A Rough Edges Rerun Review: River Queen - Charles N. Heckelmann

If Charles N. Heckelmann is remembered at all today by paperback fans, it’s probably as the founder and editor of Monarch Books or the editor at Popular Library during the Sixties. However, before that he worked as a writer and editor in the Western pulps, most notably those in the so-called Thrilling Group, and he continued writing Western novels from the late Forties throughout the Fifties. He was never very prolific as an author, but his books were well-regarded in their time.

I just read my first Heckelmann novel, RIVER QUEEN, and it’s a good one. That’s the title of the Graphic Books paperback reprint. The novel first appeared in hardback from Henry Holt under the title THE RAWHIDER. RIVER QUEEN is actually the better and more appropriate title. This is a riverboat book, set largely along the Missouri River in Montana Territory, although the first section of the story centers around the battle of Shiloh during the Civil War. Bill Horn is the captain and pilot of the riverboat Western Star. His main rival on the river is Kay Graham, the beautiful female captain of the Queen. Both of their boats wind up being hired by the army to carry troops and supplies up the Missouri River to help deal with the rising threat of the Sioux, who have started raiding the settlements there because the army is stretched so thin due to the war. There’s also a romantic triangle going on, as well as an old enemy of Horn’s who is now a Jayhawker, ostensibly helping the Confederate side while really being out for all the loot he can get his hands on.

Why this novel was never adapted into a movie starring John Wayne, I’ll never know. Bill Horn seems to be a perfect character for the Duke to play, and considering the way Heckelmann describes him, I wonder if he thought the same thing. Barbara Stanwyck would have been great as Kay Graham, and the villain cries out to be played by Forrest Tucker. It’s not really a John Ford or Howard Hawks type of story, but in the hands of a director like Michael Curtiz or Henry Hathaway . . . Well, never mind. There’s no such movie. But it would have been a good one, because Heckelmann has packed a lot into this book: epic battles, romantic intrigue, mano a mano showdowns, and a little reasonably accurate history. The action scenes are really good, and my only real complaint is Heckelmann’s occasional tendency to slow down the story in order to explain the backgrounds of some of the characters. This is especially annoying early on, but once you get past the first chapter or so, the action never flags for very long. I enjoyed this one enough that I definitely plan to read more by Heckelmann.

(It will come as no surprise to any of you that I haven't read anything else by Charles N. Heckelmann since this post first appeared in somewhat different form on November 21, 2008. However, I did start one of his Westerns not long ago, but it also had a slow start, as mentioned above, and I didn't overcome that one. But I definitely intend to try again. I have probably half a dozen or more of his books on my shelves. Also, I found a listing on-line that identifies the artist on the cover of the paperback edition as Harry Barton. I can't guarantee that's correct, but it's the only artist ID I found. Below is the cover of the original hardcover edition published by Henry Holt under the title THE RAWHIDER, with cover art by Ignatz Sahula-Dycke. I still say that RIVER QUEEN is a much better title, and I much prefer the Graphic Giant cover, too.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, June 1945

This is a pulp I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat beat-up copy in the scan, with a rather whimsical cover by the incredibly prolific Sam Cherry.

The lead feature in EXCITING WESTERN for most of its run was the Tombstone and Speedy series by one of my favorite Western authors, W.C. Tuttle. Like Tuttle’s justly more famous Hashknife Hartley and Sleepy Stevens, Tombstone Jones and Speedy Smith are range detectives working for the Cattleman’s Association. They’re generally thought of as being pretty dumb and usually solve their cases through pure luck, with considerable snappy banter and some slapstick humor along the way. From time to time, though, Tuttle drops hints that the two of them aren’t nearly as dumb as they act. In fact, in this issue’s novelette, “Gunsmoke in Oro Rojo”, they unravel a fairly complicated mystery involving rustled beef and high-graded ore and seem to be fully aware of what they’re doing as they “bumble” their way to a solution and justice for the bad guys. This is a very good entry in a consistently entertaining series.

