Once again, an Old West poker game is about to end badly. This is from the usually forgotten Popular Publications incarnation of WESTERN STORY, after it was cancelled at Street & Smith four years earlier. The magazine lasted only about a year and a half at Popular, but its lack of success didn't have anything to do with its quality, in my opinion. It generally had good covers, such as this one by Charles Dye, and excellent authors. This issue contains stories by Will Cook (twice, as himself and as Frank Peace), George C. Appell, William Heuman (a reprint from FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES), Fred Grove, Leslie Ernenwein, Bruce Cassiday, lesser-known pulpster Frank Scott York, and Richard H. Nelson, who was really William L. Hamling, science fiction fan, editor, and publisher of the SF digests IMAGINATION AND IMAGINATIVE TALES, as well as the publisher of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of soft-core novels in the late Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies.
Another great Norman Saunders cover graces this issue of F.B.I. DETECTIVE STORIES, a very late G-Man pulp. Inside are stories by some well-known authors: John D. MacDonald, Bruce Cassiday, Paul W. Fairman, Roe Richmond, Hank Searls, and Tedd Thomey. Richmond was best known for Westerns, of course. I don't think I've read anything by him in any other genre. Hank Searls was a bestseller for a while with mainstream novels like THE CROWDED SKY and THE PILGRIM PROJECT. Tedd Thomey wrote some celebrity biographies as well as a few hardboiled crime novels for Gold Medal, Signet, and Ace. I think it's safe to say Paul Fairman is best known for editing and writing science fiction, but probably his most successful novels in terms of sales were the historical romances he wrote late in life as Paula Fairman. (He died after doing a couple of these, but the pseudonym lived on in a bunch of books ghostwritten by a friend of mine.) Cassidy wrote for the mystery digests and did some paperbacks. Then there's John D. MacDonald, and I think we all know what he went on to do after the pulp market dried up. That's a pretty impressive line-up all the way around.
