Review: The Cowpuncher - Bradford Scott (A. Leslie Scott)

Alexander Leslie Scott is best remembered for his novels starring Texas Rangers Jim Hatfield and Walt Slade, of course, and rightly so. But he wrote quite a few stand-alone Western novels as well, most, if not all, of them rewritten and expanded from novellas he wrote for various Western pulps. His novel THE COWPUNCHER was published under the pseudonym Bradford Scott in hardcover in 1942 by Gateway Books, one of the lending library publishers, then reprinted in paperback by Leisure in 2009 and large print hardcover by Center Point in 2010. It’s still available in e-book and trade paperback editions on Amazon, and used copies of the Leisure paperback are easily found for sale on-line.

The original version of this story was published under the title “Black Diamonds”, as by A. Leslie, in the pulp WEST in the October 1940 issue. The black diamonds of the title refer to coal, which leads to a nice twist because this novel is about coal mining rather than gold or silver, as most Western mining yarns are. The hero, a cowboy named Huck Brannon, goes on a bender in Kansas City after the crew he belongs to delivers a trail herd there, and as a result he misses the train back home to Texas, where a rancher’s beautiful daughter is waiting for him. Circumstances forces him to hop a train to Colorado in the company of a couple of hoboes who become his friends and sidekicks.

Once there, they wind up hunting a lost treasure supposedly hidden by an evil Spanish nobleman a hundred years earlier. What they find is a coal deposit that they’re soon mining, a successful operation that makes good money and leads to a friendship with railroad magnate James G. “Jaggers” Dunn, a supporting character who often makes appearances in Scott’s novels. Of course, there are also villains who have their sights set on ruining Brannon.

THE COWPUNCHER is more epic in scope than most of Scott’s Westerns, with its action spanning a couple of years rather than a few days. It has the same vivid settings and dramatic action scenes, though, including a great one where our hero Huck has to ride a makeshift raft down a raging river in an attempt to stop a runaway train. Scott had a lot of experience with both mining and railroading, and he brought a definite air of authenticity to his stories concerning those endeavors. At times, the technical jargon gets so thick I had trouble keeping up with what was going on, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the story.

This is a really good Western novel, the sort of yarn that would have made a great big-budget, late Forties movie from Republic Pictures. I had a fine time reading it and give it a high recommendation for fans of traditional Westerns centered around mining. By the way, I have the pulp in which the original version, “Black Diamonds”, was published, and other than changing the hero’s name from Chuck Brannon to Huck Brannon and the rancher’s beautiful daughter from Millie Doyle to Sue Doyle, Scott doesn’t appear to have revised it. Either version is well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, March 1951

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The cover art is probably by Sam Cherry, although I’m not a hundred percent convinced of that. It’s a nice cover, no matter who painted it. That’s my copy in the scan.

For more than a decade, the stories about Texas Ranger Walt Slade were one of the regular series in THRILLING WESTERN. A. Leslie Scott, under the pseudonym Bradford Scott, wrote more than 70 yarns about Slade, who was also known as El Halcon (The Hawk) and was reputed to be an outlaw, although he was actually an undercover Texas Ranger. “Trail From Yesterday”, the Slade novelette in this issue, is the final pulp story in the series, although as most if not all of you know, a few years later Scott began a series of paperback original novels featuring the character that ran for even longer.

This is an excellent tale for Slade to go out on, as far as his pulp run. Most of the time, these stories find Slade chasing outlaws in the rangelands of West Texas or the brush country of South Texas. “Trail From Yesterday” begins in Dallas (a far different place in the 1880s from what it is today) and the trail of a famous Texas owlhoot was believed to be dead leads Slade to the treacherous swamplands of East Texas, with its dangers of snakes, gators, and quicksand. The plot involves smuggling, gun-running, and a fortune in black opals. Scott packs almost enough material for a novel into this novelette, and he keeps the pace racing along with his usual vivid descriptions and several terrific shootouts. Slade also has a great sidekick in this one, Little Mose Wagner, a black former cowboy who’s too stove up to ride the range anymore, but he functions as Slade’s guide and assistant during this adventure in the swamp. This is great stuff, one of the best Walt Slade pulp yarns I’ve read. Scott was at the top of his game here.

