Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Trails, May 1947

I don’t own this pulp, but I was able to read a PDF of it thanks to a friend of mine. Since I don’t have the actual issue, that’s the scan from the Fictionmags Index. The art is by Allen Anderson, whose work I associate much more with the Fiction House pulps, and it doesn’t really have his distinctive look. The Ace Western pulps, WESTERN TRAILS and WESTERN ACES, were sometimes considered salvage markets when a writer couldn’t sell a story elsewhere, but I haven’t really seen much evidence of that. I’ve found them to be pretty solid magazines with plenty of good authors on hand.

And certainly they weren’t considered salvage markets by veteran Western pulpster J. Edward Leithead, who had at least two stories in nearly every issue of those two pulps during the Forties, one under his own name and one under his most common pseudonym, Wilson L. Covert. I’m confident he wrote these specifically for the Ace pulps and never sent them anywhere else.

The story under Leithead’s name was nearly always a novelette. In this issue, it’s “Roundup of the Plundering Shotwells”, about a family of owlhoots, a father and six sons, but the seventh son wants nothing to do with being an outlaw. In fact, he’s in love the local sheriff’s daughter. But a clash with another gang draws our protagonist into gun trouble anyway, and it’s a bloody, fast-moving tale with several good plot twists, plenty of action, and a satisfying showdown at the end. Leithead is one of my favorite Western pulp authors, and this is a really nice example of his work.

The short story “Blizzard Boomerang” is by another of my favorites, Joseph Chadwick. It’s a little unusual for him in that it’s set in the snowy High Sierras during winter instead of somewhere in the hot Southwest, where his stories are usually set. It’s not a typical plot, either, as it’s about the clash between two men who deliver mail and freight to the remote mining camps, one by dogsled and the other on skis. This is a well-written, emotionally involving story, as you’d expect from Chadwick.

Kenneth L. Sinclair was a fairly popular Western pulp author but is forgotten today. His story, “Trail of the Invisible Herd”, is another story set during the winter and involves getting a herd to some grazing land even though the local range hog has blocked it off with a fence. This one is okay, reasonably entertaining, but the resolution of it seems pretty far-fetched to me. Maybe it’s not, Sinclair may know what he’s talking about, but I wasn’t convinced.

Frank Triem published dozens of Western pulp stories during the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties but is probably even more unknown today than Kenneth L. Sinclair. His story in this issue, “Say It With Sixes”, is about a young lawman waiting nervously for the return of an outlaw he knows is going to try to kill him. Hmm, that sounds vaguely familiar. But here’s the interesting thing. This issue of WESTERN TRAILS was published six months earlier than the issue of COLLIER’S that contained John M. Cunningham’s story “The Tin Star”, from which the movie HIGH NOON was made. The similarities are definitely there. Given the timing, I really don’t think Cunningham took any inspiration from Triem’s story. I believe it’s a coincidence, but it’s a striking one.

J. Edward Leithead’s second story in this issue is “Calaboose Cache” under the Wilson L. Covert pseudonym. It’s about a cowboy who returns to his hometown and is forced by circumstances to become the local lawman. He has to deal with a deputy he doesn’t trust, two competing gangs of outlaws, and the missing loot from a bank robbery that has to be recovered to keep the town from being ruined. It’s a complex yarn and pretty entertaining, although I didn’t think it was as good as the novelette under Leithead’s real name.

D.B. Newton is another longtime favorite Western author for me. His stories are always well-plotted, have plenty of action and interesting characters, and his prose is clean and sounds authentic without going in for overdone dialect. His novelette “Cowpoke on a Pistol Payroll” is about a down-on-his-luck cowboy who finally gets a job, only to find that he’s the bait in a scheme to start a range war. This is an excellent story that’s almost all action. Really enjoyable.