The Navajo Tom Raine, Arizona Ranger series ran in EXCITING WESTERN for several dozen stories, always by-lined with the house name Jackson Cole except for one story published under the name C. William Harrison, the real name of an author who may well have written some of the other stories, too. But prolific Western pulpster Lee Bond has also been linked to the series. “Indian Killer”, the Navajo Tom Raine story in this issue, reads to me like it might be Bond’s work. Raine, a white man raised by the Navajo after his lawman father was murdered, is sent to quell an uprising by the Papago tribe, which is being blamed for a series of stagecoach and freight wagon holdups. Raine quickly figures out that the Indians are being framed and uncovers the real culprit. The blurb on the first page of the story gives this away, so it’s not much of a spoiler. I think most Western pulp readers would know what was going on anyway. Despite the very predictable plot, Raine is an appealing protagonist and the writing is smooth and fast-paced, leading to a satisfactory conclusion. I’ve never read a Navajo Raine story that was great, but I’ve never read one that failed to entertain me, either.

Writer/editor T.W. Ford was another very prolific pulpster, mostly in the Western and sports pulps. I’ve found his work to be inconsistent but generally pretty good. His novelette “Lead for a Donovan” in this issue is a Romeo and Juliet yarn, with a young couple from two feuding families running off to get married and the lengths to which the patriarchs of those families will go to prevent the wedding. Everything plays out about like you’d expect, but there’s plenty of action along the way and I found this to be a very enjoyable story.

In something of a rarity for a Western pulp, the cover painting from this issue is redone as a black and white interior illustration for the short story “Lynching Lawman” by an author I’m not familiar with, Bud Wilks. He published only eight stories, five in 1945 and three in 1948, all in Thrilling Group Western pulps. I have a hunch that was the author’s real name, but who knows? Might have been a house name. “Lynching Lawman” is a short but effective tale of two lawmen who have a falling out, and then one tries to frame the other for horse stealing and murder. I thought it was pretty good. Another unusual aspect is that the cover and interior illo accurately illustrate a scene from the story, meaning that artist Sam Cherry either read it or (more likely) the editor told him what to paint.

Another long-running series in the pages of EXCITING WESTERN featured the adventures of Alamo Paige, Pony Express rider. These were published under the house name Reeve Walker. Walker A. Tompkins, Charles N. Heckelmann, and Chuck Martin have all been linked to this series, and other authors may have contributed to it as well. I don’t know who wrote “Ten Days to California”, the Alamo Paige story in this issue, but it’s a good one in which Paige pursues a wanted outlaw and killer who tries to escape justice by riding the Pony Express route and stealing fresh mounts at each way station. That’s really all there is to the plot, but the story moves right along and has some nice action scenes.

That wraps it up for the June 1945 issue of this pulp, and it’s a really solid one with the five stories ranging from good to excellent. If you have this issue of EXCITING WESTERN and haven’t read it, I think it’s well worth pulling down from the shelf.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wastern Trails, March 1942

You just can't go wrong with a Norman Saunders cover, as this issue of WESTERN TRAILS demonstrates. There's a pretty good bunch of Western pulpsters inside, too: Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Tom J. Hopkins, Charles N. Heckelmann, Ben Judson, and Jay Karth are the biggest names, joined by lesser-known authors Nelson Willliam Baker, Brete Campion, Hyatt Manderson, and V. Chute.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: The Rio Kid Western, Winter 1944/45

I wrote about the paperback reprint of the lead novel in this pulp for my Forgotten Books post yesterday, so here's the cover of the original pulp itself. I don't know who did the cover. In addition to the Rio Kid novel, this issue contains stories by prolific pulpster (and later editor of Monarch Books) Charles N. Heckelmann, Wayne Purcell, who wrote a few stories for the Western pulps in the mid-Forties, and a couple of house-names, Jackson Cole and Reeve Walker.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, January 20, 1940