The name Dabney Otis Collins is familiar to me from many Western pulp TOCs, but I don’t recall if I’ve ever read anything by him until now. His short story in this issue, “The Third Outlaw”, is about a fateful encounter between a lone cowboy and a gang of bank robbers on the run from the law as a blizzard is closing in. It’s a very suspenseful, surprisingly hardboiled tale, and I liked it a lot. I’m going to have to keep my eyes open for more by Collins.

The last time I read a Swap and Whopper story by Syl McDowell, I surprised myself by kind of liking it. The S&W story in this issue, “The Roaming Riders”, is pretty entertaining, too. It’s the usual goofy mix of wild circumstances, this time including a runaway pair of pants with all the duo’s money in it, a housing development in the desert of Southern California (this series is a modern-day Western), and an escaped elephant that’s supposed to be in a jungle movie. McDowell pulls it all together and makes it work fairly well. I got a few smiles out of this one. No outright chuckles that I can remember, but the series is growing on me.

Jim O’Mara was a pseudonym of Vernon Fluharty, who also wrote Westerns under the name Michael Carder. He was never all that prolific but he had a steady career producing well-written Westerns. His short story in this issue, “Collateral”, is a cattlemen vs. sodbusters yarn, written from the point of view of a former cowboy turned farmer. It’s a rather bleak yarn, but it has some nice action and a dark but still somewhat hopeful ending. I liked it quite a bit.

The same can’t be said of “Crop o’ Calamity” by Roger Dee (pseudonym of Roger D. Aycock), an author probably best remembered for his science fiction. This is another humorous Western about a couple of characters named Nosy Nolan and Doc Durgin, and it has something to do with escapees from a wild animal show. I don’t know for sure because it’s written in present tense (a style I don’t care for) and is dialect-heavy, and I just didn’t care for it at all, leading me to give up after a few pages. I may be warming up to Swap and Whopper after all these years, but not this one.

Much, much better is “Who’ll Ride With Me”, from the always dependable Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson. This novelette is a reprint from the August 1947 issue of THE RIO KID WESTERN. It’s a cavalry vs. the Apaches yarn set in Arizona Territory, and as usual when Wheeler-Nicholson is writing about the military, there’s a real ring of authenticity to it. Some great action, although the ending isn’t quite as dramatic as it could have been. This story is also a good example of how the late Jon Tuska was wrong when he claimed that pulp editors wouldn’t allow romances between white and Hispanic characters. There’s a nicely handled romantic angle between the white cavalry lieutenant who’s the protagonist and the beautiful daughter of a Mexican rancher, and it’s written the same as any other romance in a Western pulp.

Harold F. Cruickshank wrote a lot of air war stories early in his pulp career and then became a prolific Western pulpster. I’ve never cared for his Pioneer Folk series that ran in RANGE RIDERS WESTERN. He has a stand-alone short story, “Prodigal Gun Thunder”, in this issue. It’s about a young man framed for being a horse thief who returns home from a stretch in prison to get to the bottom of things and settle the score. It’s a definite improvement over the other Western stories by Cruickshank that I’ve read, but there’s still something about his writing that just doesn’t resonate with me.

Harvey Ivison is a brand-new name to me. He wrote only a few stories for the pulps. His story “Thataway” is about a fugitive from the law who isn’t exactly what he appears to be. On the run from a posse, he shows up at a ranch where there’s a badly injured man, and unexpected things happen. This story is written with a very nice hardboiled tone that includes a few traces of dry humor. I really liked it and will have to be on the lookout for more stories by Harvey Ivison.

This issue concludes with a condensed novel, SCORPION by Will James. Is there a difference between a condensed novel and an abridged novel? I don’t know, but I feel like there should be. In a condensed novel, you take out words here and lines there, right? Whereas in an abridged novel, you take out entire scenes or sections. I have no idea which approach was taken in producing the version of SCORPION printed here. I remember reading James’s horse novel SMOKY when I was a kid, but that’s all I could tell you about it. SCORPION is a horse novel, too, and while I wanted to like it, page after page of horse-breaking narrative with no dialogue or actual plot did me in. I didn’t read this one, either. I just don’t have the time or patience I once did.

So the March 1951 issue of THRILLING WESTERN turns out to be a really mixed bag. The Walt Slade story by Scott is superb. The stories by Collins, O’Mara, Wheeler-Nicholson, and Ivison are all very good to excellent. The Swap and Whopper yarn by McDowell is okay, the Cruickshank story is readable but forgettable, and I didn’t finish the other two. As always, some of you might enjoy the stories I didn’t, so if you have this issue on your shelves, it’s worth taking down and sampling its contents.