I’ve found Giff Cheshire to be an inconsistent Western author, but most of his stories are pretty good and occasionally I run across one that’s excellent. “.45 Merrymaker” in this issue falls into the pretty good category. The protagonist is a young cowboy who plays the guitar and sings, and his friend is a bearded old-timer who plays the fiddle. I have no way of knowing if Cheshire intentionally based them on Roy Rogers and Gabby Hayes, but close enough for me! The plot is reminiscent of a B-Western, too, with a couple of swindlers out to bilk a town by promising to build a phony railroad. However, the way our heroes go about foiling that scheme requires a heapin’ helpin’ of willing suspension of disbelief, almost too much so. In the end, I cut Cheshire enough slack to enjoy the story.

“Four Horsemen From Hades” is a great title, and it goes with an entertaining story by Willard Luce, another forgotten pulpster who published 18 stories during the Forties and Fifties. An old-timer who works as the night watchman at a dam construction project in the Pacific Northwest has to solve a payroll theft in order to clear his son’s name. The plot is pretty easy to figure out, but Luce’s writing is smooth enough and his protagonist likable enough to elevate this one.

This is a good issue of WESTERN TRAILS, worth reading if you have a copy of the actual pulp. If you’re a member of the WesternPulps email group, you can find the PDF in the Files section of the group’s website.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, Spring 1949

This is actually a fairly sedate cover by Allen Anderson on this issue of PLANET STORIES. There's a good group of writers inside, too, including Ray Bradbury (with a reprint from MACLEAN'S), Damon Knight, Alfred Coppel, Henry Hasse, Basil Wells, Stanley Mullen, and the less well-known (at least to me) Robert Abernathy and George Whitley. I don't own this issue, but it's available on-line here if any of you want to check it out. (With all the pulps that I own and all the ones that are on-line, I swear I could sit and read pulps all day, every day, and never even come close to reading all the ones I'd like to. It's a frustrating state of affairs, but what're you gonna do?) 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp Revisited - Frontier Stories, Summer 1950

I’ve featured this pulp before, but now I’ve had a chance to read it, thanks to a good friend who loaned me his copy. That’s it in the scan. The cover is by Allan Anderson, I think. His horses are pretty distinctive.

The issue leads off with the novelette “Tombstones For Gringos” by Les Savage Jr. Brothers Colin and Farris Shane are traveling with their ill and dying mother, looking for a new homestead. They find a good place, but it lies in the shadow of a mountain known as El Renegado because of some tragic events a couple of hundred years earlier. It seems that a Spanish captain (Spain ruled the region then) betrayed his men for the love of a woman, fled to the mountain with her, and the rest of the company was wiped out. Now the basin that lies in the shadow of the peak is cursed. And boy, everything that happens after that seems to bear out the curse. You’ve got family members killing family members (at least three cases of it), gruesome torture, and doomed love.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because Savage’s original version of the tale was published many years later as “The Shadow of Renegade Basin” in the Leisure paperback of the same name, which is still available from Amazon Encore. Fiction House editor Malcolm Reiss bought the manuscript in 1948, probably because Savage was one of Fiction House’s star writers by that time and he bought everything Savage sent him. Reiss must have deemed Savage’s original version unpublishable, because he sat on it for a couple of years, then did some rewrites himself and finally published it in this issue of FRONTIER STORIES.

Since I have the book with Savage’s version in it, I skimmed through it after I’d read the pulp novelette, looking for the changes Reiss made. They’re really not extensive at all. He removed one plot element that he must have felt was too offensive (given the time period, he was right) and rewrote the ending to give it at least a tiny shred of hope, rather than the bleak nihilism of Savage’s version. I hate to side with an editor over an author, but Reiss was right to do what he did. The pulp version is better. I get that Savage was trying to push the boundaries of the genre, and he successfully did so in other novels and stories, but I think this one is a misfire.

