Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Ranch Stories, September 1948

I don't have any idea who painted this cover, but I like it fairly well. I've still never read an issue of THRILLING RANCH STORIES. I'm going to have to, one of these days. This issue features one of my favorite Western writers, Joseph Chadwick, as well as Clee Woods, Joe Archibald (best remembered, I suspect, as an aviation pulpster, but he wrote everything), Harold F. Cruickshank (definitely best remembered as an aviation pulpster), Bruce Douglas, and Marian O'Hearn, as well as lesser-known pulpster Monica Morton. Oh, wait! Monica Morton was really Johnston McCulley, so never mind. Not lesser-known at all. Chadwick and McCulley make this a worthwhile issue.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: .44 Western Magazine, February 1948

I don't own this issue, so the information about it and the cover scan come from the invaluable Fictionmags Index. .44 WESTERN MAGAZINE, like all the other Popular Publications Western pulps, had good covers and good authors filling its pages. Robert Stanley did the excellent art on this cover (thanks to Robert R. Barrett for the artist ID), and I think it's the first one I've come across where a pocket watch gets shot, instead of some hombre's hat. Inside this issue are stories by William Heuman, Harry F. Olmsted, Dan Cushman, Tom Roan, Lee E. Wells, Clee Woods, Ben Frank, James Shaffer, and Harrison Colt. I'm not a fan of Ben Frank's work and don't really know anything about Shaffer or Colt, but the others are all dependable Western pulpsters. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Supernovel Magazine, May 1933

I came across the listing for this pulp in the Fictionmags Index and was surprised to find a Western pulp I'd never even heard of. The explanation for that may be that this is the only issue of WESTERN SUPERNOVEL MAGAZINE. The next issue, the title was changed to COMPLETE WESTERN BOOK MAGAZINE, which I had heard of. This lone issue under the original title sports a cover by Joseph Cragin, an artist I'm not familiar with, and features a novella by Dane Coolidge, who is supposed to be a pretty good Western writer. I haven't read any of his work yet, and I need to get around to that. Also in this issue are a couple of reprints by Stephen Payne and Clee Woods, both of which appeared originally in the pulp WESTERN RANGERS a few years earlier, and another original novella by Edgar L. Cooper. COMPLETE WESTERN BOOK MAGAZINE probably is a better title, but I kind of like WESTERN SUPERNOVEL MAGAZINE.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, July 27, 1929

Remington Schuyler was the regular cover artist for WILD WEST WEEKLY during the late Twenties. I can't say that I'm a huge fan of his work, but I like this one pretty well. WILD WEST WEEKLY always published a lot of series and house-name stories, of course, and this issue is no exception. The lead feature for a number of years was the Billy West/Circle J series, published under the house-name Cleve Endicott. The one in this issue is actually by Phil Richards, who wrote the Kid Calvert series in WESTERN ACES that I liked a lot. Also on hand are J. Allan Dunn with a Whistlin' Kid story as by Emery Jackson; Galen C. Colin with a Lum Yates story as by Collins Hafford; a Looshus Carey story by Houston Irvine (don't know either of those names); a Ranny Kid story by Clee Woods (I've at least heard of Clee Woods and seen his name on many Western pulp TOCs), and non-series stories by Stephen Payne, Archie Joscelyn, Paul S. Powers (twice, as by Philip F. Deere and Kent Bennett), and Gip Akin, whoever he was.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Leading Western, April 1950

Joseph Szokoli did quite a few covers for Trojan Publishing Corporation, including many on LEADING WESTERN, like this one which I think is very eye-catching. Unlike some Trojan pulps, house-names don't dominate in the table of contents for LEADING WESTERN. This issue includes stories by Clee Woods, De Witt Newbury, and Frank Castle, all real names. There's one by Reese Wade, who was also apparently not a house-name. But there a couple of retitled, unacknowledged reprints under house-names John Kane and Fred Maurel of stories originally published as by Giff Cheshire and Cliff M. Bisbee, the authors' real names. Trojan did this quite a bit.

Saturday Morning Bonus Pulp: Wild West Weekly, July 4, 1931

This issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY may not have a patriotic cover, but it is dated July 4, 1931. The art is by H.W. Reusswig, and I think it's a pretty good cover. As usual for WILD WEST WEEKLY, the contents lean heavily toward series stories and house names. Lee Bond, William F. Bragg, Clee Woods, and Samuel H. Nickels have stories under the own names. There's a Circle J story by Norman Hay writing as Cleve Endicott, a Whistlin' Kid story by Guy L. Maynard writing as Emery Jackson, and entries in other series I'm not familiar with by Galen C. Colin, Reginald C. Barker, and Houston Irvine. (I'm not familiar with Barker and Irvine, either.) But overall, it looks like an entertaining issue and a good way to pass the time in the summer of 1931, if you had an extra dime and nickel in your pocket. Which a lot of people didn't in those days. But I'm glad the pulps were able to survive.

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, 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.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, Second November Number, 1936

With Valentine's Day coming up next week, it seemed like a good time to run a RANCH ROMANCES cover . . . because nothing says romance like a gun battle. I don't like RANCH ROMANCES from the Thirties as well as I do the issues from the Forties and Fifties, but it still had some good covers and fine authors writing for it. In this issue, there are stories by Stephen Payne, William Freeman Hough, Clee Woods, Cliff Walters, and Elsa Barker, all regulars in RANCH ROMANCES.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Masked Rider Western, December 1949

I haven't read this particular Masked Rider novel, but since it's by Walker A. Tompkins, I'm sure it's pretty good. Tompkins always seemed to have a nice touch for the character in the ones by him that I've read. There are some other top-notch writers in this issue: L.P. Holmes, Lee Bond, and Clee Woods.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Outlaws, February 1930

Well, things don't look too good for the hair-trigger hombre in front on this cover by Walter Baumhofer. Of course, you never know what will happen, and I doubt if things will go smoothly for that star packer behind him. A Western reader ought to be pretty pleased with this issue, though, considering that it includes stories by William Colt MacDonald, E.B. Mann, Philip Ketchum, Bennie Gardner, Clee Woods, and Lawrence A. Keating, among others.