J.W. Scott liked to use blondes on his Western pulp covers instead of redheads, but he teams them with the usual Stalwart, Red-Shirted Cowboy and Wounded Old Geezer, as on this issue of WESTERN SHORT STORIES. Ed Earl Repp is the author with the biggest name in this one, and he's on hand twice, once as himself and once as Brad Buckner. Other authors include the distinctively named Carmony Gove, Jack Sterrett, Rolland Lynch, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, Harold F. Cruickshank, Luke Tyler (who sounds like a house-name but apparently wasn't), and Ken Jason and John Cannon, who were house-names. I don't own this issue or any other issues of this pulp, as far as I remember, but it looks pretty good. For a lower-rung Western pulp, WESTERN SHORT STORIES ran a long time, from December 1936 to January 1957.
We have three characters in the J.W. Scott cover on this issue of WESTERN NOVEL AND SHORT STORIES, but it's not the usual trio of Stalwart Cowboy, Wounded Old-timer, and Angry, Gun-Totin' Redhead. Even so, this is a pretty effective cover. I like the jodhpurs on the blonde. Inside are stories by Ed Earl Repp, as himself and as Brad Buckner, Rolland Lynch, Carmony Gove, and Ken Jason, a house-name used by, among others, D.B. Newton, Jonathan Glidden (better known as Peter Dawson), Bennie Gardner (better known as Gunnison Steele), Victor H. White, and editor Robert O. Erisman. So there's really no telling who wrote the Ken Jason story in this issue. I like the story's title, though: "Gun Raiders of Silver City". "Last Notch in a Killer's Colt" and "Satan's Gun-Ghost" are also good titles.
WESTERN ADVENTURES was Street & Smith's third-string Western pulp after WESTERN STORY and WILD WEST WEEKLY, but it had plenty of good authors and stories in it. This issue features yarns from Brad Buckner (really Ed Earl Repp) and Rolland C. Lynch (rumored to have ghosted for Ed Earl Repp), plus William R. Cox, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, Jim Kjelgaard, M. Howard Lane, and Kenneth L. Sinclair, none of whom have anything to do with Ed Earl Repp, as far as I know.