Next up is another novelette, “Wheels of Empire” by Alexander Wallace. This one is set during the 1840s, the days of the great immigrant wagon trains, and is about a clerk from Boston who goes west seeking adventure, becomes a frontiersman, and clashes with a crooked trading post owner who swindles the immigrants who visit his fort. It’s a pretty good yarn with some nice action and a thoroughly despicable villain. Wallace was a Canadian author who published several dozen Western and adventure stories in various pulps from the mid-Forties to the mid-Fifties. I’ve read a few stories by him and enjoyed all of them.

Charles Dickson wrote only a few detective and Western stories for the pulps, and I don’t know anything about him. I don’t recall ever reading anything by him until I read his short story in this issue, “Ride the River”. Like most of the stories in this pulp, it’s as much a historical yarn as a traditional Western and is set during the mountain man era. The protagonist is a young fur trapper who sets out to stop a rival from stirring up an Indian war. This is a pretty well-written story, and I enjoyed it.

“Retreat to Glory” by Norman B. Wiltsey is billed as a short story, but it’s actually an article based on history like the dozens of others Wiltsey wrote for various pulps. It’s about a group of Northern Cheyenne jumping the reservation in Indian Territory and heading north toward their homeland. The army pursues them, of course. Wiltsey does an okay job recounting a fairly sad chapter in history.

“Dance of the Grizzly” is Theodore Cutting’s only credit in the Fictionmags Index. The protagonist is a young Indian who has to face a grizzly bear in an ordeal of courage in order to win the girl he loves. Cutting throws in a few decent twists, but overall this story never really engaged my interest.

“Apache Flame” is bylined John Starr, a well-known Fiction House house-name. But there’s more to the background than that. A line on the Table of Contents page states that this novelette and the following one, “The Mountains Said No”, are copyright 1938 by Fiction House. The twist is that no stories by those titles were published in any Fiction House pulp in 1938. I even checked the issues from December 1937 and January 1939 just for the sake of thoroughness. Which leads me to believe that these two stories were published originally under other titles and with other bylines on them. There’s a story called “Apache!” by Ray Nafziger in an issue of FRONTIER STORIES from 1938, which seemed a likely suspect, but the writing in “Apache Flame” doesn’t really strike me as being Nafziger’s work. Of course, I could be wrong about that. Chances are, we’ll never know which “John Starr” actually wrote this story, but it’s a really good one featuring another mountain man protagonist, this one teaming up with some Spanish settlers who hate him in order to rescue some young women kidnapped by vengeful Apaches. It takes place in what will one day be New Mexico, another thing that made me think of Nafziger, who lived there while he was writing for the pulps. No matter who wrote it, “Apache Flame” really races along with good characters and plenty of action. This is a top-notch yarn.

Another Fiction House house-name, Wilton Hazzard, is the byline on the novelette “The Mountains Said No”, which wraps up this issue. The mountain man protagonist of this one comes across a wagon train under attack by a Pawnee war party and helps the immigrants run off the Indians, only to find that the wagons are being guided by an old enemy of his. Our hero and his crusty old sidekick wind up joining the wagon train, of course, to try to get them through safely to the gold fields in California. This is an excellent story, really well-written and with plenty of action. There’s a theory that a well-known science fiction author is behind the house-name on this one, but I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that “The Mountains Said No” is a fine yarn and I really enjoyed it.

Overall, this is a good issue of FRONTIER STORIES with a few disappointments mixed in, but I like that the emphasis is on buckskin-era stories rather than traditional Westerns. I haven’t read many issues of FRONTIER STORIES, but I think I’m going to have to hunt up more of them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, Winter 1947

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, store stamp and all. I’ll put a better scan from the Fictionmags Index at the bottom of this post. The cover art, as usual for Fiction House, is by Allen Anderson, and it’s excellent, also as usual. Everything in it comes from the lead novella, “Black Priestess of Varda” by Erik Fennel.

