it well enough.

I’ve been a fan of Lee Bond’s Long Sam Littlejohn stories for more than thirty years now. The one in this issue, “Long Sam Jumps the Devil”, finds the good-guy outlaw sticking his nose into someone else’s trouble, as usual, and winding up in a run-in with Deputy U.S. Marshal Joe Fry, the dogged lawman who is constantly pursuing Long Sam. In this case, Long Sam battles a notorious outlaw called El Diabolo Blanco, who dresses all in white, including a hood that conceals his identity, and saves the ranch belonging to an old friend. It occurred to me while reading this story that in some ways, the Long Sam Littlejohn series isn’t very well-written. The plots are extremely formulaic, and the characters have a habit of standing around and discussing things they already know, just so the reader will be filled in on what’s going on. Those flaws aside, though, I still really like this series and I’ve never read one that I didn’t enjoy. Long Sam is a great character, and Bond has a sure hand with the action scenes. Every time I read one, I’m tempted to write a Long Sam Littlejohn story of my own. Maybe one of these days.

Overall, this is another very solid issue of TEXAS RANGERS, and I’m glad I took it down from the shelf to read it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, May 1949

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover art is by the very prolific Sam Cherry and is certainly quite dramatic. We know Jim Hatfield’s horse Goldy is all right, but even so, that’s quite a spill he’s taking.

The Hatfield novel in this issue is “The Wasteland Empire”, written by series creator Leslie Scott writing under the house-name Jackson Cole. It’s strictly a mining boomtown yarn. There are mentions of some cattle ranches in the area but nary a sign of any rustlers, which is a little unusual for a Scott story. Hatfield—and Scott—get to put their mining backgrounds to good use in this one, as a gold strike attracts trouble to the West Texas boomtown of Gravel Bank, and Hatfield is sent in undercover to find out who’s behind the outlawry and put a stop to it.

The identity of the mastermind is pretty obvious and Hatfield figures out who it is fairly early on, but he has to round up enough proof to take action. Along the way, there are several shootouts and ambushes and Hatfield is trapped underground and almost killed not once but twice before he brings the head varmint to justice.

As always in a Scott novel, there are vivid descriptions and over-the-top action scenes, but the plot seems a bit thinner than usual. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that “The Wasteland Empire” was phoned in, but it does have a certain workman-like air about it. Still entertaining, of course. I don’t think Scott was capable of writing a story that’s not fun to read. But it’s not in the top rank of his Hatfield novels.

There are only two back-up stories in this issue of TEXAS RANGERS. The first, “Empty Holsters”, is by-lined Sam Brant, which was a frequently used house name in Thrilling Group Western pulps. I can’t even make a guess who wrote this one. There’s nothing distinctive about the style. The plot concerns a veteran lawman who has to solve a bank robbery in which his young deputy is implicated. Nothing special by any means, but it's well-written enough that I found it enjoyable reading.

The Long Sam Littlejohn series by Lee Bond was the longest-running back-up series in TEXAS RANGERS, more than 50 stories from 1936 to 1952. I’ve read a lot of them and enjoyed every one. These yarns about a good-guy outlaw pursued by a stubborn lawman and getting into one fracas after another are very formulaic, but it’s a formula I like. In this issue’s story, “Long Sam Flies a Flag”, he gets mixed up in a border dispute and a land grab centered around the Rio Grande changing course. There’s just enough action and plot to make a fine short story.

While this isn’t an outstanding issue of TEXAS RANGERS, it’s a good one, with all three stories providing enjoyable reading, and if you have a copy, it’s worth taking it down from the shelf and giving it a try.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, June 1945

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I think the cover may be by George Rozen, but I’m far from sure about that. Sam Cherry was doing most of the covers for TEXAS RANGERS by this point, but that just doesn’t look like Cherry’s work to me.

I’m much more certain about who wrote the Jim Hatfield novel in this issue—but we’ll get to that. “Gun Governor” is set in the Texas Panhandle and concerns the efforts of a gang of carpetbagger politicians and owlhoots to hang on to power as Reconstruction ends and Texans control their own destinies again. Some of those Texans have banded together and planted wheat rather than trying to rebuild the cattle business. The above-mentioned gang of robed and hooded marauders terrorizes them and tries to run them out of business. Enter Texas Ranger Jim Hatfield, sent from Austin to restore law and order and bring the leaders of the gang to justice.

