Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, November 1948

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, complete with a slam-bang cover by Sam Cherry. I’ve said it many times before, but I really like his work.

I also consistently enjoy the adventures of range detectives Tombstone Jones and Speedy Smith as penned by W.C. Tuttle. This issue’s novelette is called “Lovable Liars”, and as it opens, the pair of them are a-foot, having sold their horses and saddles anticipating that their boss at the Cattleman’s Association will send them to their next assignment via train. The boss expects them to ride horseback to the settlement of Smoke Tree, however, and since they sold their mounts and Tombstone then lost all their money trying out his supposedly foolproof system for blackjack . . . Well, the boys wind up riding the train, but they have to hop an illicit ride on a boxcar to do so. And then what happens? Why, the train gets held up, of course, and through a series of coincidences, Tombstone and Speedy are blamed for the robbery!

Clearing their names and corralling the actual train robbers complicates their original mission, which was to solve a murder for which the son of an old friend of their boss has been arrested. Our intrepid duo manage to accomplish all of that, of course, through a combination of luck, banter, fast action, and detective work that’s more clever than anyone gives them credit for. This is a consistently entertaining entry in a series I really like.

Cliff Walters, a prolific contributor to the Western pulps who’s all but forgotten these days, is next up with a story called “Bone Bonanza”, in which a young rancher who fancies himself an artist goes east in search of a career in fine art, only to have things work out differently than he expected. This is a very mild, lightweight story with a few interesting angles, and it’s an easy read that I don’t think will linger very long in anyone’s mind. But it’s a pleasant enough way to pass 15 minutes.

I sometimes wonder if the readers who bought these pulps realized that A. Leslie, Bradford Scott, and Jackson Cole (part of the time) were all the same guy. Some of them must have suspected. Under the A. Leslie name, Leslie Scott contributes the novelette “Washed in Blood” to this issue. The first part of the tale is fairly standard as young cowboy Jim Wayne clashes with three crooked brothers who run almost everything in the county. A saloon shootout leaves one of the brothers dead and Jim on the run as a fugitive. It’s when he holes up in an abandoned mission still being tended to by an old priest that the story becomes one of ghost pirates and hidden treasure. As always with a Scott story, the action is plentiful and well-written, and the settings are vivid. I really enjoyed this one.

I’ve read a couple of stories by Harold R. Stoakes, another forgotten writer, and enjoyed them. “The Red Stallion” in this issue is a modern-day Western about a horse that can’t be ridden and the relationship between a young man and his stepfather. Honestly, this seems less like a Western pulp story and more like something that would have appeared in a slick or even a literary magazine. It’s got enough angst to it that it could have been mawkish, but Stoakes keeps things pretty low-key and makes it work in a well-written story that reminds me of something Larry McMurtry might have written early in his career.

“One Man Wrecking Crew” is a short (maybe 2000 words, tops) story by the always dependable Donald Bayne Hobart. There’s not much plot to it, just some conflict between a young cowboy and a crooked saloon owner and his henchmen, and that’s just an excuse for a brutal fistfight scene. Hobart probably didn’t spend much time on this and picked up a quick 20 bucks or so, but he was enough of an old pro to make it fun to read.

The Navajo Tom Raine series has become one of my favorites. The novelette in this issue, “Ranger Out of Bounds” drops the reader down in the middle of the action as the Arizona Ranger investigates a land-and-water swindle that also involves the kidnapping of a beautiful young woman. The only break in the action comes when Raine is knocked out cold for a while. It’s a bit more complicated plot than usual for Lee Bond, who wrote this entry under the house-name Jackson Cole. Bond’s stories are pretty easy to identify: at least once in the story, the villains will stand around and explain the plot to each other, and the hero will face multiple enemies in a big, final gunfight. I thought this was an excellent story, and as usual, when I finished it I was eager to read more adventures of Navajo Tom Raine.