Who the heck is Erik Fennel, you ask? I dunno. Apparently neither does anyone else, since I can’t find anything about him on-line except that he published a dozen stories in PLANET STORIES, THRILLING WONDER STORIES, and BLUE BOOK between the mid-Forties and the mid-Fifties. “Black Priestess of Varda” is a fairly typical sword-and-planet/other dimension yarn with a nice twist or two. The protagonist is a scientist named Eldon Carmichael, who lost his left arm and left eye in a laboratory accident. Or was it an accident? The assistant who may have caused it wound up with the girl Eldon intended to marry, after all. Then another mishap sends all three of them through a dimensional rift to a world called Varda, where the beautiful High Priestess Sin (that’s her on the cover) is trying to open a dimensional rift (there are dimensional rifts galore in this story) so she can bring the evil entity known as Sasso through to Varda and finish taking over the place. Swashbuckling action and psychic warfare ensue, along with quite a few excuses for beautiful Vardan babes to lose their clothes. (Not quite to the Spicy pulp level, but close.)

I thoroughly expected that traveling between dimensions would restore our hero’s missing eye and arm and bulk him up with muscle, but no, Fennel makes the interesting choice to leave him like he is on Earth, for the most part, and it works well. There’s a little alien sidekick (he’s on the cover, perched on Sin’s shoulder) that’s very likable and plays a fairly important part in the plot. The action races right along to a spectacular finish, all the way to a satisfying last line. The whole thing reads as if Fennel was inspired by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, which is not a bad thing. “Black Priestess of Varda” isn’t a classic of the science-fantasy genre like some yarns from PLANET STORIES, but it’s entertaining.

Next up is a short story by Kenneth Putnam, who was really Philip Klass, much better known under his pseudonym William Tenn. “My, Myself, and I” is a humorous story involving a mad scientist, a hobo, and a time travel machine. It’s mildly amusing, is decently written, but doesn’t amount to much.

At that, it’s much better than “Failure on Titan” by Robert Abernathy, a writer I’m not familiar with at all. This one involves a race of telepathic, Abominable Snowman-like aliens working in the mines on the moon Titan under human supervision. I felt like there might have been something there, but I didn’t care for the writing at all and abandoned it after a few pages.

“The Running of the Zar” is by Vaseleos Garson (actually William J. Garson). It’s a crime yarn of sorts about a couple of guys trying to steal a rare and incredibly valuable element from the native race on Pluto. This may be science fiction, but Garson gives us the same sort of bleak ending that often shows up in noir crime stories. An okay story, at best.

Basil Wells wrote for the detective pulps as well as his science fiction stories. “Among the Scented Ones” is about a fugitive from Earth hiding out on a planet overrun by vicious wildlife and has a stampede of saurian described much like a buffalo stampede would have been in a Western pulp. That was the best thing about this one, which I didn’t like at all.

I vaguely recognize Henry Guth’s name. He also wrote detective yarns in addition to his SF. His story “Earthbound” is about a couple of kids on Mars who build a rocket ship in their backyard to go to Earth. It’s cute and readable, although it plays a little like an episode of a Fifties TV sitcom.

“Earth is Missing!”, a novelette by Carl Selwyn, has some decent world-building in it. 7000 years from now, Earth is covered with ice, a frozen ball in space, but civilization still thrives in underground cities including New York, where everybody talks and acts like it’s still, well, 1947. Hardboiled police detective Johnny Steel is frustrated by the law’s failure to catch The Bear, the leader of a gang that’s been robbing banks and businesses, so he turns in his badge and becomes a private detective so he can go after The Bear without having to worry about all the rules and regulations. You see, Johnny blames The Bear for the death of a childhood friend of his who went bad and turned crook. An oily corporate executive and a beautiful blond femme fatale are also involved. Johnny’s search for The Bear takes him to the frozen surface, where he has a big surprise waiting for him in a plot twist that most readers probably will see coming. This is such a goofy, over-the-top story that I couldn’t help but enjoy it. It’s my favorite in the issue, and I wouldn’t hesitate to read something else by Selwyn.