Hatfield starts out by working undercover, as he often does. He manages to infiltrate the gang, but he has to abandon his masquerade to save the life of the leader of the wheat farmers. This leads to an epic cattle in which Hatfield is almost trapped in a burning building, and once his true identity is exposed, it’s all-out war between the Texas Ranger and the carpetbagger gun-wolves as Hatfield battles a scheme that threatens not only the Panhandle but the entire state of Texas.

“Gun Governor” is a well-written, very entertaining yarn with plenty of fast-paced action. The Reconstruction references place it in 1870, which is just one of the reasons I believe it was written by Tom Curry under the Jackson Cole house-name, rather than A. Leslie Scott, to whom it’s attributed in the Fictionmags Index. Curry wrote at least one other Hatfield novel with a Reconstruction background, “The Black Hat Riders” (TEXAS RANGERS, December 1942). Most of Curry’s Hatfield novels seem to take place in the 1870. They don’t all have such specific references as this one, but when they do, that’s the era in which they take place.

Leslie Scott’s Hatfield novels, on the other hand, take place in the 1890s, based on their frequent mentions of the oil business and the spread of railroads across the state. This creates a bit of a time paradox since Hatfield is approximately the same age no matter who the writer is, but evidently the pulp readers didn’t worry about such things and neither do I.

“Gun Governor” bears several other hallmarks of Curry’s work. It has a couple of introductory chapters in which the situation is developed, the villains and their victims are introduced, and so is a proxy hero, in this case wheat farmer Ken Toll, who is a Yankee but befriends the Texans anyway. Hatfield doesn’t show up until the third chapter. The descriptive passages are much shorter and lack Scott’s highly detailed and dramatic (some might say melodramatic) prose. None of Scott’s usual catch-phrases appear. Nobody gets “a surroundin’ of chuck”. While pursuing bad guys, Hatfield never shouts to his horse, “Trail, Goldy, trail!” In the final showdown with the outlaw mastermind (whose identity is never in doubt, by the way), Hatfield’s powerful voice doesn’t ring out “Elevate! In the name of the State of Texas!” Curry’s Hatfield gets down to business in a much more prosaic fashion. Nobody even raises hell and shoves a chunk under the corner!

One final bit of evidence: this novel was reprinted in the Sixties by Popular Library under the title SHOOTOUT TRAIL. Most of the Hatfield novels Popular Library picked to reprint were by Tom Curry. Of course, there were books by other authors in the Popular Library series, including a few by Scott, so that’s not definitive proof, just a little more weight on the side of the conclusions I’ve drawn from the story itself.

All this speculation aside, is “Gun Governor” worth reading? I’d say so without hesitation. The wheat farming angle is a little offbeat, the villains are properly despicable, and Hatfield is his usual stalwart self. I had a very good time reading this yarn.

There are three back-up stories in this issue, which is fairly thin due to wartime paper restrictions. I’m sure it’s a matter of coincidence, but all three have young protagonists.

“Voice From Boothill” by Gunnison Steele is about a young man trying to avenge his brother’s killing. Bennie Gardner, who is best remembered under the Gunnison Steele pseudonym, was a fine Western pulp novelist. His three Jim Hatfield novels under the Jackson Cole name are excellent, some of the best entries in the whole series. But he also wrote a lot of short-short stories like this one, which pack action and interesting plots, usually with some twist, into 1500-2000 words. I picked up on the twist in “Voice From Boothill” before it arrived, but it’s still very effective and I enjoyed the story.

“Salvage of the Box M” is by J.R. Jackson, an author about whom I know nothing except that he published a dozen or so stories in various Western pulps in the Forties. In this story, in order to save his ranch, a young man tries to get a job as a deputy and goes after an outlaw to prove he’s worthy of a badge. This is another well-written, entertaining tale.

“A Pard for Pedro” is by Cliff Walters, a prolific but almost completely forgotten contributor to the Western pulps. It mixes Mexican sheepherders, fly fishing, and murder in an unlikely combination, but it’s well-done and I thorougly enjoyed it.

