Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Railroad Stories, May 1935

Emmett Watson provides a dramatic cover for this issue of RAILROAD STORIES. Inside are stories by E.S. Dellinger, the star author of RAILROAD STORIES, as well as John A. Thompson (who wrote as The Engine Picture Kid), Earle Davis, and Searle B. Faires, who got the cover story. Faires is a mystery to me. He published half a dozen stories in 1933-35, all of them in RAILROAD STORIES, and that's the extent of his career. I'm always curious about writers like that who appear to be on the verge of success but then disappear. It's possible that he died, of course, or just stopped writing for some other reason. But the mystery always intrigues me.

Forgotten Books: Avalanche! - E.S. Dellinger

This week we're supposed to be writing about Forgotten Books by authors we haven't read before. E.S. Dellinger qualifies for me, but spoiler alert (not really), I'll certainly be reading more by him.

RAILROAD STORIES was one of the longest-running magazines to publish fiction. Beginning as a pulp called THE RAILROAD MAN’S MAGAZINE in 1906, it continued publishing stories about railroads and railroaders until January 1979, when it had long since become a slick magazine. True, there was a ten-year span in there when it was merged with ARGOSY, and the fiction published in the Seventies was mostly reprints from the magazine’s glory days during the Thirties, but still, that’s a pretty impressive record.

The star of RAILROAD STORIES during the pulp era was E.S. Dellinger, whose yarns were nearly always featured on the cover. Dellinger (1886-1962) was a former railroader himself who became a teacher and school superintendent as well as writing dozens of yarns for the pulps, beginning in 1926 with some sales to ADVENTURE. Bold Venture Press has started reprinting some of them, and I recently read a collection entitled AVALANCHE that includes three novellas, two starring engineer Rud Randall, the other featuring King Lawson, perhaps the most popular of Dellinger’s series characters. The title story, “Avalanche!”, the King Lawson yarn, appeared in the February 1934 issue of RAILROAD STORIES. The two Rud Randall stories are “The Lion Tamer”, from June 1935, and “Tornado!” from November 1935.

Dellinger covered several different phases of King Lawson’s life and career in that series. In “Avalanche!”, he’s the superintendant of a line that runs through the Rockies and is more of a supporting character in a yarn whose protagonist is a young engineer who was caught in a snowslide when he was a boy and has to battle a mortal fear of it happening again. Which, of course, it does, with a lot of lives at stake, including that of the girl the young hero loves.

Rud Randall, the protagonist of the other two tales, works for one of the rail lines that runs through the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas and Missouri, and there’s a definite flavor of rural Americana throughout these stories. Rud is a good character, a stubborn man devoted to railroading although he also loves his wife and children. He had a bit of a reckless streak and tends to push his locomotive as fast as it can safely go—and sometimes even faster. As a result, Rud is involved with more than one train wreck in these stories, although none of them are actually his fault. But if you need somebody to outrun a natural disaster or arrive on the scene of a wrecked circus train in time to save the day, nobody is better than Rud Randall.

There’s nothing fancy about Dellinger’s style, but he was a top-notch storyteller and can really keep the reader turning the pages. These yarns have plenty of action in them, but they’re surprisingly character-driven for pulp tales. “Tornado!” especially is a mini-epic, spanning more than a decade in Rud’s life and containing a lot of drama about the relationship between him and his son, in between train wrecks, the Stock Market Crash, and a giant killer tornado.

I really enjoyed this book. Dellinger was writing for an audience that knew a lot about railroading, so the stories are a little heavy on the slang and technical jargon, but everything is easy enough to figure out from the context. I picked up the other collections of Dellinger stories, and I also have a few issues of the actual RAILROAD STORIES pulp that I plan to dig out. Admittedly, most modern readers won’t have much interest in stuff like this, but I like visiting a simpler time now and then, when railroads really were the lifeline of the country and country kids grew up hearing a locomotive’s lonesome whistle in the night.

The Wrap Up

This was a rough year personally in a lot of ways, and I’m sure hoping that 2018 will be an improvement, but the reading and the writing rolled on, as they have for decades now. That’s what I’m here to talk about today.

READING

I read 117 books this year, a slight increase from last year. Here are my Top Ten favorites, in the order in which I read them.

RIDERS OF THE NIGHT, Eugene Cunningham

FLASH CASEY—DETECTIVE, George Harmon Cose

LEO MARGULIES: GIANT OF THE PULPS, Philip Sherman

NEVER SAY NO TO A KILLER, Clifton Adams

THE LOST END OF NOWHERE, Gordon MacCreagh

SAY IT WAS MURDER, Stephen Mertz

KISS AND KILL, Richard Deming

AVALANCHE!, E.S. Dellinger

PLAY A COLD HAND, Terence Faherty

THE ART OF THE PULPS, Douglas Ellis, Ed Hulse, Robert Weinberg, eds.

If you’re keeping score at home, you’ll note that my blog posts for a couple of these haven’t shown up yet, but they will soon. Also, one of them, SAY IT WAS MURDER by Stephen Mertz, hasn’t been published yet, but it’ll be out next spring from Rough Edges Press. Remember the title (like I’d let you forget!) because it’s a great private eye novel.

The older I get, the more I seem to retreat into the pulp era. Four of the books listed above first appeared in the pulps, and two more are about the pulps, at least partially in the case of the Margulies bio. But four of them are also new books, appearing for the first time in 2017, so I’m not a complete fossil yet. Still, more than a fourth of the books I read this year were either pulps, pulp reprints, or pulp-related. Another fourth were what I would consider vintage paperbacks or hardbacks. So I’m definitely beating ceaselessly into the past, boats against the current.

WRITING

I wrote a million words again this year, for the 13^th straight year. I have a tentative plan to try to hit a million two more times, then semi-retire and write about half a million words a year from then on. (I know, I know, we’ve all heard this before . . .) I spent enough years as a semi-starving freelancer that it’s difficult to turn down work, but I’ve begun to do that now and then. The million words this year included eight solo novels, six collaborations, and sizable chunks of two more novels. No short fiction at all in 2017, and only one of the novels, which probably won’t be out for a while, will have my name on it. But I haven’t worried about that in forty years and don’t intend to start now, as long as I can continue fooling everybody into believing I know what I’m doing and don’t have to take an honest job. I’m ’way too old for that. Many thanks to everyone involved in saving me from that terrible fate, from the editors and agents to the readers to Livia, Shayna, and Joanna, who make it all possible to start with.

I don’t make resolutions, but I have the vague hope that I’ll have more time to read, watch TV and movies, and just generally enjoy life. I plan to attend Robert E. Howard Days in June, I may make it to a science fiction convention or two, and I’ll definitely continue going to hockey games when I can. (I’ve become a big hockey fan and have been known to pontificate about games that I’m watching, based on my vast experience of two whole years as a spectator and never having been on ice skates in my life . . .) The blog will continue, the WesternPulps group will continue (until Yahoo pulls the plug on all the groups, which I remain convinced they will, sooner or later), and I’m sure I’ll still spend too much time on Facebook. To all of you out there who make this stuff fun, my very best wishes and the hope that 2018 is kind to you.