Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, November 28, 1936

I came across this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY, one of my favorite Western pulps, on the Internet Archive, and since the lead novella is a Thanksgiving-themed story, I read it immediately so I could post about it on Thanksgiving Day. You can read my thoughts about it here. Now I’ve read the rest of the issue, or most of it, anyway. The cover is by R.G. Harris, who did a lot of excellent covers for WILD WEST WEEKLY. I don’t think this is one of his better ones, but it’s okay.

George C. Henderson is almost completely forgotten today, but I’ve read several of his stories and think he was a good Western pulpster. “Double Cross at the Double Crescent” uses the old plot of the protagonist, in this case a drifting cowboy, being mistaken for someone else, leading to a bunch of action including an attempted lynching. It’s a well-written story and Henderson includes a nice twist in the plot, so I enjoyed this one quite a bit.

Allan R. Bosworth was an even better writer. For WILD WEST WEEKLY, he did a long-running series about muleskinner Shorty Masters and his sidekick, a gunfighter known as the Sonora Kid. In “Mix-Up in Mescalero”, Shorty’s freight outfit gets drafted into an effort to move a gold shipment in secret so that outlaws won’t be able to steal it, but of course, things go wrong and Shorty and the Kid have to burn plenty of powder to set things right. One nice touch about this series is that Shorty is a fan of classical music and has named his mules after famous composers. I’ve read a couple of stories in this series and liked them.

The stories about good-guy outlaw Sonny Tabor, written by Paul S. Powers under the name Ward M. Stevens, were some of the most popular in WILD WEST WEEKLY and numbered among their fans none other than Elmer Kelton. In “Sonny Tabor at Broken Gun Ranch”, Sonny protects a ranching family from rustlers and discovers who’s really behind all the trouble. That’s it as far as the plot goes, but Powers provides plenty of well-written action scenes and Sonny Tabor is a very likable protagonist. I can see why it was a popular series. I’ve read two of the stories and enjoyed both of them.

Claude Rister wrote a lot for the Western pulps under his own name and was also one of several authors to use the pseudonym Buck Billings from time to time. I haven’t read much by him, but I’ve liked what I’ve read. His short story in this issue, “Dynamite and Water”, has two young cattlemen trying to keep the local range hog from running them off. Rister writes well and this is a pretty good yarn, but it suffers from a rather limp ending that could have been a lot more dramatic. Still good enough that I’d be happy to give anything else by Claude Rister a try.

This issue wraps up with the novelette “Texas Triggers Sling Lead” by Walker A. Tompkins. Tompkins was the most prolific contributor of linked novelettes that could then be fixed up into novels. I’m pretty sure he did that with the Texas Triggers stories, but at this point, I don’t know which novel they became. And since this story falls right in the middle of the series, I decided not to read it. I figure that sooner or later I’ll come across the whole thing in novel form. If any of you know the title of the book cobbled together from the Texas Triggers stories, please let me know.

Overall, this is a good solid issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. Not what I would consider above average, but entertaining and easy to read. The stories are action-packed and full of colorful “yuh mangy polecat” dialogue, and sometimes that’s just what a dagnabbed ol’ pelican like me wants to pass the time.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, August 27, 1938

I own a couple dozen issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY, but the August 27, 1938 issue isn’t among them. It’s available on the Internet Archive, though, and I picked it to read for a reason which I’ll get around to. The cover is by the legendary Norman Saunders, and it’s a good one illustrating the lead novella, “The Cougar’s Claws”.

That novella features Pete Rice, and that’s the reason I read this one. A little background for those of you unfamiliar with the character: Inspired by the success of THE SHADOW and DOC SAVAGE, in 1933 the good folks at Street & Smith decided to launch a Western hero pulp. The result was PETE RICE MAGAZINE. The title character is the two-fisted, fast-shootin’ sheriff of Trinchera County, Arizona, who's assisted by two deputies, scrawny little Misery Hicks (who does double duty as the barber of Buffalo Gap, the county seat) and Teeny Butler, who, in keeping with the nicknaming tradition of pulp characters, is well over six feet tall and weighs 300 pounds. The gimmick of the series, if you can call it that, is that while it has all the Western trappings, it’s set in the modern day, putting it in firmly in the same camp as the Western B-movies of the times starring Gene Autry and others. These Pete Rice novels, and they were full-length novels, were written by veteran pulpster Ben Conlon under the pseudonym Austin Gridley.