Rimrock Raiders - Bradford Scott (A. Leslie Scott)

As I’ve mentioned before, the Walt Slade novels by A. Leslie Scott (writing as Bradford Scott) are comfort reading for me. I know exactly what I’ll get because the plots are almost always the same: Texas Ranger Walt Slade, who sometimes pretends to be an outlaw known as El Halcon, rides into an area bent on breaking up an outlaw gang and discovering the identity of the hidden mastermind behind all the hell-raising that’s caused the locals to ask the Rangers for help. For approximately three-fourths of the book, Slade will break up various plots by the gang and kill off quite a few of the owlhoots, while picking up a few clues as to who the big boss is and what’s behind it all. He may even be captured and escape a time or two. Then, in the final fourth of the novel, things become clearer, Slade closes in on the main villain and his henchmen, reveals the true motive behind the scheme, and wraps things up in a huge blaze of gunfire or, more rarely, a hand-to-hand battle to the death.

RIMROCK RAIDERS, originally published by Pyramid Books in 1957, sticks pretty closely to this formula. Slade is in the Big Bend this time, operating in and around a silver mining boomtown. The mines and the surrounding ranches in the Espantosa Hills are being plagued by a gang known as the Rimrock Raiders. (By the way, according to Scott, there are numerous different ranges of Espantosa Hills and Espantosa Mountains in Texas. It means “Haunted”, and he really loved the name.) Slade befriends a saloonkeeper who has gotten on the wrong side of the outlaws. He lets the townspeople believe he’s an outlaw, too, but the sheriff is an old acquaintance and knows that Slade is really a Ranger. He breaks up bushwhackings, trails rustlers, thwarts a payroll robbery, and explores the countryside, looking for the reason the Rimrock Raiders are really up to no good. When the identity of the evil mastermind is revealed, it won’t come as a surprise to anybody who’s ever read one of these books.

So, if they’re all the same (and they pretty much are, as I realized even when I was buying them new and reading them more than fifty years ago when I was in high school), why read them? I’m glad you asked. Because Scott writes great, breakneck, over-the-top action scenes. Because he writes descriptive passages in sometimes flowery but very effective prose. Because he usually comes up with some oddball twist regarding the bad guys’ method of operation and/or the motivation behind their villainy. All of these things are true in RIMROCK RAIDERS, although the description is a little more toned-down than in some of Scott’s books. The discovery he makes in the Espantosa Hills is a good one, though, and a little on the macabre side. I don’t know if it’s realistically possible, but I don’t care, either.

I never read Walt Slade novels back to back, or even too close together. But taken sparingly, I still enjoy them very much. There’s an ebook version of RIMROCK RAIDERS available, and if you’ve never read any of the series and would like to try one, it’s a pretty good example.

Saturday Afternoon Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, September 1944

More proof, as if we needed it, that sitting down to a "friendly" game of cards was just about the most dangerous thing you could do in the Old West. This is a Sam Cherry cover and quite a dynamic one. As usual in THRILLING WESTERN during the Forties, there's a Walt Slade yarn by Bradford Scott (A. Leslie Scott) and another appearance by Syl MacDowell's Swap and Whopper, plus stories by the great W.C. Tuttle, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Dixon Wells (author/editor Samuel Mines), and a couple of prolific but lesser-known pulpsters, Hal White and John A. Thompson. (Sorry I'm running late today.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, September 1950

This is a pulp I own and read recently. The scan is from my copy. I don’t know who the artist is, but if you check the lower right corner, you’ll see that this is an Injury to a Hat cover. I’ve been reading issues of THRILLING WESTERN for years now and always enjoy them, although there are usually one or two stories in each issue I don’t care for.

This issue leads off (as most issues from 1940 to 1950 did) with a Walt Slade, Texas Ranger story by Bradford Scott, who was really the highly prolific and distinctive A. Leslie Scott. “The Sky Riders” is one of the last stories in the pulp series. There would be only two more after it. But a few years later Scott began writing paperback novels for Pyramid Books featuring the Walt Slade character, mostly originals but some expansions from pulp yarns. That paperback series ran even longer, all the way into the early Seventies. There’s a Walt Slade novel from 1968 called THE SKY RIDERS, and while I haven’t read it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s an expansion of this pulp novella.

