Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Giant Western, June 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. I don’t know who did the cover, but I’m not fond of it. It seems too drab and murky to me. But in this case, since the stories inside looked promising, I didn’t really care that much about the cover. It was just good to get a chance to read a Western pulp again after being away from them for a while.

I’m a long-time fan of William Hopson, although I’ve always found his work inconsistent. He wrote some great books, some not very good ones, and a lot in between that were still entertaining. The lead novel in this issue of GIANT WESTERN is one of those rare cases where a pulp novel actually is novel-length. And in fact, “Cow Thief Empire” was published as a hardback novel by Arcadia House, also in 1953. It might have been expanded some for book publication, but my hunch is that it wasn’t, at least not in any significant way. The pulp version is long enough to have been an Arcadia House Western.

But what is it about, you ask? Stony Burns, a rancher who has a spread in Indian Territory on land leased from the Indians, rides down into the Texas Panhandle to the ranch where his late father worked. When he got word of his father’s death, Stony decided to visit the ranch and put up a gravestone. But when he gets there, he immediately clashes with the beautiful young woman who inherited the ranch and winds up making an enemy out of the ranch manager, as well. The stove-up old cowboy who serves as the ranch cook has a beautiful daughter, too, and before you know it, we have a tension-filled romantic rectangle that results in several brutal fistfights.

This is far from being a Western romance, though. Before you know it, a Comanche war party jumps the reservation and follows the buffalo south through the Panhandle, and “Cow Thief Empire” turns into an Indian fighting yarn, with Stony Burns and the young woman who owns the ranch holed up in an isolated line shack, trying to survive a blizzard and an attack by that war party. Up until then, Stony has hated the girl, but now he sees her in a new light.

But wait, the cook’s daughter is captured by the Comanches, and Stony has go after her, joining up with a cavalry patrol to do so, and “Cow Thief Empire” becomes a cavalry vs. the Indians story. If that’s not enough, an army of rustlers descends on the Panhandle after the Indian threat is dealt with, and those rustlers are led by an old enemy of Stony’s, which makes “Cow Thief Empire” (finally, the title fits) a Save the Ranch tale, with some Texas Ranger action thrown in to sweeten the pot.

Whew! You get the idea. “Cow Thief Empire” has the same sort of epic sweep and kitchen sink plotting as TO TAME A LAND, my favorite Louis L’Amour novel. L’Amour was a better writer overall than Hopson, and Hopson’s Texas geography is a little shaky at times, but although I wasn’t sure at first, I wound up really enjoying “Cow Thief Empire”. I love big, sprawling Westerns like this, and Hopson keeps things moving along briskly. The characters are interesting, and they actually evolve over the course of the story. The protagonist, Stony Burns, is pretty unlikable at the start. In fact, he’s downright rotten, but he grows into a sympathetic hero. This isn’t the best novel I’ve read by William Hopson, but it’s right up there. (My two favorites by him, for what it’s worth, are THE RANGE CAT and GUNFIGHTER’S PAY, and I go back and forth on which one is better.)

Thomas Calvert McClary published hundreds of Western, detective, and adventure stories in the pulps and digests in a long career that lasted from the early Thirties to the mid-Sixties. His story in this issue, “Frontier Post”, published under the name T.C. McClary, is a cavalry yarn, as you might guess from the title. The captain in command of the post has to deal not only with a horde of Blackfeet on the warpath but also an overbearing Senator on an inspection tour of the West. It’s not a bad story, but the writing isn’t very good and I struggled a little to get through it. I haven’t read a lot by McClary, but I think this is the weakest story of his I’ve encountered.

I don’t know much about Marc Miller. “A Bride Comes to Dry Gulch” was his first published story, and he went on to do about a dozen more Western and detective stories for various pulps. This is a mail order bride story, as you can guess from the title, and it’s told in the sort of folksy, humorous, first-person narration that often doesn’t work for me. I actually liked this story better than I expected to, but it’s not really that funny and it comes to a very abrupt ending, as if it’s just the first part of what should have been a longer story.