Well, PETE RICE MAGAZINE was not a raging success. It ran for 31 issues, approximately two and a half years. I read one of the novels years ago and don’t remember much about it except that I wasn’t impressed and didn’t seek out any more of the series. But . . . after Pete’s own magazine was cancelled, the character moved to WILD WEST WEEKLY, where he starred in 21 more novellas and novelettes. Or did he? You see, the stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY are no longer set in the modern day but take place in the Old West, which prompted a recent discussion between me and a friend about the idea that the Pete Rice in the WILD WEST WEEKLY stories is actually the father or grandfather of the Pete Rice who starred in his own magazine. That seems feasible, other than the fact that in WILD WEST WEEKLY, Misery and Teeny are still Pete’s deputies, and claiming that those characters are also an earlier generation seems like quite a stretch to me. I suspect that in real life, nobody at Street & Smith ever gave the change in time period a second thought other than maybe instructing Conlon to make the stories actual Westerns in hopes that they would help sell WILD WEST WEEKLY. It’s a safe bet that none of the pulp writers and editors dreamed anybody would still be talking about this stuff nearly a century down the road!

Anyway, another difference in the characters in PETE RICE MAGAZINE and WILD WEST WEEKLY is that in the later incarnation, Austin Gridley became a house-name. Ben Conlon continued to write some of the stories, but other authors contributed Pete Rice yarns, too, including Paul S. Powers, who teamed Pete with his popular character Sonny Tabor, leading to a joint byline of Austin Gridley and Ward Stevens (Powers’ pseudonym); Ronald Oliphant, who penned a crossover between Pete and Billy West of the Circle J, under the names Austin Gridley and Cleve Endicott (the house-name on the Circle J series); Lee Bond; and the extremely prolific Laurence Donovan, who also ghosted some Doc Savage novels for Street & Smith. The Pete Rice story in this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY I just read, “The Cougar’s Claws”, is Donovan’s first Pete Rice story.

And after my lukewarm at best reaction to the other Pete Rice yarn I read, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I really enjoyed this one. The Cougar is the leader of an outlaw gang plaguing Trinchera County and has come up with a really grisly way of disposing of his enemies: he wraps them in green bullhide and then lets the sun dry it out so that it shrinks and crushes the victims to death. Pete and his deputies clash several times with the Cougar and his gang, escape from some death traps, and finally expose the real mastermind behind all the villainy. There are some clever twists and Donovan was always really good with action, of which there is plenty. I found Pete and his deputies likable and had a fine time reading this novella. I’ll be on the lookout for more of the Pete Rice issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY.

I think the novelette “Gunsmoke Tornado” is the earliest story I’ve ever read by Dudley Dean McGaughey, the real name of Dean Owen, who gets the credit for this one. I’ve read quite a few of McGaughey’s pulp novels from the Forties and a bunch of paperbacks from the Fifties and Sixties, but “Gunsmoke Tornado” was only his ninth published story. It’s a good one, too, about a drifting young cowhand who signs on with a ranch crew where he faces some hazing. That might have been a story in itself, but there’s more going on than that, and before you know it, our young hero finds himself in danger up to his neck because of a feud between rival ranches. McGaughey’s work has a nice hardboiled tone to it and this story is no exception.  Plenty of tough action makes this one a winner.

I’m familiar with Lee Bond mostly from the long-running Long Sam Littlejohn series he wrote as backup stories in TEXAS RANGERS, but he did several series for WILD WEST WEEKLY, including one featuring drifting cowpokes Calamity Boggs and Shorty Stevens. Shorty is, well, short and feisty, just as you’d expect. Calamity is tall and husky and full of doom and gloom, an extreme pessimist who always believes the worst is about to happen, which is, I’m sure, how he got his nickname. Bond doesn’t explain that in “Calamity Hubs a Frame-Up” in this issue, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s easy enough to just jump right into this yarn in which our two rambling heroes find a recently abandoned line shack, decide to spend the night there, and wake up the next morning to find themselves the prisoners of a posse out to hang them for murder and rustling. As you might suppose, eventually they sort things out and everything gets resolved in a big gunfight, as things usually do in a Lee Bond story. Bond moves things along well and was always excellent when it comes to the action scenes. This is the third very good story in a row in this issue.

