Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Golden West Magazine, February 1937

That's a pretty graphic clinch for a Western romance pulp cover. It was painted by Harry Fisk, who did several dozen pulp covers and interior illustrations. I wasn't familiar with his name or work, but he seems to have been a decent artist. This incarnation of GOLDEN WEST MAGAZINE didn't last very long, only half a dozen issues in 1936 and '37. There's a later GOLDEN WEST ROMANCES from the Thrilling Group, but it also ran for only six issues in 1949 and '50. But to get back to this one, there are only four stories in it, three of them by fairly well-known Western authors: Charles M. Martin, W.D. Hoffman, and Kenneth Sinclair. The fourth story is by Lulita Crawford Pritchett, who published quite a few stories in RANCH ROMANCES among other Western romance pulps. I don't recall ever hearing of her, though. I was curious enough to do a little investigating and found that there's a website devoted to her and her work. Pretty interesting stuff, too. You never know what you're going to find when you start looking into the backgrounds of some of these pulp authors.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, March 12, 1938

I don’t own this pulp, but thanks to the kindness of my friend Cullen Gallagher, I was able to read a PDF of its lead novelette, “Feud of the Haunted Corral”, featuring T.W. Ford’s best-known series character Solo Strant, also known as the Silver Kid. The cover on this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY is by H.W. Scott, and it’s an excellent illustration of the Silver Kid in action.

Solo Strant is a drifting gunfighter. He doesn’t hire out his gun, but he’s quick to pitch in when he sees someone being taken advantage of or an innocent person being threatened. As this yarn opens, that’s what happens when a gang of gun-wolves attacks a small ranch. Solo rides to the rescue, but as it turns out, he may not have done the right thing after all, since it looks like the rancher he rescued may be a murderer!

That’s the first mistake Solo makes in this story, but it’s not the last one. In fact, he seems uncharacteristically prone to making the wrong decisions. But that may have something to do with the extremely complicated plot Ford comes up with, which deals with a generations-long feud between two ranching families, assorted murders, mistaken identities, and the Haunted Corral, which is not a corral at all but rather an area of badlands where folks go in, but they seldom come out alive. The whole “shadow of the past” element in this novelette reminds me of many of Walt Coburn’s novels and stories.

“Feud of the Haunted Corral” is a fast-moving, entertaining story. Solo Strant is a likable protagonist, and I’ve enjoyed every story I’ve read about him. It’s pretty easy to spot the evil mastermind in this one, but that doesn’t take away from the pleasure of reading it. My thanks to Cullen for making that possible.

Elsewhere in this issue are stories by a number of WILD WEST WEEKLY stalwarts. Norman W. Hay, writing under the house-name William A. Todd, contributes a Risky McKee yarn. (All the Risky McKee stories are by Hay, and while William A. Todd is considered a house-name, it’s possible Hay wrote everything under that by-line. We’ll probably never know for sure.) There’s a Calamity Boggs story by Lee Bond. Guy L. Maynard pitches in with a Reckless Blaine story. (There are six Reckless Blaine stories, published in six consecutive issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY. I’d be surprised if Maynard didn’t cobble them together into a fix-up novel, but if he did, I can’t find any record of it.) J. Allan Dunn, Charles M. Martin, and Carl Raht contribute stand-alone stories. This appears to be a very good issue of one of my favorite Western pulps.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, February 1937

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. Although there’s no cover credit on the TOC page and it’s unattributed on the Fictionmags Index, I suspect it’s the work of Arthur Mitchell. It looks like one of his paintings, and he did a lot of covers for ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE during this period.

