Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Two Gun Western Stories, October 1929

TWO GUN WESTERN STORIES is a pretty obscure Western pulp, although it managed to run for about four years during the late Twenties and early Thirties. I've never seen an issue of it. The cover on this issue is by Fred I. Good, an artist I've never heard of. It has some good authors in its pages, though: L.P. Holmes, Archie Joscelyn, John G. Pearsol, Raymond W. Porter, and Arthur H. Carhart. It also has some authors whose names aren't familiar to me at all: K. Carleton Unthank, Francis W. Hilton, and Gordon E. Warnke.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: All Star Adventure Fiction, September 1935

I'm not sure I've ever heard of ALL STAR ADVENTURE FICTION, let alone come across a copy. But I'm also not sure why it's not better known and wasn't successful at the time, running for only seven issues. It had decent covers by J.W. Scott, including this one, and some fine authors. This issue features stories by Donald Barr Chidsey, J. Allan Dunn, Frank Richardson Pierce, Lemuel de Bra, Rollin Brown, and Arthur Hawthorne Carhart, all of them fine pulpsters who appeared regularly in the top magazines. Their stories here may well have been rejects from ARGOSY, ADVENTURE, etc., but they were probably still pretty good.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Street & Smith's Western Story Magazine, September 19, 1936

We close out the year with a moody, evocative Sidney Riesenberg cover on the granddaddy of Western pulps, WESTERN STORY. I'm not a big Riesenberg fan, but I really like this one. You can feel that cold, rainy wind, and the blonde is impressive, no hat despite the weather and packing iron. The line-up of authors in this issue is, well, an undistinguished one. The best known are probably Art Lawson and Arthur Hawthorne Carhart, and neither of those guys are much remembered these days. Other authors on hand are John Dudley Phelps, Lloyd Eric Reeves, Eugene R. Dutcher, W.H.B. Kent, and Ray Humphreys. Lawson was usually worth reading, and I'll bet some of the other stories are good, too.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, October 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That's my copy in the scan. ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, and for that matter, the other pulps published by Dell, are little remembered these days, but I’ve read several issues of ALL WESTERN and found them to be very solid. The cover on this issue was painted by Arthur Mitchell, who did most of the covers for this pulp.

The issue leads off with a novella by Tom Roan, “The Two-Gun Sheriff of Painted Rock”. Roan was most prolific in the Western pulps from Popular Publications, but he appeared in others as well. This yarn begins with a couple of owlhoots bushwhacking a rider who they believe to be the new sheriff on his way to tame the wild town of Painted Rock. Their unfortunate mistake sets in motion a chain of violent events as the new sheriff clashes with the crooked saloon owner who runs the town. It’s a stereotypical plot, but Roan keeps things moving very fast and has a good touch with an action scene. He’s never been one of my favorite Western pulpsters, but he’s dependably entertaining, and so is this novella.

Miles Overholt sounds like a pseudonym, but evidently that was his real name. He had a long, prolific career as a pulpster stretching from 1909 to the early Fifties, writing a variety of genres early on and then concentrating on Westerns. His story in this issue, “Gunsmoke Money”, is the first thing I recall reading by him. The protagonist is a young, drifting cowboy who’s forced to kill an hombre trying to steal his horse. The dying man asks him to deliver some money that’s in his saddlebags, and the cowboy’s promise to do so lands him in the middle of a range hog’s attempt to take over a beautiful young woman’s ranch. Nothing new there, but Overholt spins his yarn in such a breezy, fast-moving fashion, and his protagonist is so likable, that I really enjoyed this story and will be keeping my eyes open for more of his work. As far as I can tell, he never wrote any novels, just short fiction.

I’ve read a number of stories by Hapsburg Liebe over the years. His contribution to this issue is the short story “The Britches Kid”, which finds a prodigal son returning home to help save his father’s ranch from yet another range hog. It’s very different from the Miles Overholt story with a similar plot, and not as well written as Overholt’s story, to be honest, but several interesting, offbeat characters make this one worthwhile.

Charles M. Martin, who also frequently wrote as Chuck Martin, was a very prolific Western pulpster who worked as a real cowboy in his younger years. His work is heavy on pseudo-Western dialect and standard plots, but he wrote good action scenes and kept his yarns moving right along. His story in this issue, “Casa Grande Bullets”, find two Arizona Rangers trying to arrest a couple of bank robbers, and the ensuing shootout results in a vengeance quest that leads across the border into Mexico. It was entertaining enough to keep me reading but pretty forgettable at the same time.

The novelette “Lightning in Levis” is by Harry F. Olmsted, one of my favorite Western pulp authors. Some have claimed that Olmsted farmed out all of his work and never wrote anything on his own, but I don’t believe that. I don’t doubt that he might have gotten some help from other authors from time to time. That’s common among high-producing writers, and although I haven’t counted them, I read somewhere that Olmsted is credited with more than 1200 stories. The voice in the ones I’ve read is pretty consistent. That said, the tone in “Lightning in Levis”, which features a number of colorfully named characters and a convoluted plot, seems a little goofier than the usual Olmsted yarn. So I guess it’s possible somebody else contributed to this one, or maybe Harry was just feeling a little more whimsical than usual when he wrote it. At any rate, it’s an entertaining tale that finds the Wild Bunch (Butch, Sundance, and the rest of the boys) clearing their names after being framed for some robberies and killings they didn’t commit.

Arthur H. Carhart (sometimes billed as Arthur Hawthorne Carhart) is a name I’ve seen on a lot of Western pulps, but I don’t recall ever reading by him until now. “A Streak of Powder” is the story of two rival ranchers trying to capture the same outlaw so they can use the bounty on him against each other. It’s not a bad plot, but the writing is very bland and never hooked me. I finished this one, but it took some effort to do so.

Carson Mowre is another author I haven’t read before. His story “Timber Foot” is about a ferry operated by an ex-outlaw who helps other owlhoots escape from the law, all while waiting to take vengeance on an old enemy. It’s an intriguing idea, and Mowre does a fairly good job with it. The twist ending is pretty predictable but the story overall is enjoyable.

I like S. Omar Barker’s Western poetry and non-fiction, but his humorous short stories don’t appeal to me. “Two Tough Tails”, in this issue, is part of his Boosty Peckleberry series, which involves cowboys with colorful names sitting around the bunkhouse telling shaggy dog stories. I didn’t care for it.

There are some good stories here from Roan, Olmsted, Overholt, and Mowre, but taken as a whole, this is probably the weakest issue of ALL WESTERN I’ve read so far. Still, I’m glad I read it, of course. I’ve never read a Western pulp that didn’t provide some entertaining yarns.

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.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, November 30, 1935

Have I ever written anything with barnstormers in it? I don't think so. Maybe I should, one of these days. I doubt if I could top George Bruce, though. He was one of the top aviation pulp writers. Elsewhere in this issue of ARGOSY are stories by Judson Philips, Murray Leinster, J.D. Newsom, Anthony M. Rud, and Arthur Hawthorne Carhart, all dependable pulpsters (and Philips and Leinster went on to long, successful careers as novelists, of course).