I don’t know anything about Clark Gray except that he published more than a hundred stories in various Western pulps and that he wrote the two worst Jim Hatfield novels in the whole series, “Lobo Colonel” (TEXAS RANGERS, January 1952) and “Warpath” (TEXAS RANGERS, June 1952). His story in this issue, “Tortilla Tenderfoot”, is about Pedro Gonzales, a reformed rustler who has lived a law-abiding life for years, only to be drawn back into a life of outlawry by the return of his former partner. This is a decent plot, but Gray plays it for laughs and the actual humor to be found in the story is pretty sparse. However, the writing isn’t bad, and although unimpressive, this is a much better story than either of Gray’s Hatfield novels.

All in all, this is a good solid issue of EXCITING WESTERN, due to top-notch series entries by Tuttle and Bond, a very good stand-alone by Scott, and some interesting short stories. It’s worth reading if you have a copy on your shelves.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, Second March Number, 1953

Kirk Wilson did only a handful of covers for RANCH ROMANCES, but the ones he did are all excellent, like this one. This appears to be a pretty good issue as far as the authors with stories in it, too: Dean Owen, Wayne D. Overholser, Frank Castle, Robert Aldrich (not the movie director), Harrison Colt, Cy Kees, Robert Moore Williams, and Clark Gray. The others could be hit and miss, but Owen, Overholser, and Castle are enough to make an issue like this worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: New Western, September 1952

I don't recall seeing a railroad handcar on a Western pulp cover before, but I'm sure there were others besides the one on this issue of NEW WESTERN. As always with a Popular Publications Western pulp, this looks like a solid issue with stories by E.B. Mann (a reprint from a 1934 issue of STAR WESTERN), George C. Appell, James B. Hendryx (a Black John yarn), Hascal Giles, Robert L. Trimnell, and Clark Gray.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Six-Gun Western, August 1950

Another Old West poker game gone bad! SIX-GUN WESTERN being a Trojan Magazines, Inc. pulp, you'd expect a racy cover (check!) and a veritable plethora of house-names (not so much). In fact, Ralph Sedgewick Douglas is the only verified house-name in this issue, although two other authors listed in the Table of Contents, Tom Morant and Henry K. Dallett, are very little known today and published only a few stories, so who knows about them. Otherwise, though, it's a line-up of prolific pulpsters: E. Hoffmann Price, Clee Woods, Clark Gray, and Ben Frank (whose real name was Frank Bennett, a name under which he also published).

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, June 1952

This is a pulp I own and read recently. The scan is of my copy, complete with newsstand stamp on the cover. I pulled this issue of TEXAS RANGERS off the shelf because there was a story by Clark Gray in the issue I read a few weeks ago that I enjoyed, and the Jim Hatfield novel in this issue, “Warpath”, is also by Gray, one of only two Hatfield yarns he wrote for the magazine. The other was “Lobo Colonel”, from the January 1952 issue, which I read in a paperback reprint many years ago. I don’t remember anything about that one except that I didn’t like it and didn’t think Gray had a good handle on the Hatfield character. I wanted to give him another chance, though.

Well, as it turns out, while I didn’t completely dislike “Warpath”, I didn’t much like it, either. It’s the old plot about somebody selling whiskey to the Indians (in this case, the Comanches) and stirring them up. Hatfield’s out to find the culprit and put a stop to the plan. He winds up with a sidekick of sorts, a young white man who was raised by the Comanches and now finds himself unwelcome in both worlds, red and white. There’s a beautiful blonde who plays guitar and sings in a medicine show, as well, along with an older Ranger and a Comanche chief who wants peace. Those are enough ingredients for an entertaining, if stereotypical, story.

And Gray’s writing is okay for the most part, although some of his action scenes are pretty awkward and hard to follow. The thing that bothered me is that this just didn’t really seem like a Jim Hatfield story, like Gray’s other entry in the series. The character was off in ways that are hard to explain. He could have been almost any Texas Ranger protagonist, and he brooded ’way too much. I did like the crazed Comanche warrior Bitterfoot, though. He made a good villain. But overall I wouldn’t recommend “Warpath” to anyone who hasn’t read a Hatfield novel before. It’s not a good representation of the character and the series.