The lead novella, “Gun Smoke on the Pecos”, is the third and final story in the Roaming Reynolds series by Charles M. Martin. I haven’t read the first one, but I read the second one a while back and liked it fairly well. In this story, Roaming Reynolds and Texas Joe, a pair of drifting cowboys/gunfighters/adventurers, return to their home country in West Texas and immediately find themselves mixed up in a range war. The plot is very much by-the-numbers, right down to the rancher the boys are working for having a beautiful daughter, and Martin’s heavy-handed pulp cowboy lingo and narrative style wear thin pretty quickly. If I’m being honest, and I try to be here, this is a rather mediocre story. And yet . . . the numerous action scenes work really well, the setting rings true, and Martin does a good job of playing up the epic, mythological clashes between Roaming Reynolds and the evil gunfighter on the other side. When they face off at the end, I could hear Ennio Morricone music welling up inside my head. So this novella has that going for it, anyway, and ultimately, that was enough for me, but you might feel differently.

Harry F. Olmsted is one of my favorite Western pulp authors. His story “Headboard Tally” in this issue packs quite a bit of plot in a few thousand words. It’s a revenge yarn, as a cowboy tries to track down the four men responsible for lynching his brother, but as it opens, he’s already killed three of the four and doesn’t know the identity of the final man. He finds out in what turns out to be a pretty far-fetched coincidence, but Olmsted writes well enough I’ll cut him that much slack. For a story that’s mostly bleak and dark, this one turns out to have a heartwarming element to it, as well. It worked for me, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

James P. Olsen, who also wrote a lot for the pulps as James A. Lawson, was a consistently good author, with many stories that tend toward over-the-top action. For that reason, “Malachi Murphy—Cowboy” is something of an oddity among Olsen’s work in that it’s a quiet little slice-of-life story about an old cowboy spending the winter at an isolated high country line camp. Not much happens, but it’s well-written and the title character is an interesting one.

I’ve read quite a few stories over the years by Hapsburg Liebe, real name Charles Haven Liebe. While his work is usually enjoyable, I’ve never considered myself a fan of his stories. “Bullet” is about a teenage boy whose father is an outlaw. When Bullet’s pa and another owlhoot rob a bank and are caught, it’s up to Bullet to save them from being lynched. This is a well-written, cleverly plotted story, one of the best from Liebe that I’ve read.

Darrell Jordan is best remembered for almost a hundred stories he wrote for the aviation and air war pulps, but he also turned out a few detective and Western yarns, including the novelette “Range War Nemesis” in this issue. The protagonist, young cowboy Brad Bannon, wants to repay the man who grubstaked his father twenty years earlier, but that effort lands Brad in the middle of a range war, and the fact that he’s a dead ringer for a notorious gunman complicates the issue. This isn’t a bad story and there are some nice action scenes, but the plot is pretty muddled and hard to keep up with. I don’t recall ever reading anything by Jordan before. I ought to try one of his aviation stories.

Sam H. Nickels wrote the long-running Hungry and Rusty series in WILD WEST WEEKLY as well as a lot of stand-alone stories under his own name and various house-names. His stories appeared outside of the pages of WILD WEST WEEKLY from time to time, too, as in this issue with “When the Sheriff Lied”. This is a pretty good action yarn with a protagonist who pretends to be an outlaw and winds up saving a lawman’s life. The reason behind the deception isn’t very surprising, but the story works effectively.

Ralph Condon was a life-long newspaperman who wrote several dozen stories for various Western pulps in the Thirties and Forties. “Red Trail” is about a cowboy and his grizzled old sidekick trying to track down a herd of stolen horses. It’s almost all action and fairly well-written, nothing special but entertaining enough.

There’s also a story by S. Omar Barker in his Boosty Peckleberry series, and that’s another one I don’t read. Just not a fan of humorous tall tales, I guess.

Overall, this is probably the weakest issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE I’ve read, with most of the stories falling into the readable but unmemorable range. The ones by Olmsted and Olsen are the best, but I wouldn’t put either in the top rank of those authors’ work. I believe I’ve now read all the issues of ALL WESTERN that I own and I probably won’t seek out any more.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, August 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with a cover by Arthur Mitchell, an almost forgotten but consistently pretty good artist who did most of the covers for ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE. This was Dell’s flagship Western pulp (maybe its only Western pulp, I don’t really know), and although I haven’t read many issues, they’ve all been good so far.