Overall, this is a really solid issue of TEXAS RANGERS with a top-notch Hatfield novel and good back-up stories. If you have a copy on your shelves and are in the mood for a few hours of good reading, I recommend it. Likewise if you have a copy of the paperback reprint, SHOOTOUT TRAIL, although you won’t get the other stories with it.

California Ranger - Tex Holt (Leslie Scott)

Tex Holt was a house-name used on Western novels primarily by Archie Joscelyn and Claude Rister. But several other authors used it now and then, including at least once by Leslie Scott on a novel called CALIFORNIA RANGER, published by Arcadia House in 1948.

How do I know Leslie Scott wrote this one, you ask? Well, the copy I own is signed by him, as you can see below. And even if it wasn’t, I would have known within a few pages that CALIFORNIA RANGER is Scott’s work. It opens with a vivid description of the Mojave Desert setting, and then Grant Marshal, our protagonist, happens on a trio of bad guys forcing two elderly prospectors to work an arristra, a primitive mining set-up that crushes ore so the gold in it can be retrieved. A shootout ensues, of course, with Marshal gunning down the villains.

This scene plays out exactly like it would in one of Scott’s Walt Slade, Texas Ranger novellas published in the pulp THRILLING WESTERN under the pseudonym Bradford Scott. And it just so happens Grant Marshal is described exactly the same way as Walt Slade. He even has a big horse named Smoke, and when he chases the bad guys, he shouts, “Trail, Smoke, trail!” For those of you who don’t know, Walt Slade’s horse is named Shadow, and several times in each story, he shouts, “Trail, Shadow, trail!”

All of which is to say that I strongly suspect Scott took one of his Slade yarns and rewrote it into the opening of this novel, something he frequently did in his career. I’ll give him credit, though: he doesn’t just change Walt Slade’s name to Grant Marshal and move the setting from Texas to California. The way the book plays out, I think the rest of it was probably newly written. And it’s a good one, too, as Marshal, who is on the trail of the owlhoots who murdered some of his friends, winds up in early day Los Angeles and becomes a California Ranger. There are shootouts galore, several villainous schemes foiled, and a beautiful, mysterious young woman who is tried up with the case somehow. Marshal uncovers the identity of the mastermind behind the gang that’s been wreaking havoc (said mastermind’s identity will be pretty obvious to anybody who’s read more than one or two of Scott’s novels), and everything wraps up in a very satisfactory fashion.

Some modern readers probably find Scott’s prose, especially his descriptions, florid and overwritten. Not me. I enjoy his detailed, immersive descriptions. A lot of times when I run into things like that in other authors’ books, I skim through those passages. I don’t know what it is about Scott’s work, but he holds my attention effortlessly. And his action scenes, oh, my, I can see the muzzle flashes and smell the powdersmoke. Admittedly, his plots are often repetitive, which is why I space out reading his books, but I’ve never read one of his books from before 1965 that I didn’t enjoy. The ones after that are inconsistent and usually weaker but still readable.

There was a British paperback edition of this novel, a Canadian hardback, and a Spanish translation but I don’t know in which form. Those are the only reprints of CALIFORNIA RANGER as far as I know. Many of the copies of the Arcadia House hardback for sale on-line attribute it to Archie Joscelyn, but you can take my word for it, this is definitely a Leslie Scott novel and I had a great time reading it. If you’re a fan of his work, I’d say it’s worth tracking down and reading. If you haven’t sampled his work, a lot of them are available as inexpensive e-books on Amazon under his own name and as Bradford Scott. If you’re a fan of action-packed traditional Westerns, you should give them a try.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Giant Western, February 1951

This issue of GIANT WESTERN sports a slightly cartoonish cover by Ed DeLavy, but it's yet another example of just how dangerous it was to go to the barber shop in the Old West. I kept telling my mother I didn't want to get my hair cut when I was a kid. I guess I sensed somehow that some ranny might start burnin' powder. Anyway, this issue (which I don't own) features stories by some fine writers including William MacLeod Raine, A. Leslie Scott, Leslie Ernenwein, Louis L'Amour (as Jim Mayo), T.C. McClary, and B.M. Bower (probably a reprint since Bower died in 1940 although it's not listed as such). 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, October 1952