That only takes up about half the issue, though. The first short story is “That Packsaddle Affair” by Jim Mayo, none other than Louis L’Amour his own self, of course. L’Amour was just starting to get established as a Western novelist in 1952 and was still selling regularly to the Western pulps in the Thrilling Group. I’ve long felt that he was a better short story writer than he was a novelist, and this tale is a good one about a Texas outlaw who stops at a New Mexico stage station and finds himself in the middle of a deadly attempt by plotters to steal a rich gold claim from a young woman. The writing is smooth as it can be and the action scenes and dialogue are top-notch, although I thought there was one really good plot twist waiting to be employed that L’Amour never sprang on the reader.

The next story, “Good Country for Prairie Dogs”, is also set at a stage station and is by an author I’m not familiar with, Robert Aldrich. (I assume this isn’t the same person as the movie director Robert Aldrich.) In this one, the station manager and his pregnant wife are waiting for the local doctor to show up on a regular visit, when a seemingly friendly stranger with a dangerous agenda of his own stops at the station. This is nothing ground-breaking but still a nice, tense story.

“Trail Without End” is a novelette by Wayne D. Overholser writing as Joseph Wayne. The protagonist is the sheriff of a dying former boomtown who wants to move on to the gold fields of Colorado, but he’s held there by his love for the daughter of the local storekeeper, whose other daughter is married to a ne’er-do-well young gambler whose father is a horse thief and whose brother is a hired gunman. Got all that? Overholser provides plenty of domestic drama in this one, but there’s some action, too, along with some minor plot twists. I enjoyed it quite a bit because it’s very well written and Overholser does a good job with the characters.

Ralph Perry wrote one of the best Western novels I’ve read in recent years, NIGHTRIDER DEPUTY, and he has a story in this issue, “One Killing Deserves Another”. I like that title, and the story is a fine one about a shooting in a tiny crossroads settlement and the violent aftermath that follows it. Perry has a slightly off-kilter style, but it’s very effective and I thought this was an excellent story, my favorite in the issue.

This one wraps up with “Inside Straight” by Jim O’Mara, whose real name was Vernon Fluharty. It’s the old plot of the outlaw who has gone straight but whose lawless past comes back to haunt him. That familiarity hurts it a little, but O’Mara was a pretty good hardboiled Western writer and does a fine job with it.

This is an odd issue of TEXAS RANGERS. It’s the only one I ever recall reading where the Jim Hatfield novel is actually the weakest story in the bunch. All the others are very good to excellent. So it’s well worth reading, but I’d recommend the lead novel only to Hatfield completists.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, August 1949

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the picture, although it’s a photo and not a scan this time.

I’m a long, long time fan of Texas Ranger Jim Hatfield, having first encountered the character approximately 50 years ago when I read a Popular Library paperback reprint of one of the novels that originally appeared in the pulp TEXAS RANGERS. I was in high school at the time, and I remember sitting in the old army barracks building my school used as a study hall and flipping the pages, absolutely enthralled by the yarn. (I seldom if ever actually studied in study hall, preferring to use that time to read paperbacks or library books, but as I’ve mentioned before, I really was studying for my future career, wasn’t I?) The book was titled GUNFIGHTER’S RETURN, but that was actually a retitling from the pulp, and I no longer recall what the original title was. At the time, I’d never heard of TEXAS RANGERS, didn’t know that the author listed on the cover, Jackson Cole, didn’t really exist but was actually a house-name, and had no idea that the real author was Tom Curry. But I learned all that later.

All that long-winded reminiscing leads up to the fact that Tom Curry is also the author of the Hatfield novel in this issue, “Rustlers of Black Range”. Curry wrote 55 of the Jim Hatfield novels, tied with series creator A. Leslie Scott for the most. (Actually, Scott later wrote a few paperback original novels featuring Hatfield, so technically, he wrote the most overall . . .) Curry’s entries are pretty easy to spot. He usually spends some time at the first of the novel setting up the situation and introducing a secondary hero before Hatfield ever appears, and his stories often have some sort of historical angle, too. That’s the case here, as “Rustlers of Black Range” centers around the Alsatian, Swiss, and German immigrants who settled in central Texas. It’s specifically set in and around the real town of Castroville, west of San Antonio in the rangeland between the Hill Country to the north and the thick chapparal to the south. The villain is a German baron who’s trying to take over the ranches in the area for some unknown reason. He has a gang of rustlers working for him, trying to drive the honest cattlemen out of business. The secondary hero is wandering cowpoke Aje Pickett, who first falls in with the rustlers, then goes over to the side of the good guys once he realizes what’s going on. The victimized settlers have written to Austin asking for help from the Rangers, and that’s where Jim Hatfield comes in.