This issue leads off with the novella “Deuce of Diamonds”, the second in a short-lived series by Charles M. Martin about a drifting cowboy and troubleshooter known as Roaming Reynolds. There are three stories in the series. I don’t have the first one, but I do have the third one in addition to this one and will be getting to it soon, I expect. In this one, Reynolds and his sidekick, a 16-year-old cowpoke called Texas Joe, drift their way into a range war when they interrupt a setup by two hardcases intended to result in the death of a rancher’s son. This leads to a bunch of action in the next twenty-four-hour span, including ambushes, fistfights, the discovery of a rustled herd, and a stampede.

Martin, who also wrote a lot for the pulps as Chuck Martin, has a distinctive style that I enjoy, although he does get pretty heavy-handed with the “Yuh mangy polecat” dialect. And his plots are very traditional, nothing that Western pulp readers haven’t encountered many times before. But he spins his yarns with such enthusiasm that I can’t help but enjoy them. Martin was a colorful character who supposedly made little grave markers for the villains he killed off in his stories and planted them in his backyard. I like his work, but reading it is always a slightly bittersweet experience for me because, like Walt Coburn, he eventually committed suicide. Making a living in the pulps definitely took a toll on some writers.

Sam H. Nickels was another Western pulp author who turned out hundreds of stories, many of them in a long-running series in WILD WEST WEEKLY about a couple of cowboys nicknamed Hungry and Rusty. He also wrote many stand-alone stories under the house-names common in that pulp. Now and then he published a story under his own name in a different pulp, such as “Mud in Mooney’s Eye” in this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE. The protagonist is known as Mournful Mooney because of his sad disposition, which is caused by his habit of running afoul of the law. Mooney, despite not looking like much, is hell on wheels when it comes to shooting and fighting. He seems like he ought to be a series character, too, but as far as I know, this is his only appearance. In it, he’s hired as a lawman to tame a wild town. The results are entertaining, if not particularly memorable. Nickels was a decent writer.

Harry F. Olmsted is one of my favorite Western pulp writers. He’s almost completely forgotten because he never wrote any novels, but he turned out more than 1200 pieces of shorter fiction. His story in this issue, “Empty Shells”, is about a sinister gunfighter who turns up in a frontier town looking for the son of a local rancher who has just taken over the spread after his father passed away. Clearly, the gunman is there to settle a score with the young man, who was something of a shady character himself, running with outlaws, before coming home and trying to settle down. Of course, Olmsted is too good a writer not to put a twist on what seems apparent. The prose is spare and clean, the dialogue isn’t overloaded with dialect (although there is a little), and the suspense builds steadily throughout this one. “Empty Shells” is an excellent story and a good example of why I enjoy Olmsted’s work so much.

Carson Mowre is better remembered as a pulp editor rather than a writer, but he turned his hand to fiction, too, now and then, and published several dozen stories, most of them Westerns. He contributes a novelette, “One Night in Ten Sleep”, to this issue. As the title indicates, all the action takes place in one night in the frontier settlement of Ten Sleep, where a stranger called Tennessee Parker rides into town and finds himself in the middle of a war between a crooked judge on one side and a crooked sheriff and deputy on the other. Parker plays the two sides against each other (I was reminded a little of Hammett’s RED HARVEST) because he has an agenda of his own that doesn’t become clear until the end of the story. This one features some of the most brutal and graphic violence I’ve encountered in a Western pulp yarn. It has interesting characters, the pace is swift and never really lets up, and I really enjoyed it. I’ll have to keep an eye out for more of Mowre’s fiction.

I normally don’t read the non-fiction features in Western pulps, but one in this issue caught my attention. It’s “The Blond Cossack” by Ed Earl Repp, whose work I usually enjoy. This is an interesting article about an outlaw known as Russian Bill, who was part of the Cowboy faction in Tombstone along with the Clantons and Johnny Ringo. Russian Bill claimed to be the son of a princess and told people he was forced to flee from Russia for political reasons after being a Cossack there. Whether there was any truth to that story remains unknown, but Repp’s recounting of it is vivid and interesting. Repp was known to use ghostwriters and the prose in this is a little toned down from his fiction, so another writer may have had a hand in it, but the Cossack parts of it read like Repp’s work to me.

