Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, February 1952

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, complete with a good Sam Cherry cover as usual for this era.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue, “Panhandle Freight”, is an interesting one for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, though, it’s a good solid story that finds Hatfield getting mixed up in a war between two freighting companies in the Texas Panhandle. Settling that trouble isn’t actually his assignment, as it usually is when he wades into a case. Instead, he’s on the trail of an outlaw he’s followed across Texas, and that hardcase has gone to work for the villainous freight line owner who plans to wipe out his competition. That’s what draws Hatfield into the trouble, and when he finds out a young woman has been kidnapped, he’s not going to stop until he puts things right. There’s no mystery in this one about who the main bad guy is—the reader knows right away. But that doesn’t detract from the enjoyment as we get a shootout at a waterhole, assorted bushwhackings and fistfights, a big fire, a stagecoach holdup, and a final showdown in which Hatfield and a young freighter who serves as sort of a proxy hero take on the whole gang. It’s traditional stuff, but done very well.

For a long time, this novel was attributed to D.B. Newton. I forget why Newton’s name was attached to it, possibly because of payment records from the August Lenniger Literary Agency. Newton is listed as the author of four Hatfield novels in the Fictionmags Index, including this one. But the manuscript of it is known to be in the collection of Tompkins’ papers at the University of California-Santa Barbara, so it seems pretty safe to say that he wrote it. Having read it now, I’m even more confident of Tompkins’ authorship. It reads just like his work with plenty of well-done action scenes and an abundance of hyphenated words, his most distinctive stylistic tag. Establishing that it is Tompkins’ work and not Newton’s is one of the reasons I find it interesting.

The other is that I was reading along in it and suddenly Anita Robertson shows up! Anita Robertson, for those of you not familiar with her, is a beautiful young woman who lives in Austin with her teenage brother Buck. She was added to the series in the mid-Forties presumably in response to the numerous letters to the editor asking that “Jackson Cole” give Hatfield a steady girlfriend. Anita and Buck appear in a dozen or so novels written by Tom Curry. Usually, Anita is in the story only very briefly, just there long enough for a quick kiss and a paragraph about how Hatfield can’t marry her until he gives up his dangerous work as a Ranger. Then Buck tags along with Hatfield as a sidekick on his latest case. The readers apparently didn’t like them, although the editors printed a few letters in support of them, but they vanished after a few years and nobody seemed to mind.

I’d read that Tom Curry was the only Hatfield author to use the characters, except for one appearance in a story by D.B. Newton. This must be the story, except it’s not by Newton. And while Buck is mentioned, he doesn’t appear. Surprisingly, Anita actually has something to do. She teams up with Hatfield to help him break the case open, and—this really surprised me—I liked her! Tompkins handles the character much better and she’s more believable. It’s kind of a shame she didn’t appear in more of the Hatfield novels by Tompkins, but getting rid of Buck is an acceptable trade-off.

This issue of TEXAS RANGERS was on the stands in January 1952 (the cover dates on pulps were off-sale dates), but it has a Christmas story in it, “Double Dick Follows a Star” by Lee Priestly, who was really Opal Shore Priestly. It’s the third in a series of four stories about a colorful old prospector named Double Dick Richards. I read another in the series a while back and found it readable and mildly amusing. I found this one to be neither of those things. I bailed after a page or so. Probably more to do with my mood than the story itself, although I wouldn’t swear to that.

“Dead Man’s Boots” is a novelette also by Walker A. Tompkins, but it has his name on it, and reading it so soon after “Panhandle Freight” just convinced me that Tompkins did author that Hatfield novel. The styles are identical. The novelette is a good one using the “outlaw masquerades as a lawman” plot. In this case, escaped convict Rand Weston, sent to Yuma Prison for a murder he didn’t commit, winds up assuming the identity of a murdered range detective who was supposed to investigate the murder of a beautiful young woman’s rancher father. That’s a lot of murders there, but Tompkins untangles things with his usual skill. This one starts off especially well but eventually feels a little rushed. It probably would have worked better at novella length. But it’s still a very enjoyable yarn and well worth reading.

“Fiddle and Fight” by Cy Kees is another humorous story, this time about a fiddling contest. The Devil does not show up, which is kind of a shame because it might have made this one better. This is another story I didn’t like and didn’t finish. Man, I really must have been in a grumpy mood when I read this issue!

On the other hand, I thought “Haggerty’s Valley” by Francis H. Ames was pretty good. Ames published about 80 stories in various Western pulps in the decade between the late Forties and the late Fifties. If I’ve ever read anything by him before, I don’t remember it. This one uses the old amnesia plot, as our protagonist wakes up wounded and not knowing who he is, being tended to by a beautiful girl who tells him he’s a deputy and has to rescue her from a gang of vicious outlaws who are after her. I kept waiting for one more twist in this story that never materialized, but it's well-written, moves along nicely, and had plenty of action.