The final story is “Duel in Black”, by another author I don’t know, John Foster West. It’s a pretty blatant example of a Western plot transplanted to a science fiction setting, as a miner on the Moon is bushwhacked by a no-good claim jumper, who even speaks in Western pulp dialect. West’s writing isn’t bad, though, and I had no trouble making it to the end, which is more than I can say for a couple of other stories in this issue.

Rounding things out is The Vizigraph, a letters column full of long, enthusiastic letters. As is common, some familiar names crop up: the first letter is by Chad Oliver, and there are also letters from Lin Carter and Larry Shaw. Then as now, SF fandom was a real breeding ground for future pro writers.

Overall, this is the weakest issue of PLANET STORIES I’ve read, with a couple of not bad stories and the rest either pretty forgettable or ones that I didn’t like. Anderson’s cover may well be the best thing about it. But despite that, I’m glad I read it. I don’t consider reading any pulp a waste of time because I really like visiting that era. If you want to check it out yourself, the entire issue can be found online here.

 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy Detective Stories, December 1942

There's a lot going on in this cover by Allen Anderson, including a Clark Gable lookalike who's about to get brained by a feisty redhead. Oddly enough, the cover story in this issue is by Alan Anderson, a totally different guy, as far as I know. There's also a Dan Turner story by Robert Leslie Bellem, and the rest are all retitled reprints from earlier issues of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES published under house-names. The real authors behind them include Arthur Warren and William G. Bogart. The others? Who knows? This is actually the final issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES. The next month the magazine continued under the name SPEED DETECTIVE STORIES, with (supposedly) slightly toned down content.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, July 1948

I like to think that if I'd been around during the pulp era, I could have written for LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE. This issue features another dynamic cover by Allen Anderson. Inside are stories by some top pros: William Heuman, W.T. Ballard, and Laurence Donovan, plus lesser-known but still prolific Al Storm, H. Frederic Young, and Costa Carousso. The lead novella is by William J. Hodgson, and the odd thing about that is that it's his only story listed in the Fictionmags Index. I'm not sure why a writer would get cover-featured with his first (and apparently only) story, but that happened some in the pulps. Or maybe Hodgson was actually a pseudonym for somebody else in that issue. Heuman, Ballard, and Donovan wrote a lot, under many different names. Likely we'll never know, but I always find these questions intriguing.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Two Complete Science-Adventure Books, Winter 1952

Eagle-eyed commenter b.t. spotted the similarities between this cover by Allen Anderson and yesterday's Western pulp cover that doesn't have any artist attribution. The pose and the gun make me believe that Anderson did indeed do at least half of yesterday's cover. With split covers like this, it's always hard for me to tell if the same artist did both parts. Anyway, this issue of TWO COMPLETE SCIENCE-ADVENTURE BOOKS features a reprint of a novella that was a classic already, despite being only ten years old: "Beyond This Horizon" by "Anson MacDonald" originally published in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION in April 1942. By 1952, were there any science fiction fans who didn't know that Anson MacDonald was really Robert A. Heinlein? I suppose there could have been. The other story in this issue, "The Magellanics" by Alfred Coppel, is new. I don't think I've ever read anything by Coppel, or if I have, I don't remember it. Maybe I should, if his stories have sexy redheads in towels in them.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Spicy Western Stories, June 1942

Good old SPICY WESTERN STORIES. Covers don't get much more garish than this one by Allen Anderson. It's sure eye-catching, too. Most of this issue's contents are reprints from four or five years earlier with the titles and house-names changed. Laurence Donovan has one of the two original stories, and one of the reprints appears to be by him, as well, since it was published originally under the name Larry Dunn, which as far as I know was a personal pseudonym for Donovan. The other original story is by Edwin Truett Long writing as Wallace Kayton. The rest of the TOC is a hodge-podge of house-names.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Private Detective Stories, September 1942