G. Davisson Lough is one of the pseudonyms of Glenn Dale Lough, a West Virginia writer whose career started in the Western and detective pulps in the mid-Forties, but who is best remembered today as the author of dozens of softcore novels, most of them for lower-rung publishers, under the names Glenn Low and John Furlough. I’ve read several of his novels and enjoyed them. I think “The Damned Die Old”, his novelette in this issue, is the first Western by him that I’ve read. It has an unlikely protagonist, a cowardly misfit who takes on the job of delivering the ex-wife of an outlaw who escaped from prison to a ghost town where the fugitive plans to take his revenge on her. Or does he? There’s also a fortune in hidden loot in play, as well as numerous other hardcases who want to get their hands on it. Lough drops the reader down right in the middle of this complicated plot. He tends to play up basic emotions in his work, so there’s plenty of lust, greed, and brutality in this one, but some admirable traits emerge from the characters as well, even the unlikely ones. The writing is gritty and raw and works very well. This is a terrific story that I thoroughly enjoyed. Lough’s fiction has a distinctive voice, and I really need to read more of it.

I don’t know anything about Fred Delano except that he published a few stories in various Western pulps in the mid-Fifties. “The Glass Ball” in this issue is about a down-on-his-luck rancher who decides to go after the reward on a bank robber because some clever deduction has clued him in on the thief’s identity. It’s an okay story, not at all surprising in its resolution but decently written.

Caddo Cameron, whose real name was Charles Richard Beeler, was a prolific contributor to the Western and general fiction pulps from the mid-Thirties to the early Fifties. His novelette “A Devil on the Cattle Trail” in this issue is his last published story. It’s about a trail drive and a young wrangler who gets a reputation as a hoodoo, or jinx. The actual protagonist is one of the cowboys who sticks up for the youngster. I don’t know anything about Beeler’s background, but I’ve read several of his stories and the air of authenticity about them always strikes me. I suspect that like Walt Coburn, J.E. Grinstead, Chuck Martin, Eugene Cunningham, and others, he worked as a cowboy at some point in his life. This story lacks a dramatic resolution, but it’s a very likable yarn despite that. 

With so much of this issue being taken up by Hopson’s novel, the overall quality sort of has to rise and fall with it, and it’s a good one so I’d say this is a pretty good issue of GIANT WESTERN. The story by Glenn Lough is also excellent and the others are all right, with McClary’s cavalry yarn being the weakest. If you have a copy on your shelves, it’s worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, May 25, 1942

I don’t have this issue of SHORT STORIES, and I’m not particularly fond of that Pete Kuhlhoff cover, but Wildside Press just reprinted the lead novella, “Master of Dragons” by E. Hoffmann Price in paperback and e-book editions, and since I just read it, I want to write about it.

Price is a long-time favorite of mine. Some of his stories are better than others, of course, but it seems like he always brought a solid effort to everything he wrote, no matter what the genre or market. Many years ago I got my hands on a copy of FAR LANDS, OTHER DAYS, a massive collection of his adventure stories from various pulps, and I absolutely loved it. I own a copy of that volume now, and I ought to reread it one of these days.

In the meantime, “Master of Dragons” is a World War II espionage yarn. Naval intelligence agent Gil Jordan undergoes plastic surgery to make him look like a shady Australian who may be working as a spy for the Japanese in the Dutch East Indies in the days shortly before Pearl Harbor. When the man is murdered, Jordan takes his place and finds himself up to his neck in a dangerous investigation involving a Japanese society of assassins, a beautiful and mysterious blonde who can’t be trusted, hidden airfields, and a date with a firing squad. Price keeps things moving along briskly, and although there are definitely some pulpish elements, this reads a little more like a serious espionage story of the type that would become more prevalent in the Fifties and Sixties.

I have a strong hunch that it was written a short time before Pearl Harbor, when people suspected the Japanese were about to do something but weren’t sure what, and then the ending was revised before the story was published in May 1942. But like I said, that’s just a hunch. Either way, it’s a good story and I enjoyed it.

Elsewhere in this issue, there’s a really strong line-up of authors, including H. Bedford-Jones, Day Keene, William MacLeod Raine, Caddo Cameron, Robert R. Mill, S. Omar Barker, H.S.M. Kemp, and Phil Richards. SHORT STORIES was a consistently top-notch adventure pulp and this appears to be an above-average issue.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, October 1951

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover is by Sam Cherry, who did nearly all of them for TEXAS RANGERS during this era.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue, “Riders of the Storm”, is attributed to Tom Curry in the Fictionmags Index, the final Curry novel in the series. However, having read it, there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that it’s actually by A. Leslie Scott. It’s Scott’s work, through and through. I was tipped off to this by my friend Anders Nilsson, who told me that the story was rewritten into a Walt Slade paperback called TRIGGER TALK that was published by Pyramid Books five years later under the Bradford Scott pseudonym.