An unusual cover with that red tone, but I think it's quite effective. The artist is Richard Case. As usual with WILD WEST WEEKLY, there are some good authors on hand in this issue, including one of the magazine's all-time stalwarts, Paul S. Powers, with a Sonny Tabor novelette under his Ward S. Stevens pseudonym. Also in this issue are C. William Harrison with two stories, one under his name and one under the house-name Nelse Anderson, William F. Bragg, John A. Saxon, and Charles N. Heckelmann.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Action, June 1940

That's a nice dramatic cover on this issue of WESTERN ACTION. I don't know the artist, but I like his work here. Inside are two stories by Charles N. Heckelmann, one as himself and one under the house-name Mat Rand, a story by house-name Cliff Campbell, and three well-known Western pulpsters, Wayne D. Overholser, Stephen Payne, and C. William Harrison, to go along with lesser-known authors Clem Barton, Dick Robson, and Duane Yarnell. Some of those may be house-names, too, for all I know.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, August 1943

To wrap up the year for this series, this is a pulp that I own and read recently. The scan is from the issue I read, ragged cover edges, scribbling, and all. Anybody who’s read this blog for very long knows that TEXAS RANGERS is one of my favorite Western pulps and Jim Hatfield is my favorite Western pulp character. I’ve been reading his adventures (first in the paperback reprints from the Sixties) for a very long time now.

The Hatfield novel in this issue is “Pecos Poison”, written by Tom Curry under the Jackson Cole house-name, and behind that very generic title is an interesting and effective yarn about the conflict between coal miners and ranchers in West Texas. This particular mine is about played out and isn’t valuable, so far as anybody knows, but somebody is conspiring to steal it anyway and is using rustling and the friction between miners and cattlemen as a distraction. Jim Hatfield is sent in to get to the bottom of the trouble and works undercover to begin with, as usual. Also as usual, Curry employs a proxy hero, young miner-turned-cowboy Bert Webb, to carry part of the action while Hatfield is off investigating other angles. There’s plenty of action, and the main villain in this one (there’s no secret about his identity) is particularly dastardly, using a couple of murder methods you don’t often find in pulp Westerns. It all leads up to an explosive and very effective underground climax in the coal mine.

There are also four short stories in this issue. The first, “Widow’s Choice” by William Morrison (who was really Joseph Samachson), concerns the rivalry between two prospecting partners over the affections of a widow who may not be much to look at, but she’s a great cook. Then things are complicated by an Indian attack. This is a pretty lightweight tale that takes a grim turn part of the way through, then eventually swings back to humorous fare. I’m not sure it completely works—it’s a little bit too schizophrenic—but it’s a readable story.

“Ranger’s Ruse” by Charles N. Heckelmann is a murder mystery, as a miserly moneylender is shot in the back and a Texas Ranger has to figure out which of three suspects is the killer. It’s not much of a whodunit, since Heckelmann keeps information from the reader that would make it possible to solve the mystery, but it’s another one that reads okay.

“Range Waif” by W.E. Carleton is a contemporary Western comedy about rival dude ranches competing for customers. It didn’t work for me at all and I didn’t finish it.

This issue wraps up with “Sodbuster’s Showdown”, a short story by Frank Morris. In a post earlier this year about an issue of HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE, I wrote about how there seem to be two Frank Morrises, one who wrote for a variety of Western pulps from the mid-Thirties to the mid-Forties, and another who was a house-name for the Trojan pulps. The author of “Sodbuster’s Showdown” is almost certainly not the same person who wrote “Location for Murder” in that HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE. But it’s a good story anyway, about a small rancher (not really a sodbuster, despite the title) who clashes with a brutal cattle baron over water rights. There’s quite a bit of well-written action, and while overall the story is nothing out of the ordinary, I enjoyed it. It’s the best of the short stories in this issue.