I’ve written here before about how Elmer Kelton and I enjoyed talking about Western pulps whenever we’d get together. I think I may have been the only one of his friends who was a pulp fan. He told me several times that WILD WEST WEEKLY was his favorite pulp when he was a kid growing up on a ranch in West Texas, and Sonny Tabor was his favorite character. Paul S. Powers wrote the Sonny Tabor series under the pseudonym Ward M. Stevens. More than 130 novelettes and novellas between 1930 and 1943 is quite a run. Some of those stories were crossovers featuring Sonny Tabor meeting up with other series characters from WILD WEST WEEKLY, including Kid Wolf (also a Paul S. Powers creation), Pete Rice, and Billy West and the Circle J outfit.

But who was Sonny Tabor? He was a good-guy outlaw, falsely accused of some crime (I don’t know the details) and on the run from the law, blamed for every bit of outlawry that occurs any time he’s around, and sometimes even when he’s not. The novelette in this issue, “A Murder Brand for Sonny Tabor”, is actually the first one I’ve read. The youngest of three brothers who own a ranch together is gunned down, shot in the back, and the name Tabor is carved into his forehead. The dead man’s brothers and the local law blame Sonny, of course, and he has to uncover the real killer to clear his name of this charge, anyway, although he’ll still be wanted for dozens of others. This is a really well-written story and I found myself liking Sonny and rooting for him right away. I have quite a few more issues with Sonny Tabor stories in them and I’m glad of that because I really enjoyed this one.

I was familiar with Allan R. Bosworth as the author of several excellent Western novels, but I’ve discovered in recent years that he also wrote scores of stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY under house-names, as well as contributing to the magazine under his own name. He used it on his long-running series about freight wagon driver Shorty Masters and his sidekick Willie Wetherbee, also known as the gunfightin’ Sonora Kid. In “A Hangin’ on Live Oak Creek”, all Shorty and Willie want to do is run a trotline and catch themselves a mess of catfish for fryin’ up. Instead, they find a fella who’s been lynched, but luckily they come across him before he’s choked to death. Rescuing him puts our heroes smack-dab in the middle of a fight between ranchers and rustlers. There’s a nice twist in this one. I saw it coming, but that didn’t make it any less satisfying. Also, I like the way Shorty names the mules in his team after classical music composers. That’s a nice touch I wasn’t expecting. Another really good story.

One of WILD WEST WEEKLY’s specialties was the series of linked novellas that could then be combined and published as a fix-up novel. Walker A. Tompkins was the master of this format, writing many of them for the pulp. His story in this issue published under the house-name Philip F. Deere, “Death Rides Tombstone Trail”, is the third of six to feature a Wyoming cowboy named Lon Cole who is in Texas working as a trail boss and also getting mixed up in various adventures. In this one, he’s between trail drives and takes a job as a special guard for a stagecoach carrying a shipment of gold. Of course, the stagecoach is held up. Lon is grazed by an outlaw bullet and knocked out so they think he’s dead and ride off leaving him there. He goes after the varmints, of course, and discovers they’re a gang known as the Secret Six and are led by a mysterious mastermind known as The Chief. This is nothing we haven’t all seen before, but Tompkins is good at it. Even though the story has a beginning, middle, and end, it’s weakened slightly by being part of a bigger whole, but I had a good time reading it anyway. The six Lon Cole stories were combined into the novel THUNDERGUST TRAIL, published under Tompkins' real name by Phoenix Press in 1942. I own a copy of that book but haven't read it. When I get around to it, I'll have already read a chunk out of the middle of it, but I don't think that'll bother me too much.

Overall, this is one of the best Western pulps I’ve read in a long time. Every story in this issue is very good to excellent, and several of them really make me want to read more about the characters. If you’ve never read an issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY, it would make a good introduction to the magazine, I think. If you’re a long-time fan like me, it’s well worth downloading and reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, May 26, 1934

This is a dandy, very dynamic cover by Walter Baumhofer. The action seems to almost leap off the page, to use a cliché that happens to be accurate in this case. This issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY features the usual assortment of series and stand-alone stories, heavy on the series. In this case, The Whistlin' Kid by Emery Jackson (J. Allan Dunn), Sonny Tabor by Ward M. Stevens (Paul S. Powers), Shorty Master by Allan R. Bosworth, Hungry and Rusty by Samuel H. Nickels, and the Bar U Twins by Charles E. Barnes. The stand-alones are by Lee Bond, George C. Henderson, and Kent Bennett (who was actually Samuel H. Nickels, his second story in this issue).