This one opens with a very evocation scene involving a killing on a high natural bridge running between two sides of a canyon. Scott always wrote good action scenes and good descriptions of the settings, and both of those elements are on display here. Walt Slade, an undercover Texas Ranger who most folks believe to be the notorious outlaw El Halcon (The Hawk), witnesses that shooting, and his investigation plunges him into the hunt for a gang of owlhoots known as the Sky Riders because they’re usually spotted riding along some rimrock, silhouetted against the sky.

Anybody who’s read more than one or two Walt Slade yarns will know exactly what’s going on in this story and will pick out the hidden mastermind of the outlaws with no trouble. The geography of the region plays a big part in the plot, as it often does in Scott’s stories, and he handles it very well, resulting in some vivid scenes. Sure, the whole thing is formulaic, but I always enjoy Scott’s work anyway. It’s pure comfort reading for me.

I have the opposite reaction to the Swap and Whopper series by Syl MacDowell, which ran even longer than the Walt Slade series, starting in 1939 and continuing until 1952. Slapstick Westerns are a hard sell for me to start with. The Swap and Whopper stories feature a couple of saddle tramps, one tall and skinny, the other short and fat, who always wind up in bizarre situations. Part Mutt and Jeff, part Abbott and Costello, and well written enough by old pro Syl MacDowell, but dang, this series just doesn’t work for me. I’ve started dozens of them and finished only a few. The one in this issue, “The Talking Bear”, is not one that I finished.

Nels Leroy Jorgensen wrote scores of stories during a pulp career that lasted approximately thirty years, from the early Twenties to the early Fifties. He turned out detective, aviation, adventure, and war stories in addition to Westerns. I first became aware of him as a Western writer but later discovered that his work appeared frequently in BLACK MASK during the Twenties and Thirties, most notably with a series about a gambler named Black Burton (a series that wound up in BLACK BOOK DETECTIVE during the Forties). Jorgensen’s novelette in this issue, “Gunstorm on the Wagon Trail”, has a good title and the plot, about a couple of guys who own a freight company trying to get a wagon train full of badly needed supplies (including medicine) through a gauntlet of Mexican bandidos and Apache renegades, is interesting as well. I thought the actual writing was pretty bland, though, with lots of long paragraphs of the protagonist thinking about what’s going on. I finished the story, but it never really caught my interest much.

I’ve never read a story by Johnston McCulley that I didn’t like, and “Agency Injun” continues that streak. It’s a minor yarn about a cavalryman trying to prove that a friendly Indian didn’t commit a murder at an army post, but McCulley tells it well. This one has an illustration by the great Nick Eggenhoffer, too, which certainly doesn’t hurt anything.

I read a story by L. Kenneth Brent in an issue of THRILLING WESTERN last year and enjoyed it. His tale in this issue, “Gunsmoke Freeze-Out”, is even better. It’s a “small rancher vs. cattle baron” story, with the added complication that a rustler the small rancher testified against in court has gotten out of prison and is coming back to try to kill him. It’s a standard plot, but Brent’s writing is good and he creates some genuine suspense along the way. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more of his stories.

Like Nels Leroy Jorgensen, Harold F. Cruickshank had a pulp career that lasted from the Twenties to the Fifties. During that time he wrote several hundred stories, specializing during the first part of his career in war and air war stories before branching out into Westerns and sports yarns. He was a highly regarded air war writer, but I haven’t read any of those stories. In Westerns, he had a long-running back-up series in RANGE RIDERS WESTERNS about the settlers in Sun Bear Valley. I’ve read some of these (also known as the Pioneer Folk series) but never cared much for them. His novelette in this issue, “Branch Line to Hell”, is a stand-alone about a railroad surveyor who’s trying to survey a spur line over the opposition of a ruthless local cattle baron. It’s a good title, but unfortunately that’s the best thing about this story. Cruickshank’s writing just doesn’t appeal to me, and all the technical details of surveying and railroad construction are just confusing, so I wasn’t quite sure what was going on some of the time. I think maybe I’ve read enough of Cruickshank’s work, although I am still curious about his air war stories.

So far this issue of THRILLING WESTERN is batting .500. I’ve liked three of the stories and disliked the other three. But there are four short stories left.