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, featuring the usual excellent cover by Sam Cherry. That guy must have been tireless. He turned out a ton of pulp and paperback covers, all of them fine work.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue of TEXAS RANGERS has been attributed to Joseph Chadwick. It begins with Hatfield receiving a mysterious assignment from not only his regular Ranger boss, Cap’n Bill McDowell, but also from the governor of Texas his own self. In a clandestine meeting at the Capitol in Austin, the governor tells Hatfield to go to Fort Worth, check into a hotel there, and wait for someone to contact him and use the code word “Alamo”. It’s an intriguing opening.

Before you know it, there’s a beautiful girl involved, too, and Hatfield finds himself on a vast ranch in the Texas Panhandle impersonating the grandson of the owner and trying to get to the bottom of a deadly plot against the old-timer.

Having read a number of Chadwick’s non-series stories, I can easily believe that he wrote this Jim Hatfield novel. The story is extremely violent and hardboiled, and Hatfield comes in for a considerable amount of punishment, both physical and emotional. Chadwick always put his protagonists through the wringer, so this fits right in with his work. With a different character, this would have been a terrific novel.

But as a Jim Hatfield novel, it’s terrible. Chadwick’s grasp of the character and the series is fine up to a certain point: there are appearances by Cap’n Bill and Hatfield’s horse Goldy, and he refers to Hatfield as the Lone Wolf fairly often. But again and again, especially in the second half of the story, Chadwick has Hatfield doing things that he just doesn’t do in the stories by most of the other authors who wrote as Jackson Cole. He’s slow on the draw, he gets beaten up too easily, he gets too involved with the girl in the story, and he even talks about maneuvering one of the bad guys into a position where it’ll be easy to kill him. Quite a few years ago, I read another of Chadwick’s Hatfield yarns, “Death Rides the Star Route”, and while I don’t recall the details, I remember being displeased with it, too. I suspect it was for the same reasons. I believe he wrote only one other Hatfield novel, and I have a hunch I won’t be reading it any time soon, if ever.

“Spring Storm” is a short story by the prolific pulpster Giff Cheshire. I haven’t read a great deal by him, but I’ve found his work to be a little inconsistent, with a lot of it on the bland side. This yarn about a cattleman trying to drive off a nester fits that description, despite the fact that there’s some action. One of the supporting characters, an old cowboy, is very well-written and also redeems the story to a certain extent.

“The Sheriff Buys a Ring” is by Julian Hammer, one of only two stories credited to him in the Fictionmags Index. The title makes it sound like a comedy, but it’s actually a fairly hardboiled tale about a secret in a lawman’s past coming back to haunt him. It’s no lost classic, but it’s not bad.

“Double Dick and the Widow Woman” also sounds like a comedy, and it is. The author is Lee Priestly, and it’s the fourth and final story in a short series about old prospector Double Dick Richards, who roams around his with burro and pet cat getting into various scrapes. This one features a young cowboy who trades in his horse for a motorcycle and an attractive widow woman who owns a ranch plagued by rustlers. Hijinks, romantic and otherwise, ensue. This story isn’t particularly funny, although it’s supposed to be, but it’s mildly amusing in places and a lot more readable than some Western pulp humor I’ve encountered.

Not surprisingly, the best story in this issue is by Gordon D. Shirreffs. His novelette “Apache Ambush” is set in New Mexico and Arizona during the Civil War and finds a young Union army lieutenant battling Confederate spies and marauding Apaches. There’s a beautiful young woman to rescue and a massacre of Union troops to prevent. A colorful old-timer who is a civilian scout is on hand to help out, too. Shirreffs keeps things racing along with plenty of gritty action scenes and does his usual excellent job with the southwestern setting. This is a suspenseful, thoroughly entertaining yarn.

Charles A. Stearns wrote mostly science fiction for the pulps and digests in the Fifties, but he turned out a few Western stories as well. “Duel at Sundown” in this issue is a short but well-written story about a young man, the son of a legendary lawman, trying to work up the courage to face his first gunfight. It’s an effective tale with a twist ending that I didn’t see coming.