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Giant Western, September 1949

This is another action-packed cover from Sam Cherry, one of my favorite Western pulp cover artists (and paperback cover artist, too, for that matter). Inside this issue of GIANT WESTERN are stories by Wilbur S. Peacock, Allan R. Bosworth, T.C. McClary, and Ben Frank, plus classic reprints by Charles Alden Seltzer and Frederick R. Bechdolt. The big guy in the red shirt looks a little like James Arness to me, but this is too early for Arness to have influenced the art, I think.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: War Birds, April 1933

I was in the mood for an aviation pulp cover this morning, and I picked this one by George Rozen from WAR BIRDS because I don't recall seeing many observation balloons on pulp covers. Also there are some good writers in this issue, including William E. Barrett, Robert J. Hogan, Robert H. Leitfred, and one better remembered for his excellent Westerns, Allan R. Bosworth.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: War Birds, January 1932

You just don't run across stories with titles like "Fokker Dust" anymore. Thomson Burtis was a well-known writer of aviation and air-war stories, but I don't believe I've ever read anything by him. Also in this issue of WAR BIRDS are stories by O.B. Myers, another prolific and well-regarded aviation pulpster, Allan R. Bosworth, an excellent Western author who wrote a little bit of everything for the pulps, William E. Barrett, best remembered for the novel THE LILIES OF THE FIELD, and several authors whose names are unfamiliar to me. I've never really read much from the aviation pulps compared to some of the other genres, but I've generally enjoyed what I've read.

Happy Thanksgiving Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, November 26, 1932

There are at least three Thanksgiving stories in this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY: "Sonny Tabor's Trail to Thanksgiving" by Paul S. Powers writing as Ward M. Stevens; "Circle J's Thanksgiving Guest" by Ronald Oliphant writing as Cleve Endicott; and "One Turkey--Plenty Tough", a Shorty Masters yarn by Allan R. Bosworth. I suspect that "Celebratin' in the Thunder Birds" by Reginald C. Barker writing as Lee Harrington may be a Thanksgiving story as well. Other authors in the issue are Walker A. Tompkins and Lee Bond, once as himself and once as Frank J. Litchfield. The cover art is by H.W. Reusswig. The cover scan and the information comes from the Fictionmags Index, that invaluable site for which I'm very grateful. I'm also thankful for family, friends, and all of you who read this blog. I hope it's a wonderful day for all of you.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Stories & Complete Novel Magazine, June 1931

Thanks to David Lee Smith for the excellent cover scan from this issue of a pulp with a long-winded title but pretty good contents, from the looks of the authors. Gladwell Richardson's novel takes up most of the issue, but there are also stories by top-notch Western pulpsters Allan R. Bosworth and Cliff Farrell, plus a few others. That's one tough-looking hombre on this cover. I don't reckon I'd want to be the fella swappin' lead with him.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Ranch Stories, July 1947

This issue of THRILLING RANCH STORIES sports the usual good cover by the apparently tireless Sam Cherry (honestly, when did the man sleep and eat?), and inside there are stories by some top names in Western fiction: L.P. Holmes, Allan R. Bosworth, Joseph Chadwick, Louis L'Amour, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, Hascal Giles, and Joe Archibald. Okay, maybe not all of them are that well-known today, but they were all good solid pulpsters.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, December 10, 1938

A striking and unusual cover by Norman Saunders graces this issue of one of my favorite Western pulps, WILD WEST WEEKLY. The line-up of authors and stories inside is outstanding, too, leading off with a Sonny Tabor yarn by Paul S. Powers writing as Ward M. Stevens. Also in this issue are stories by Walker A. Tompkins, Allan R. Bosworth, Chuck Martin, Lee Bond, and Ralph Yergen.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, November 18, 1933

That's an action-packed cover by Walter Baumhofer on this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY, and the line-up of authors and stories inside is great: a Johnny Forty-Five story by Paul S. Powers writing as Andrew A. Griffin, a Border Eagle story by Walker A. Tompkins writing as Philip F. Deere, a Hungry and Rusty story by Samuel H. Nickels, a Shorty Master story by Allan R. Bosworth, and non-series yarns by William F. Bragg, Arthur Hawthorne Carhart, and Cliff Farrell writing as Nelse Anderson. Pretty entertaining from cover to cover, I expect.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, March 3, 1934

A nice cover by H.W. Scott on this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY, and a very nice line-up of authors inside: Paul S. Powers. Allan R. Bosworth, Stephen Payne, Samuel H. Nickels, J. Allan Dunn (a Whistlin' Kid yarn as by Emery Jackson), Lee Bond (writing as Philip F. Deere), and Norman W. Hay (a Circle J story as Cleve Endicott). I've never read an issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY that I didn't enjoy, and I'm sure if I had a copy of this one, I'd have a great time reading it, too. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Top Western Fiction Annual, 1954