So while this is maybe a slightly below average issue of TEXAS RANGERS because of the back-up stories, the Hatfield novel is a good one, and that’s the main appeal of TEXAS RANGERS to start with, so I enjoyed this one and think it was well worth taking down from the shelves.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Adventures, February 1942

WESTERN ADVENTURES may have been Street & Smith's third-string Western pulp, behind WESTERN STORY and WILD WEST WEEKLY, but I've always thought it had some pretty strong issues. I like the cover on this one, and there's a fine line-up of authors inside including Cliff Farrell, Norman A. Fox, Gunnison Steele, Jim Kjelgaard, S. Omar Barker, and Charles N. Heckelmann.

Forgotten Books: River Queen - Charles N. Heckelmann

If Charles N. Heckelmann is remembered at all today by paperback fans, it’s probably as the founder and editor of Monarch Books or the editor at Popular Library during the Sixties. However, before that he worked as a writer and editor in the Western pulps, most notably those in the so-called Thrilling Group, and he continued writing Western novels from the late Forties throughout the Fifties. He was never very prolific as an author, but his books were well-regarded in their time.

I just read my first Heckelmann novel, RIVER QUEEN, and it’s a good one. That’s the title of the Graphic Books paperback reprint. The novel first appeared in hardback from Henry Holt under the title THE RAWHIDER. RIVER QUEEN is actually the better and more appropriate title. This is a riverboat book, set largely along the Missouri River in Montana Territory, although the first section of the story centers around the battle of Shiloh during the Civil War. Bill Horn is the captain and pilot of the riverboat Western Star. His main rival on the river is Kay Graham, the beautiful female captain of the Queen. Both of their boats wind up being hired by the army to carry troops and supplies up the Missouri River to help deal with the rising threat of the Sioux, who have started raiding the settlements there because the army is stretched so thin due to the war. There’s also a romantic triangle going on, as well as an old enemy of Horn’s who is now a Jayhawker, ostensibly helping the Confederate side while really being out for all the loot he can get his hands on.

Why this novel was never adapted into a movie starring John Wayne, I’ll never know. Bill Horn seems to be a perfect character for the Duke to play, and considering the way Heckelmann describes him, I wonder if he thought the same thing. Barbara Stanwyck would have been great as Kay Graham, and the villain cries out to be played by Forrest Tucker. It’s not really a John Ford or Howard Hawks type of story, but in the hands of a director like Michael Curtiz or Henry Hathaway . . . Well, never mind. There’s no such movie. But it would have been a good one, because Heckelmann has packed a lot into this book: epic battles, romantic intrigue, mano a mano showdowns, and a little reasonably accurate history. The action scenes are really good, and my only real complaint is Heckelmann’s occasional tendency to slow down the story in order to explain the backgrounds of some of the characters. This is especially annoying early on, but once you get past the first chapter or so, the action never flags for very long. I enjoyed this one enough that I definitely plan to read more by Heckelmann.

This week marks the beginning of a new wrinkle in my Forgotten Books posts. From time to time I’m going to give away the books I’m writing about. People have been incredibly generous this year in sending books to me after the fire back in January, and I’d like to pay back that generosity in small part by passing on some of the books that I’ve read and enjoyed. Just to clarify, I’m not giving away any of the books that were sent to me. Those occupy a special place in my new collection. These will only be books that I’ve bought myself.

So here’s how it works: if you want this copy of RIVER QUEEN, it’s yours if you’re the first person to email me asking for it (not by posting a comment in the comments section). There’s an email link in my profile, if you don’t have the address already. I’ll update this post as soon as the book is spoken for. It’s that simple. I’ll probably be doing this with some of the other books I post about, too, not just the Forgotten ones on Friday. This copy of RIVER QUEEN isn’t in top-notch shape, but it’s all there, so if you’d like to read it, this is your chance.

Update: This book is now spoken for, but I'll be giving away more in the weeks to come.