I love S. Omar Barker’s cowboy poetry and the non-fiction columns he wrote for RANCH ROMANCES and TEXAS RANGERS, but his fiction usually isn’t to my taste. For ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, he wrote a series of humorous stories about a yarn-spinning old cowboy named Boosty Peckleberry. In this issue’s “All Ears”, Boosty is telling his bunkhouse mates about an alcoholic mule named Napolean. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t make it all the way through this one. This sort of stuff just doesn’t resonate with me, but I’m sure plenty of readers found it funny and charming because Barker was very popular for a long time.

Like Charles M. Martin, J.E. Grinstead was an actual cowboy at one time in his life, and his stories have a ring of authenticity. “Six-Gun Music” begins with a violent encounter in a saloon between a down-on-his-luck stranger and a local gunman/bully, and that leads to rustling and ambushes. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read by Grinstead in the past, and this is one of his best stories.

Galen C. Colin is another very prolific pulpster who’s mostly forgotten today. His story “Death Takes the Trail” is actually a dying message mystery, although not a very complicated or clever one. It leads to a good action scene, though. While I’ve read better by Colin, this is an okay yarn.

Overall, this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE is a solidly entertaining Western pulp. The stories by Olmsted, Mowre, and Grinstead are the best, and the others are all enjoyable with the exception of the S. Omar Barker tall tale, and other readers might like that a lot better than I did. I have several more issues of ALL WESTERN on hand and will be getting to them soon, I hope.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, July 18, 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The excellent cover by R.G. Harris illustrates a scene from the lead novelette by Walker A. Tompkins, “Tommy Rockford’s Coffin Clew”.

In this installment of Tompkins’ long-running series about the young railroad detective who carries a pair of gold-plated handcuffs, Rockford arrives in an isolated Arizona settlement on a stormy night in pursuit of a notorious train robber. However, when he gets there he discovers that his quarry has already been brought to justice, drilled in a gunfight with the local sheriff. Then the sheriff himself turns up dead, and Tommy has to solve his murder. This is one of those stories where the big plot twist is pretty obvious, but that doesn’t stop Tompkins from spinning it into a very entertaining yarn with his usual skill. I was a little disappointed in the last Tommy Rockford story I read, but not this one. It’s well-written, atmospheric, and suspenseful. Also, I didn’t figure out the “coffin clew” of the title, so that’s one final surprise Tompkins saves for the story’s last paragraph. Fine work in this one.

Hal Davenport wrote a lot of stories under the various WILD WEST WEEKLY house-names, including more than 20 novelettes in the Billy West and Circle J series as Cleve Endicott. His story in this issue, “Six-guns Say No”, is a stand-alone published under his own name. It’s a range war yarn as a young rancher fights to defend the waterhole on which his spread depends from a bunch of no-good crooks trying to steal it. This story is almost all action, and while there’s nothing in it we haven’t seen many, many times before, Davenport does a good job of storytelling and comes up with an entertaining tale.

Samuel H. Nickels also wrote prolifically under house-names for WILD WEST WEEKLY, but under his own name he authored almost 140 short stories about a pair of young Texas Rangers named “Hungry” Hawkins and “Rusty” Bolivar. In this issue’s Hungry and Rusty yarn, “Rangers’ Rescue”, our intrepid pair set out to find a rancher’s son who’s been kidnapped by outlaws. This is another tale that’s almost all action. This is the first Hungry and Rusty story I’ve read. I enjoyed it and found them a very likable pair of protagonists. Definitely wouldn’t mind reading more of these.