This Allen Anderson cover is a good example of a picture that tells a story. Since it's 1942, I'll bet those are black market tires, and the blond shutterbug is either a private eye or works for one, and she was trying to get some photos as evidence of the black-marketeering when those two yeggs caught her . . . yeah, I could write that. But in this case, Howard Wandrei, as Robert A. Garron, probably did. Other authors in this issue of PRIVATE DETECTIVE STORIES are Laurence Donovan (twice, as himself and as Larry Dunn), Roger Torrey, and house-names Paul Hanna and R.T. Maynard, who might be any of those other three guys, or somebody else entirely. With Trojan Publishing Corp., you just never know.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, Winter 1948

I always like Allen Anderson's covers, and this one for PLANET STORIES is no exception. Based on the authors inside, this is a fine issue: Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, A. Bertram Chandler, Frank Belknap Long, Ray Cummings, Bryce Walton, Alfred Coppel, and a couple of lesser known writers, W.J. Matthews and William Brittain. One of the things I want to do this year is read more science fiction. Some stuff from PLANET STORIES would be a good place to start.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, January 1946

This issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE came up in the comments on last Sunday's pulp post, as did the one I'll be posting tomorrow. This cover is by Fiction House stalwart Allen Anderson, although I don't think it's a typical Anderson cover. Still a pretty good one, though. Inside are stories by William Hopson, Giles A. Lutz, Lee E. Wells, Curtis Bishop, R.S. Lerch, and lesser-known authors John C. Ropke, Harold R. Stoakes, and Walter Galli.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy-Adventure Stories, August 1941

"Tropic Hell" by Henry Kuttner? I'm ready to read that right now, and I might if I actually owned this issue of SPICY-ADVENTURE STORIES, which also sports a nice cover by Allen Anderson. The rest of the issue looks pretty promising, too, with two stories by Victor Rousseau (one as by Lew Merrill and one as by Stan Warner, the latter of which is a reprint of a story originally published as by Clive Trent), two by E. Hoffmann Price (one as by Clark Nelson and one as by Arthur Cutler, both reprints of yarns originally published under Price's real name; the Cutler is one of his Don Cragston yarns), and other assorted house-names and one-shot or little-known authors. With their habit of reprinting stories under different titles and by-lines, all the Spicy pulps are a bit of a maze, but there's a lot of good reading to be found in them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, May 1952

Another excellent Allen Anderson cover on this issue of PLANET STORIES. Why the War-Maid of Mars' raygun looks like an old-fashioned Western six-shooter at first glance, I don't know, but it's eye-catching, as are other, ah, attributes. Maybe Anderson adapted this from an unused painting he did for LARIAT STORY. Anyway, speaking of the War-Maid, I wouldn't mind reading that story by Poul Anderson. I'll have to check and see if it's ever been reprinted anywhere. The only other familiar names in the Table of Contents are Bryce Walton, Robert Moore Williams, and J.T. McIntosh.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Trails, June 1948

The two Ace Western pulps, WESTERN TRAILS and WESTERN ACES, were pretty good magazines during this era. This particular issue of WESTERN TRAILS features a good cover by Allen Anderson and stories by L.P. Holmes, Joseph Chadwick, Ray Gaulden, John Jo Carpenter, Gladwell Richardson, and Lee Floren. I've enjoyed every issue of WESTERN TRAILS that I've read. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story, January 1950

I probably post too many covers from LARIAT STORY, but dang, I like the covers by Allen Anderson, including this one with another of his odd-looking horses, and the story titles. I really want to read "Blood-Guns of the Crazy Moon!", especially since it's by Les Savage Jr., one of the better pulp Western authors. Heck, I wouldn't mind writing a story called "Blood-Guns of the Crazy Moon!" Savage and Richard Wormser (a reprint under the John Starr house-name) are the only recognizable authors in this issue.