I don’t know anything about Dupree Poe except that I’ve seen his name in various Western pulps. He sold several dozen stories to the Thrilling Group in the late Forties and early Fifties, along with a few to MAMMOTH WESTERN and the Ace Western pulps, WESTERN ACES and WESTERN TRAILS. His story “Hangman’s Tree” in this issue is a little unusual for the era in that the plot revolves around a rancher’s suspicion that his wife is having an affair with an outlaw who’s hiding out on the ranch and pretending to be a cowhand. This sets off a string of events that include a lynching, a visit by another outlaw, and the rancher’s near death in quicksand. (Quicksand, of course, is one of the things that improve any story, and if the greatly missed Bill Crider was still with us, I have a hunch he would agree.) Anyway, there’s also a good dog in this story, and that helps, too. “Hangman’s Tree” is almost too grim, but I wound up thinking that it’s a decent story.

Ben Frank is the pseudonym of Frank Bennett, an author who wrote under his real name for both the pulps and the slicks in the Forties and Fifties. He was more prolific as Ben Frank and is best remembered for a back-up series that appeared in many issues of TEXAS RANGERS featuring a cagey old-timer known as Doc Swap. He also wrote a comical Western about a deputy named Boo-Boo Bounce. As I mentioned above, with a few exceptions (Robert E. Howard and W.C. Tuttle come to mind), I’m not much of a fan of comedy Westerns. I don’t care for the Boo-Boo Bounce stories at all. The Doc Swap yarns are at least readable because they’re usually well-plotted. Frank’s stand-alone story in this issue of THRILLING WESTERN, “One Man Justice” features another old-timer and his attempt to bring to justice the man who tried to murder his son-in-law. This isn’t a comedy; Frank plays it completely straight and gives the tale a nice hardboiled, suspenseful tone, as well as a twist or two. This one took me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting to like it, but I did, quite a bit.

Robert J. Hogan was the author of G-8 AND HIS BATTLE ACES, of course, along with a lot of other air war stories, but he also wrote a considerable number of Westerns. His story in this issue, “Badge for a Bandit”, uses the old plot of an outlaw trying to go straight. In this case, the young man has even become a deputy, but then his old gang shows up intending to rob the bank. I generally enjoy Hogan’s stories, but I never could work up much interest in this one.

The final story is “Heading Into Trouble”, a short, simple yarn about a bank messenger, a stagecoach driver, and a shotgun guard trying to get a stagecoach carrying a lot of money through a gauntlet of outlaws. It’s almost non-stop action, which is good, and the writing is okay. The by-line is the house-name Jackson Cole, which was often used when an author had more than one story in an issue. In this case, though, the style doesn’t strike me as being similar to any of the other authors in this issue. In fact, it reminded me of the work of Charles S. Strong, an editor at the Thrilling Group who wrote Western fiction under the name Chuck Stanley as well as detective and adventure yarns under his own name. That’s just a guess on my part, however. It could have been someone else who wrote “Heading Into Trouble”. Whoever did, I thought it was an okay story.

Overall, I’d say this is a below average issue of THRILLING WESTERN. The two best stories are the Walt Slade novella and Ben Frank’s story, and there are several I don’t think are very good at all. But considering the sheer number of Western pulps published, they can’t all be great. I’m confident that I’ll have better luck the next time I take one off the shelf.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, January 1942

Yesterday in my Forgotten Books post, I talked a little about Leslie Scott's Walt Slade series that ran in THRILLING WESTERN. Here's another issue that featured a Slade novella. Scott later expanded this one into a full-length novel and sold it to one of the lending library publishers. There's also a novelette by the dependable Chuck Martin in this issue, along with an entry in a series I don't care for, Syl MacDowell's Swap and Whopper, plus short stories by some unfamiliar names. I remember reading this issue years ago, or at least the Walt Slade novella and the Chuck Martin story. I may have skipped the others.

Forgotten Books: Killer Country - Jackson Cole (A. Leslie Scott)

We wrap up the Forgotten Books series for another year with an old favorite of mine, an author I've been reading for close to 50 years. In the early Sixties, when I was volunteering in the local public library, I came across some Western paperbacks that looked interesting in a batch of books somebody had donated. They were about a Texas Ranger named Walt Slade, and they were written by an author I'd never heard of, Bradford Scott.

Well, I read them and thought they were great, so I started buying the new Walt Slade paperbacks that came out every month. Of course, I had no idea at the time who Bradford Scott really was or about the history of the Walt Slade character, but I didn't care. I just read the books and enjoyed them.