Finally, “Men of Steel” is a late pulp story from the prolific A. Leslie Scott, writing here as A. Leslie. He had already started writing paperbacks and would concentrate on that for the next two decades. In this one, set on the Texas coast along Matagorda Bay, the hero is Sheriff Neale Ross, who is trying to track down a gang of sheep rustlers believed by the local Mexican herders to be ghosts because they wear Conquistador armor. It’s a similar plot to ones that Scott used many times, but the descriptive writing is vivid and the action scenes are great. It’s a minor but very enjoyable yarn. And it got a new life when Scott rewrote it as the first chapter and a half of his Walt Slade novel BULLETS FOR A RANGER, published by Pyramid Books in 1963. The hero in that version is Texas Ranger Walt Slade, of course, with Sheriff Ross becoming a supporting character. I own that novel but I don’t think I’ve ever read it. Maybe now I should.

I’d say that, judged as a whole, this is a below-average issue of TEXAS RANGERS because the Jim Hatfield novel just doesn’t work very well, and only the stories by Shirreffs and Scott are really outstanding among the backup stories. As always, I’m glad to have read it, but I hope the next issue I pick up off the shelves will be better.

Rustlers Three - Buck Billings

When the law makes things too hot in Montana for notorious rustler Wild Will Wilson, he drifts down to the West Texas cowtown of El Centro and forces his way into a rustling ring masterminded by railroad superintendent T.K. “Track” Zuter. (This isn’t a spoiler; Zuter’s villainy is revealed right away.) Wilson proves his bona fides by wide-looping some cattle from the nearby Diamond A Ranch, owned by Jim Blair. Then Wilson comes up with an even more audacious scheme to swipe some cattle right of the very railroad cars in which they’re being shipped. Along the way, he also romances Marjorie Blair, the beautiful daughter of Jim Blair.

Then, halfway through this book, the author pulls off a nice plot twist in which it turns out hardly anything is what it appeared to be. This development would be even more effective if the dust jacket copy hadn’t given it away, but even so, it works well and plunges the reader into a rather dizzying array of complications, double-crosses, and hidden identities.

RUSTLERS THREE was published in hardback by Arcadia House in 1943 under the name Buck Billings. As far as I know, it was never reprinted, at least not under that title and by-line. Buck Billings is a pseudonym that’s been connected to prolific pulpsters Claude Rister and A. Leslie Scott, but there’s no definitive list of who wrote what. A friend of mine and I have been trying to figure that out, but it’s a daunting task involving a lot of guesswork and speculation. For example, there’s a long novella entitled “Rustlers Three” that was published in the November 1939 issue of the pulp magazine WEST under the house-name Sam Brant. This could well be the source of the Arcadia House novel. I haven’t been able to lay my hands on a copy of that issue or find a scan of it in order to compare. Neither Rister nor Scott have been known to write under the Sam Brant name, but in the world of pulp magazine house-names, almost anything is possible.

The best I can do as far as authorship of RUSTLERS THREE goes is to make an educated guess. Most of this novel reads like it was written by A. Leslie Scott, who had a fairly distinctive style. But some of it doesn’t read like Scott. He had a habit of taking one of his pulp novels, rewriting it, and adding material from a short story in order to make the yarn long enough for book publication. Something like that happens in RUSTLERS THREE, but I have to wonder if someone else (maybe Scott’s wife Lily, who wrote for the love pulps) did the actual combining and rewriting to produce the Arcadia House version of the novel. That’s some of the pure speculation I mentioned above. The one thing I can say with relative certainty is that the book wasn’t written by Claude Rister. I’m no expert on his work, but it seems very different in style to me.

But to get to the most important question, is RUSTLERS THREE any good? Well, yeah, it is. It’s a fast-moving tale with a likable protagonist and some good action scenes. It could have used a little more action, to be honest, but what’s there is exciting and well-written. I raced through this book and had a good time reading it. If you’re a fan of traditional Westerns from the Thirties and Forties, it’s worth reading if you come across a copy, which, admittedly, is likely to be pretty uncommon these days.