Guy L. Maynard was another regular house-name scribe but also wrote several popular series under his own name, the longest-running of which featured a character called Señor Red Mask. He wrote a dozen stories featuring a redheaded cowboy, trail driver, and adventurer known as Flame Burns. Some legendary historical Old West characters appeared in these as well, much like the Rio Kid series. In this issue’s novelette, “Death Riders of Dodge”, Flame is in Dodge City, having just delivered a herd of cattle he brought up the trail from Texas. He’s set upon by outlaws and robbed of the payoff for that herd, and the rest of the story concerns his efforts to get the money back and avenge the death of a friend in a shootout. He gets some help in this from none other than Calamity Jane, who bears only a passing resemblance to the historical Calamity Jane. There’s one mention of her nursing the sick during an epidemic, and other than that she’s strictly the fictional version that’s shown up in so many movies, TV shows, and novels. This is the first thing I’ve read by Maynard, as far as I know, and when I read it, I wasn’t very impressed by it. It seemed a little too simple and juvenile. It’s sticking with me more than I expected, though. I’ll have to read more by Maynard to form a worthwhile opinion of his work.

“King of Colts” is by Charles M. Martin, who sometimes wrote as Chuck Martin. It’s a vengeance yarn, as a young rancher sets out after the three outlaws responsible for the death of the grandfather who raised him. That’s all there is to it, but Martin writes in a terse style that I enjoy, and since he was an actual cowboy, like Walt Coburn, his work has a strong sense of authenticity. Also like Coburn, Martin wound up taking his own life by hanging, which is a shame. He was a pretty darned good writer.

There are some assorted features and one other piece of fiction in this issue, the novelette “Whizz Fargo Springs a Murder Trap” by George C. Henderson. This is one of six linked novelettes about Whizz Fargo that were fixed up into the novel WHIZZ FARGO, GUNFIGHTER. I happen to own a copy of that novel, so I skipped the story in this issue, preferring to read it in the novel version. Which I’ll get around to soon, I hope. I’ve read some stories by Henderson in the past and enjoyed them, as far as I recall.

Overall, this is a good but not great issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. Tompkins’ Tommy Rockford story is definitely the highlight. The other stories are all perfectly readable and entertaining, but they didn’t really make a strong impression on me. Having said that, I’m glad I read it and believe it’s worth your time if you happen to own a copy of it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Quick Trigger Western Novels Magazine, March 1937

This issue of QUICK TRIGGER WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE sports an evocative cover by H.W. Scott and contains only two stories, a novella by Charles M. "Chuck" Martin that's long enough it probably ought to be considered an actual novel, as the magazine's title suggests, and a short story by James P. Olsen, as well as a poem by Raymond S. Spears. All three of those authors were top-notch pulpsters, so I'm sure this is a fine issue and I wouldn't hesitate to read it if I owned a copy. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, December 1936

The Gun-Totin' Redhead, a fixture on the covers of Western pulps from Popular Publications, even shows up on Dell's ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, as in this cover by Arthur Mitchell. She doesn't appear particularly angry in this one, more like annoyed, but she's still ready to burn some powder and throw some lead. It's a safe bet that plenty of powder gets burned inside this issue, with stories by Tom Roan, Charles M. Martin, Hapsburg Liebe, Sam H. Nickels, Galen C. Colin, house-name Clay Starr (who might well have been Martin, too), and lesser known authors Victor Kaufman and Stanley Hofflund.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, October 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That's my copy in the scan. ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, and for that matter, the other pulps published by Dell, are little remembered these days, but I’ve read several issues of ALL WESTERN and found them to be very solid. The cover on this issue was painted by Arthur Mitchell, who did most of the covers for this pulp.

The issue leads off with a novella by Tom Roan, “The Two-Gun Sheriff of Painted Rock”. Roan was most prolific in the Western pulps from Popular Publications, but he appeared in others as well. This yarn begins with a couple of owlhoots bushwhacking a rider who they believe to be the new sheriff on his way to tame the wild town of Painted Rock. Their unfortunate mistake sets in motion a chain of violent events as the new sheriff clashes with the crooked saloon owner who runs the town. It’s a stereotypical plot, but Roan keeps things moving very fast and has a good touch with an action scene. He’s never been one of my favorite Western pulpsters, but he’s dependably entertaining, and so is this novella.