For a stretch during the Forties, Curry introduced a couple of supporting characters in a number of his stories, pretty schoolteacher Anita Robertson and her teenage brother Buck. Anita, of course, was a low-key love interest for Hatfield, who’s much too devoted to his job to indulge in much actual romancin’, and Buck was Hatfield’s sidekick, helping him out with his assignments. I’ll be blunt: I never liked Anita and Buck. I mean, Hatfield is known far and wide as the Lone Wolf. Why saddle him with a kid sidekick? (It’s even worse in the Fifties, when author Roe Richmond introduces a whole gaggle of irritating sidekicks for the so-called Lone Wolf.) But I have to say, Buck isn’t too annoying in this novel and actually serves a purpose in the plot, and Anita barely appears, so there’s not too much of that sappy mush to steal pages from ridin’ and fightin’ and shootin’, which of course is what we’re there for.

Anyway, Hatfield, Buck, Aje Pickett, and the good guy settlers put the kibosh on the evil baron’s plans (did I mention that the evil baron has a pair of wolfhounds?) and the motivation behind the whole scheme won’t come as any surprise, making this a fairly undistinguished but still enjoyable yarn. And I really liked using the European immigrants and their transplanted culture as part of the setting and plot. That’s a little unusual. I mean, how many Western novels have you read where there’s a chapter entitled “Guns at the Biergarten”?

There are three short stories backing up the Hatfield novel in this issue. The first, “Long Sam’s Hangnoose Swap”, is part of a long-running series by Lee Bond about heroic outlaw Long Sam Littlejohn, who is always pursued by deputy U.S. marshal Joe Fry. The first Long Sam story appeared in the very first issue of TEXAS RANGERS in 1936, and the series continued to appear in almost every issue until 1952. The stories are very formulaic but still great fun if they’re spaced out. Bond was a good writer. In this one, Long Sam and Joe Fry are forced to team up (as they often are) in order to battle against a gang of vicious Comancheros. It’s an entertaining yarn.

“Louisiana Lobo” is by Clark Gray, a Western pulpster who was reasonably prolific for a time in the Forties and Fifties and who wrote a couple of Jim Hatfield novels as Jackson Cole. I read one of those Hatfield novels a long time ago in the paperback reprint (LOBO COLONEL) and recall not liking it much. That being said, this story is a pretty good hardboiled Western yarn about a Cajun ex-Confederate sergeant who travels to Texas after the war to help his old commanding officer start a ranch, but instead he winds up in the middle of a deadly hunt for a fortune in gold. I enjoyed this one enough that I may have to dig out the issue of TEXAS RANGERS containing Gray’s other Jim Hatfield novel, “Warpath”, and give it a try.

Clee Woods wrote hundreds of stories for a lot of different Western pulps, but his work appeared regularly in RANCH ROMANCES for almost three decades, from the mid-Twenties to the mid-Fifties. “Nurse’s Big Call”, his story in this issue of TEXAS RANGERS, could have just easily appeared in RANCH ROMANCES, since it’s a modern-day Western about a love triangle involving a nurse, the doctor she works for, and a young rancher. There’s a little action, a decent fistfight, but overall there’s not much to this one and it’s easily the weakest story in the issue.

So overall, this is a fairly average issue of TEXAS RANGERS, with a solidly entertaining, slightly unusual, but not top rank Hatfield novel by Tom Curry, and two out of three pretty good short stories. Not an issue to give somebody who’s never read an issue before, but if you’re already a TEXAS RANGERS fan, it’s well worth reading.