But over time I also discovered and became a fan of a paperback series about another Texas Ranger, Jim Hatfield, published under the name Jackson Cole. By then I was aware of pulps and eventually learned that the Jim Hatfield novels being published by Popular Library had appeared originally in the pulp magazine TEXAS RANGERS. It struck me that the style varied considerably from book to book, so I figured out that Jackson Cole must not be a real person, but rather several different authors. And one of them wrote an awful lot like Bradford Scott...

Well, it's too late to make a long story short, but let's move along. Bradford Scott, for those of you who don't already know this, was really Alexander Leslie Scott, a prolific pulp author who also wrote under the names A. Leslie and A. Scott Leslie. He even had some poetry published in WEIRD TALES. In 1936 Scott created the Jim Hatfield character in the first issue of TEXAS RANGERS, in a novel called "The Lone Wolf Rides". Several years later, in the pages of THRILLING WESTERN, a pulp published by the same company, he came up with the Walt Slade character and wrote a long series of novellas about him under the name Bradford Scott, while continuing to write some of the Jim Hatfield novels as Jackson Cole. Scott didn't write all the Hatfields, but he and Tom Curry tied for the largest number of entries in the series at 55 novels.

Then in the early Fifties, Scott stopped writing for TEXAS RANGERS and the other pulps, and I don't believe I've ever heard exactly why. But he moved right over into the new paperback market and took the Jim Hatfield character with him, writing a series of novels for Pyramid Books featuring the Hatfield character. Some of these books were rewrites of Hatfield novels from TEXAS RANGERS, and some were new stories.

Ned Pines, the publisher of TEXAS RANGERS, got wind of this and demanded that Scott stop writing Hatfield novels for Pyramid, since he (Pines) was still publishing the character in the pulp and using the Jackson Cole house-name. Scott resurrected the Walt Slade character from THRILLING WESTERN and starting using him instead in the novels from Pyramid Books. Evidently Pines didn't mind about that. (Slade and Hatfield are almost, but not quite, carbon copies of each other.) Again, some of the early Walt Slade novels were rewrites of pulp stories, but for the most part they were originals. The series was very successful, too, running for more than a hundred books and lasting until 1971.

But to get to the real subject of this post (at last!), the novel KILLER COUNTRY is a Jim Hatfield story from the period when Scott was doing them for Pyramid. I don't know if it's a rewrite or an original. Hatfield is sent to the border country in West Texas to find out who's responsible for terrorizing the Mexican villages on both sides of the Rio Grande. Farmers are being crucified on giant cactus plants, staked out on anthills, thrown into snake pits, and other assorted atrocities. Mysterious night riders are striking terror into the area. Rustling and stagecoach robbery are rampant. In other words, plenty of work for a hard-ridin', hard-shootin' Texas Ranger to take care of.

Hatfield does just that, of course, wading through a flurry of ambushes and a myriad of suspects as he tries to uncover the identity of the hidden mastermind who's really behind all the trouble. Scott's plots nearly always follow this formula, but he throws in a few nice twists in this one and I actually wasn't sure who the villain would turn out to be until the end.

Scott is noted for a couple of things: his flowery, long-winded descriptions of the scenery (he was getting paid by the word for his pulp stories, after all) and his over-the-top action scenes. He's in fine form on both scores in KILLER COUNTRY. Actually, his work has had a considerable influence on my own writing as far as the action scenes go, although I don't write the same sort of long descriptive passages at all. KILLER COUNTRY has some nice lines and a breakneck pace, and I really enjoyed reading it. A lot of modern readers probably wouldn't like it because it's silly and unrealistic, but those things don't bother me when I'm in a nostalgic mood.

Leslie Scott was an interesting writer with a tendency for getting the most financial return out of his work. He rewrote some of his Hatfield novels, changing Hatfield's name to Jim Woodward, and sold them to lending library publishers. The early Ace Double BADLANDS MASQUERADER, published under the Leslie Scott name and featuring Walt Slade, is actually a rewritten Hatfield novel from TEXAS RANGERS. In the early Fifties he wrote soft-core erotica for the hardcover publisher Arco Books and later resold the novels as paperbacks to Beacon Books. He also wrote a number of stand-alone Western novels for Arcadia Books that are a notch above most of his paperback originals. His wife Lily was also a pulp writer, and their son Justin Scott is a writer as well and still in the business, having published a number of well-regarded mysteries and currently writing thrillers with Clive Cussler. I just like Leslie Scott's work, although I don't think it would be to everybody's taste. A couple of his Jim Hatfield novels, including KILLER COUNTRY, are currently available as e-books, and used copies of many of his books are easily found on-line.