Miles Overholt sounds like a pseudonym, but evidently that was his real name. He had a long, prolific career as a pulpster stretching from 1909 to the early Fifties, writing a variety of genres early on and then concentrating on Westerns. His story in this issue, “Gunsmoke Money”, is the first thing I recall reading by him. The protagonist is a young, drifting cowboy who’s forced to kill an hombre trying to steal his horse. The dying man asks him to deliver some money that’s in his saddlebags, and the cowboy’s promise to do so lands him in the middle of a range hog’s attempt to take over a beautiful young woman’s ranch. Nothing new there, but Overholt spins his yarn in such a breezy, fast-moving fashion, and his protagonist is so likable, that I really enjoyed this story and will be keeping my eyes open for more of his work. As far as I can tell, he never wrote any novels, just short fiction.

I’ve read a number of stories by Hapsburg Liebe over the years. His contribution to this issue is the short story “The Britches Kid”, which finds a prodigal son returning home to help save his father’s ranch from yet another range hog. It’s very different from the Miles Overholt story with a similar plot, and not as well written as Overholt’s story, to be honest, but several interesting, offbeat characters make this one worthwhile.

Charles M. Martin, who also frequently wrote as Chuck Martin, was a very prolific Western pulpster who worked as a real cowboy in his younger years. His work is heavy on pseudo-Western dialect and standard plots, but he wrote good action scenes and kept his yarns moving right along. His story in this issue, “Casa Grande Bullets”, find two Arizona Rangers trying to arrest a couple of bank robbers, and the ensuing shootout results in a vengeance quest that leads across the border into Mexico. It was entertaining enough to keep me reading but pretty forgettable at the same time.

The novelette “Lightning in Levis” is by Harry F. Olmsted, one of my favorite Western pulp authors. Some have claimed that Olmsted farmed out all of his work and never wrote anything on his own, but I don’t believe that. I don’t doubt that he might have gotten some help from other authors from time to time. That’s common among high-producing writers, and although I haven’t counted them, I read somewhere that Olmsted is credited with more than 1200 stories. The voice in the ones I’ve read is pretty consistent. That said, the tone in “Lightning in Levis”, which features a number of colorfully named characters and a convoluted plot, seems a little goofier than the usual Olmsted yarn. So I guess it’s possible somebody else contributed to this one, or maybe Harry was just feeling a little more whimsical than usual when he wrote it. At any rate, it’s an entertaining tale that finds the Wild Bunch (Butch, Sundance, and the rest of the boys) clearing their names after being framed for some robberies and killings they didn’t commit.

Arthur H. Carhart (sometimes billed as Arthur Hawthorne Carhart) is a name I’ve seen on a lot of Western pulps, but I don’t recall ever reading by him until now. “A Streak of Powder” is the story of two rival ranchers trying to capture the same outlaw so they can use the bounty on him against each other. It’s not a bad plot, but the writing is very bland and never hooked me. I finished this one, but it took some effort to do so.

Carson Mowre is another author I haven’t read before. His story “Timber Foot” is about a ferry operated by an ex-outlaw who helps other owlhoots escape from the law, all while waiting to take vengeance on an old enemy. It’s an intriguing idea, and Mowre does a fairly good job with it. The twist ending is pretty predictable but the story overall is enjoyable.

I like S. Omar Barker’s Western poetry and non-fiction, but his humorous short stories don’t appeal to me. “Two Tough Tails”, in this issue, is part of his Boosty Peckleberry series, which involves cowboys with colorful names sitting around the bunkhouse telling shaggy dog stories. I didn’t care for it.

There are some good stories here from Roan, Olmsted, Overholt, and Mowre, but taken as a whole, this is probably the weakest issue of ALL WESTERN I’ve read so far. Still, I’m glad I read it, of course. I’ve never read a Western pulp that didn’t provide some entertaining yarns.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, August 1936

This is a pulp I own and read recently. The scan is from the copy I read. Arthur Mitchell, who was a pretty prolific pulp cover artist, mostly in the Thirties, painted the cover. ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, from what I’ve read of it, was a pretty good Western pulp.