You know anything by Clifton Adams will be well-written. “The First of May”, his short story in this issue, certainly is. It’s about a young man who wants to avenge the death of his brother, but he has to wait for his twenty-first birthday to do so because of a promise he made. This is more of a psychological Western than anything else, and because of that I found it a little unsatisfying overall. I don’t think it’s one of Adams’ better stories, but it might hit the target for other readers.

The issue wraps up with Lee Bond’s “Long Sam Pays a Visit”, and it’s a momentous entry in the long-running series that debuted in the very first issue of TEXAS RANGERS along with the Jim Hatfield novels. This is the final Long Sam Littlejohn story. Appropriately, it finds the heroic outlaw returning to the small settlement in the Piney Woods of East Texas where he grew up. The visit doesn’t go as planned, though, because Sam has to deal with an old acquaintance who has turned into a vicious owlhoot. This is a good story with plenty of drama and action and a nice plot twist near the end. Long Sam’s constant nemesis, Deputy U.S. Marshal Joe Fry is mentioned but doesn’t appear, for a change. While it isn’t exactly a series finale as we think of them now, this story does end with at least a hint that life may be about to change for the better for Long Sam Littlejohn. I’ve been reading these stories for so long that Sam seems like an old friend now, so I hope things worked out for him. And I’m glad there are still plenty of earlier stories in the series that I haven’t read yet.

Despite the fact that I didn’t finish a couple of the stories and the one by Clifton Adams was slightly disappointing, I think that overall this is a pretty issue of TEXAS RANGERS. The Hatfield novel and the novelette by Tompkins are both very entertaining, the Long Sam yarn is one of the better ones in the series, and the Ames story was a pleasant surprise since I didn’t know what to expect from that one. I’m also happy to have confirmed that the Hatfield story is by Tompkins. If you happen to have a copy of this one, it’s well worth reading, and who knows, you might enjoy those humorous yarns more than I did.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Max Brand's Western Magazine, July 1952

MAX BRAND'S WESTERN MAGAZINE started out as a reprint pulp, using older stories not only by Frederick Faust under his Max Brand pseudonym and other pen-names but also stories by other Western pulpsters. As time went on, though, the magazine published more and more new stories. By the time the July 1952 issue came out, there was only one reprint in the Table of Contents, a John Colohan story from the July 1936 issue of DIME WESTERN. Authors with new stories in this issue include Philip Ketchum, Ray Townsend, Lee Floren, Allan K. Echols, Cy Kees, Robert L. Trimnell, and Marvin De Vries. Most of those may not be big names, but they published regularly in the Western pulps. And that dramatic cover, which I like, is by H.W. Scott.

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: Star Western, August 1953

This is a pretty sedate cover, but I like it a lot anyway. There's a nice sense of impending menace to it, and that's a really beautiful woman. I don't know the artist. The authors inside this issue of STAR WESTERN are good ones, as well: Joseph Chadwick, Will Cook, Frank Castle, J.L. Bouma, Van Cort (Wyatt Blassingame), Kenneth L. Sinclair, and Cy Kees. Even this late in the game, STAR WESTERN was a very good Western pulp.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, May 1953

This is a pulp I own and read recently. That’s supposed to be a Sam Cherry cover, but it’s not one of his better ones, in my opinion. The scan is of my copy.

Roe Richmond is an author whose work I’ve sort of avoided over the years, because I really don’t care for the Jim Hatfield novels he wrote for TEXAS RANGERS under the Jackson Cole house-name. Those stories are well-written, but Richmond made (to me) a fatal mistake in the way he approached the character, giving a character known as the Lone Wolf a whole crew of annoying sidekicks. However, I may have been too quick to brush aside the rest of his output. He wrote the lead novella in this issue of EXCITING WESTERN, and I thought it was excellent. “Six Guns—Six Graves” is the story of an outlaw gang seeking to hide out in a desolate section of northern Arizona between the Grand Canyon and the Utah border. I’ve been in this area, and desolate doesn’t even begin to describe it. The gang consists of six owlhoots and the beautiful woman who’s with one of them. Well, you know with a setup like that, a lot of tension is going to develop. Richmond adds a nice twist, making the protagonist of the story a man who has struggled with alcohol and wound up on the outlaw trail only because of his fondness for booze. This is a dark, hardboiled yarn that succeeds in making several of the characters sympathetic despite their deep flaws, and it has a very effective ending after a number of brutal action scenes. “Six Guns—Six Graves” is a top-notch tale that has me wanting to read more of Roe Richmond’s work. By the way, the same thing happened with Joseph Chadwick. I didn’t like his Jim Hatfield novels, but the stand-alones by him that I’ve read have been consistently good. I guess some authors just aren’t at their best with series work.