I was baffled as to how a Hatfield novel by Tom Curry wound up being rewritten into a Walt Slade paperback, so I went to my shelves to see if I had a copy of the pulp version. Sure enough, I did, so I pulled it down and read it. I knew within a few pages that Scott was the actual author, not Curry, which explained why he felt free to cannibalize it for that paperback.

The story itself is an excellent entry in the Hatfield series. It opens with Hatfield and a fellow Ranger discovering a ship perched atop a bluff about twenty miles inland from Galveston. Hatfield theorizes that it was carried there by a tidal wave generated by a gigantic hurricane. That seems pretty far-fetched, but hey, it’s a pulp yarn so as I always say, sure, why not. Unfortunately for the new recruit riding with Hatfield, a gang of outlaws are unloading something from the ship and open fire on the two Rangers. The new fellow is killed, and Hatfield is wounded and knocked unconscious. When he comes to and finds his friend dead, he sets out on the owlhoots’ trail, which leads him to Galveston, which has indeed suffered tremendous damage from a hurricane. (The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900? It’s possible. The Hatfield novels weren’t very consistent with their time period, taking place anywhere from the mid-1870s to the late 1890s, depending on the author.)

The plot involves smuggling guns to Mexican revolutionaries and takes Hatfield from Galveston to the Big Thicket in East Texas and finally to Brownsville, down at the tip of Texas on the Rio Grande. It’s a little unusual in that it involves several action scenes on ships. Scott seems to have been trying to break away from his usual formula in the early Fifties, but it didn’t do him any good. His final Walt Slade novella in THRILLING WESTERN appeared earlier in 1951, and the next Hatfield novel in TEXAS RANGERS after this one, “Trail of Hunted Men”, was Scott’s last. But as I’ve mentioned before, he moved right on to paperbacks and probably made more money in the long run. “Riders of the Storm” is a very good story and I’m glad I was prompted to read it. There are also some good interior illustrations by H.L. Parkhurst in this novel.

Next up in this issue is Ralph Yergen’s short story “Vengeance on the Hoof”. It’s written mostly from the point of a view of a horse, a technique I don’t usually care for, and it’s a little hard to read because there’s quite a bit of animal abuse in it. However, Yergen won me over with this story about an outlaw’s horse, and it comes to a satisfying conclusion. Definitely better than I expected it to be.

“The Horsehair Noose” by Leslie Ernenwein is a reprint from the November 1945 issue of THE RIO KID WESTERN. It’s something of a rarity for a Western pulp because it’s a dying message mystery story. In order to prevent a range war, a sheriff has to figure out who murdered a local cattleman, based on a name scrawled in the dirt by the dying man and a few other clues. It’s not a particularly good dying message story, mind you, but I like Ernenwein’s style and I enjoyed this yarn.

“Buffalo Men” is by another veteran, dependable pulpster, J. Allan Dunn. It's a novelette reprinted from the September 1940 issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES. Set in the buffalo hunting era, it’s about the founding of Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle and the epic battle there between a few dozen buffalo hunters and a force of a thousand Indians led by the legendary Comanche chief Quanah Parker. In the first half of the story, Dunn sticks pretty close to the historical facts other than inventing a couple of fictional protagonists to be on hand for the battle, along with a renegade hunter to serve as a minor villain. He even has Bat Masterson on hand, which he was in one of his early exploits. In the battle itself, Dunn strays pretty far from history, having one of his fictional characters make the famous long-distance shot that was actually made by Billy Dixon, and changing the outcome of that shot, as well. Despite that, it’s a very well-written story and captures the feeling of the time and place quite well.

The short story “Payoff in Lead” is another reprint, this time from the October 1946 issue of THE RIO KID WESTERN. The author is Joseph Chadwick, one of the most dependable authors of hardboiled Western tales, and it’s a good one. An embittered ex-Confederate heads west on the trail of the carpetbagger who stole his land and his fiancée after the war. The protagonist finds the man he’s looking for, but things turn out much differently than he expected. A gritty, very satisfying story.

This issue wraps up with a new short story, “A Man’s Job” by Caddo Cameron, whose real name was Charles Richard Beeler. It’s about a young cowboy holding down a line camp by himself for the first time and his encounter with some outlaws. Another good one, with some nice action and a very likable protagonist.

Overall, this is a very solid issue of TEXAS RANGERS with stories ranging from good to excellent and not a really weak one in the bunch. I’m glad the question of who actually wrote the Hatfield novel caused me to pull it off the shelves and read it.