This is a pulp that I own and read recently. I don’t have access to a scanner at the moment, so I took a picture of my copy instead, and that’s it above. The cover is by Carl Reiter, and all I know about him is that he did a few pulp covers. As you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I’m a long-time fan of the pulp TEXAS RANGERS and have been reading the Jim Hatfield novels published in it for more than 50 years, since I discovered them in paperback reprints in the Sixties.
This issue is from fairly early in the series’ run, when most of the Hatfield
novels were written by either Leslie Scott, the series creator, or Tom Curry.
“Vaquero Guns” is one of Curry’s entries, and as usual in his novels, it
features a secondary hero. In this case, it’s drifting cowboy Jerry Farmon, who
starts the action off by searching for a missing friend of his, a deputy
sheriff who disappeared while on the trail of an escaped killer. But Hatfield,
a Texas Ranger who’s known as the Lone Wolf, is soon involved, being sent by
his boss, Captain “Roarin’” Bill McDowell, to West Texas to break up a gang of
masked marauders that has been raiding settlements along the border.
When Hatfield arrives on the scene, he quickly discovers that there’s a violent
feud going on between the biggest ranch in the area, the Square A, and
everybody else in the region. The Square A’s crew is composed of vaqueros
imported from Mexico, and they’re the ones who have been raiding the
settlements. Or are they? Could something else actually be going on, something
more sinister behind the scenes?
After a long series of gunfights, fistfights, captures, and escapes, Hatfield
uncovers the truth and exposes the criminal mastermind who will have been
obvious to most readers from very early on in the novel. That’s the main
problem with this one. Even for a pulp yarn, everything is just too
predictable.
Even so, there are some things to like about “Vaquero Guns”. The opening scene,
which features a nighttime escape from a train, is very evocative and
well-written. The action scenes are always good in a Curry novel, and the big
battles have a nice epic feel. There are clever callbacks to previous Hatfield
novels written by Curry. And Hatfield himself is a great character as always,
mostly superhuman but still likable and believable. I wouldn’t recommend this
to anyone who hasn’t read a Hatfield novel before, because it really is one of
the series’ weaker entries, but as an old-timer, I found it enjoyable reading.
Moving on to the back-up stories, “White Hat for an Outlaw” is by Robert E.
Obets, who, under that name and as Bob Obets, wrote scores of stories for
various Western pulps between the mid-Thirties and the mid-Fifties. Almost
completely forgotten now, he was a solid writer, and his story in this issue is
very good. It’s about a young outlaw infiltrating a company of Texas Rangers to
lead them into a trap, then having to decide whether he wants to continue on
the owlhoot trail or go over to the side of law and order. I liked it quite a
bit.
“Gun-Gang Plot” is by an even more forgotten writer, Anson Hard. It’s about a
saloon swamper who witnesses a confrontation between a gang of stagecoach
robbers and a stranger who might be a Texas Ranger. This one has a twist ending
I should have seen coming but didn’t, and again, I enjoyed it.
Syl MacDowell is best remembered for his humorous Swap and Whopper series and the
Sheriff Blue Steele series he wrote under the pseudonym Tom Gunn. But he wrote
plenty of traditional, stand-alone Western tales, too, including “West of the
Pecos” in this issue, which finds a young Ranger trying to rescue the sister of
a dead pal from a life of shame and degradation as a soiled dove, although
MacDowell is never quite that blunt about what’s going on. This one is well-written
and also has a twist ending that’s a little more of a stretch but still
effective. I don’t care for Swap and Whopper but have enjoyed everything else
I’ve read by MacDowell, including this one.
Given that the Hatfield novel isn’t one of the best and it takes up most of the
pages, this is probably a below-average issue of TEXAS RANGERS. Of course, I’m
still glad that I read it. If you’re a long-time Hatfield fan like me, you’d
probably enjoy it, too.