You have to look close to see it, but there's a bullet going through this cowboy's hat, so this qualifies as an Injury to a Hat cover. Who's the artist? I don't know. The art reminds me a little of both H.W. Scott and A. Leslie Ross and might easily be neither of them. TOP WESTERN FICTION ANNUAL was a reprint pulp, as you might guess, and the 1954 edition has some fine authors in it: Allan R. Bosworth, William Hopson, J. Edward Leithead, Leslie Ernenwein, Larry A. Harris, W.F. Bragg, and the ubiquitous house-name Sam Brant. The stories come from a variety of Thrilling Group Western pulps published in the Thirties and Forties. Maybe not the very top Western fiction . . . but PRETTY DARNED GOOD WESTERN FICTION ANNUAL probably wouldn't have sold as well.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, May 25, 1940

This is a decent cover with a more subdued color scheme than you find on some pulps, and inside is a top-notch lineup of authors: Walker A. Tompkins (twice, once under his own name and once as Hal Dunning, continuing the White Wolf series after the real Dunning's death), Ed Earl Repp writing as Brad Buckner, Allan R. Bosworth, J. Allan Dunn, and Laurence Donovan. Lots of good reading there.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, October 8, 1938

I wish it didn't have some hunks chewed out of it, but you can still tell that's a nice cover by A. Leslie Ross on this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. I'll bet the Tommy Rockford story by Walker Tompkins is pretty good, too, since all of them I've read have been. There are also stories by Lee Bond (twice, one under his own name and one under the house-name Andrew A. Griffin), Chuck Martin, J. Allan Dunn, and Allan R. Bosworth writing under the Dean McKinley house-name. Looks to me like a fine issue all around.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, March 9, 1940

Was Sonny Tabor the most popular character who ever appeared in WILD WEST WEEKLY? Maybe. Those stories were featured on the cover many times, as in the case of this issue with a nice cover by Richard Case. In addition to Paul Powers, who was really Ward M. Stevens, of course, authors in this issue include Dean Owen, Lynn Westland (really Archie Joscelyn), and Allan R. Bosworth, an excellent Western pulpster who wrote under a lot of the house-names in WILD WEST WEEKLY as well as his own.

Forgotten Books: Border Roundup - Allan R. Bosworth

According to TWENTIETH CENTURY WESTERN WRITERS, this novel was originally a pulp serial, but TCWW doesn't say when and where it was first published. Doubleday did a hardback version in 1941 under the title WHEREVER THE GRASS GROWS, and then Bantam reprinted it in paperback in 1947. That's the edition I just read. (And as a side note, while the plastic coating on the paperback covers is starting to show a little wear, the paper is just barely tan and in beautiful shape, better than most two or three year old paperbacks these days. But then, that's common for paperbacks from that era, at least in my experience.)

In 1875, Ruck (short for Rucker, which was Bosworth's middle name) Hanna returns to Texas after spending five years in Wyoming. Ruck had to leave the family ranch because he shot and killed a crooked carpetbagger who was trying to kill him. Knowing he wouldn't get a fair trial from the Reconstruction government, he went on the run instead. But by the beginning of the novel, Reconstruction is over, Ruck's father is dead, and Ruck has to return to save the ranch. All of the Nueces brush country in South Texas is under assault from Mexican raiders and rustlers led by Cheno Sandoval, whose sister Olivia is an old friend (and potential romantic interest) of Ruck's.

There are other problems besides the rustlers. The open range era is ending, and there are clashes among the local ranchers over how to handle this evolution in cattle-raising. The spectre of barbed wire is looming.  Ruck has a lot of trouble to handle, including a romantic triangle with Olivia and Hattie Blake, the daughter of a carpetbagger who has remained in Texas to become a business tycoon. Texas Rangers led by Captain Leander McNelly show up to put a stop to the rustling and wind up crossing the Rio Grande to invade Mexico, and Ruck goes along with them.

This is a very well written novel with good characters, a historically accurate background, and a fine sense of time and place. I've been to many of the places Bosworth describes, and he gets it right. The only flaws, in my opinion, are a shortage of action and the lack of a sense of urgency, especially in the first half of the book. The second half is considerably stronger. Overall, I'd highly recommend this one, and I intend to look for more novels by Bosworth.

(Bosworth was one of the regular stable of authors on the various house-name series in WILD WEST WEEKLY. I don't know which particular stories he wrote, but I'll bet they were good.)