It opens with the novella “Deuce of Diamonds” by Charles M. Martin, who also wrote a great deal for the pulps under the name Chuck Martin. This one features drifting cowpoke and gunman “Roaming” Reynolds, as well as his sidekick, young Texas Joe. There are three stories in this short-lived series, all appearing in ALL WESTERN, and this is the middle one. Reynolds and Texas Joe find themselves helping out a couple of old ranchers (one of whom has a beautiful daughter, of course) who are being plagued by rustlers. Reynolds suspects that local cattle baron Griff Tyson, owner of the Deuce of Diamonds spread, is behind the trouble. Tyson is quite a gunfighter himself and likes to shoot playing cards out of the air, his favorite being the two of diamonds, hence the name.

This story is very heavy on the “yuh mangy polecat” dialect, and there’s nothing in the plot or characters you haven’t seen many, many times in Western pulps, but Martin, like Walt Coburn, was an actual cowboy and the background details of his stories always ring true now matter how standard the plots are. Also, he writes in a very terse, clipped style that I like quite a bit. Martin was something of an eccentric and had a “cemetery” in his back yard where he planted miniature tombstones bearing the names of the villains he killed in his stories. And also like Coburn, he came to a bad end, committing suicide when he had played out his string as a writer. I enjoy his work because of his distinctive style, but I wouldn’t put him in the top rank of Western pulpsters. I never hesitate to read one of this stories, though.

Sam H. Nickels was the author of the Hungry and Rusty series that ran in WILD WEST WEEKLY. I haven’t read any of those, but I suspect, based on the characters’ names, that they’re humorous yarns. The protagonist of Nickels’ story in this issue of ALL WESTERN, “Mud in Mooney’s Eye” is Mournful Mooney, and while it’s not full-fledged slapstick and has some decent action, it’s definitely on the lighter side. Mooney is a sad-sack character who always attracts bullies, but actually he’s a dangerous gunman and a whirlwind with his fists, as he proves in this story when he’s hired to pin on a lawman’s star and clean up the border town of Vacaton. This story is okay, readable but nothing special.

“Empty Shells” by Harry F. Olmsted is definitely a cut above that. This is a tense, well-written yarn that finds a killer known as the Montana Kid searching for a young man who has left the owlhoot trail behind him and returned home to try to reclaim his late father’s ranch. There’s an air of brooding vengeance about this one that shows why Olmsted is one of my favorite Western pulp authors.

I enjoy S. Omar Barker’s cowboy poetry and Western non-fiction, but his short stories usually don’t appeal to me. I’ve mentioned many times that with few exceptions, I’m not a fan of comedy Westerns, and the blurb on the Table of Contents for “All Ears”, Barker’s story in this issue is “A Boosty Peckleberry Laugh Riot”. (I think the editor misspelled “Laff”.) This is one of a series of tall tales spun by the old cowpoke Boosty Peckleberry to entertain the other cowboys in the bunkhouse. It concerns a mule that created the Grand Canyon. I didn’t care for it.

J.E. Grinstead wasn’t a cowboy himself, but he came from pioneer stock and was a newspaperman in Oklahoma and Texas not long after those places were still the frontier. After retiring from newspaper work, he became a prolific Western author, and his fiction has the same air of authenticity as that of Coburn and Martin. His story in this issue, “Six-Gun Music”, is about a tramp who comes stumbling from the desert into the wild border town of San Tomas and finds himself in the middle of some sinister goings-on. It’s a tough, well-written yarn and I really enjoyed it. I think I need to read some of Grinstead’s novels. I read one, WHEN TEXANS RIDE, many years ago but none since, although I’ve read some of his pulp stories.

The final story in the issue is “Death Takes the Trail” by Galen C. Colin, a vengeance tale in which a young cowboy tries to track down the men responsible for killing his foster father. It has some nice action and moves right along, but the plot is pretty thin and seemed to need at least one more twist.

Overall, this is a good but not great issue of ALL WESTERN. The stories by Olmsted and Grinstead are excellent, with the novella by Martin worth reading if not quite up to the level of those other stories. None of the others really impressed me. But still, good enough that I won’t hesitate to read another issue sometime.