George H. Roulston is a name I don’t recall encountering, which isn’t a surprise since he only published half a dozen stories in the mid-Fifties. His short story in this issue, “Mission for a Stranger”, is an okay yarn about a stranger who shows up on a ranch where something mysterious and possibly sinister is going on. Not bad, but it kind of limps to an ending.

I’ve always thought Cy Kees had to be a pseudonym, but if it is, I’ve never seen that confirmed. He was fairly prolific all through the Fifties, publishing 70 or 80 stories in various Western pulps during that decade. His story “Trouble Range” is a mildly humorous tale about a grub line rider who ties a knot in a cow’s tail and the resulting ruckus with the cow’s owner. This is a very slight story, entertaining but forgettable.

Tom Roan was a prolific Western pulp author from the mid-Twenties on through the Thirties and Forties, with his stories often featured on the cover of various pulp magazines, most of them from Popular Publications. By the Fifties, his sales were dwindling and most of his work was appearing in Thrilling Group pulps. His novelette in this issue, “The Man From Calico Creek”, reflects that, as it seems like a bit of a throwback to Western pulp yarns of an earlier day with its characters such as the good-guy outlaw, the Durango Kid; hard-fighting sheriff Trigger Dan Ringo; and despicable villain Two-Gun Doc Dalton. It’s the story of an outlaw gang on the run (similar to Roe Richmond’s novella that leads off the issue), but is told in a much more old-fashioned style. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since I love the Western pulps from the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties, too. I’ve never been a big fan of Roan’s work but I generally enjoy it. That’s true here, as “The Man From Calico Creek” is fun to read, but like the Cy Kees story that immediately precedes it, quite forgettable.

“The Holy Freeze” is a short-short by Bob and Jan Young, a husband-and-wife writing team (I assume) who contributed fairly often to the Western pulps from the late Forties on through the Fifties, although I don’t recall encountering their work before now. This story is a Northern, a tale about the clash between a surly miner and a preacher in the Klondike. I don’t know if the gimmick around which the plot resolution centers is actually feasible, but it makes for a nice little story anyway.

Floyd Day is another author I hadn’t encountered before, not surprising since there are only three stories listed under that name in the Fictionmags Index. “Sodbuster’s Gold” in this issue is a novelette about a prospector with dreams of gold finding another sort of treasure instead. It’s a gentle, poignant story that wouldn’t have been out of place in RANCH ROMANCES. No action to speak of, but it’s very well-written and I enjoyed it.

Seth Ranger was the most common pseudonym of Frank Richardson Pierce, who usually wrote under his own name. I’ve found his work under both names to be consistently good, but “Red Trail”, published as by Ranger in this issue, is an animal story, this time about a bull moose. I didn’t mind animal stories when I was a kid—I read a lot of dog books by Jim Kjelgaard and horse books by Walter Farley—but I have a hard time with them now. The writing is fine in this one, as you’d expect from Pierce, but I couldn’t work up much interest in it and didn’t finish it.

This issue of EXCITING WESTERN wraps up with the novelette “Renegades’ Rendezvous” by Al Storm, who was really Alvin N. Scism. He wrote mostly Westerns but did a few detective and jungle yarns as well, his work appearing in a number of different pulps during the Forties and Fifties. This one is a pretty good yarn about an amoral hired gun who shows up in the town of Broken Spur thinking that he’s going to sign on as a gun-wolf for the guy who’s trying to take over the town. When he gets there, though, he discovers that he has a good reason to oppose the man he thought would be his boss, instead. As it turns out, the protagonist’s brother is the local lawman, and there’s a good-looking girl involved, too. This is a smooth, competent story, pretty hardboiled in places, and while it’s predictable I definitely found it entertaining.

Overall, “exciting” may be stretching it as a description of this pulp. The Roe Richmond novella is excellent and will prompt me to seek out more stories by Richmond. The novelettes by Floyd Day and Al Storm are good, most of the other stories okay but utterly unmemorable. Still, as with every Western pulp, I’m glad I read it, because there’s always a gem or two.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, First May Number, 1952

I really like the Fifties issues of RANCH ROMANCES. Generally great covers, of which this is another one, and top-notch authors. This issue includes stories by Frank C. Robertson, Joseph Chadwick, S. Omar Barker, Bryce Walton, Chandler Whipple, and Cy Kees.