Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, September 1951

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover art is by George Rozen, who has become one of my favorite Western pulp cover artists even though he’s probably best remembered for his covers on various issues of THE SHADOW.

I don’t know anything about Alexander Wallace except that he produced about three dozen stories for various pulps, mostly from Fiction House, between 1946 and 1954. His novelette “The White Peril” in this issue has an Indian as its protagonist, a young Crow chief called Blue Star, who has to battle a white gunrunner with plans to arm the Sioux, who are bitter enemies to the Crow. I don’t recall reading anything else by Wallace, but maybe I should because the writing in this one is very good. The story moves along well and I enjoyed it.

“Water Power” is a more humorous story than the others I’ve read by Ed La Vanway. It’s about a water witcher using a divining rod to head off a war between a cattle baron and some sodbusters. It’s pretty lightweight but okay reading.

Joseph Chadwick has become one of my favorite hardboiled Western authors. His novelette “Home to Boot Hill” features a first-person narrator, sort of unusual for Westerns of this era, a former Texas Ranger who fears he’s gone gun-shy. But he returns home to New Mexico anyway to help his old flame (who is now married) fight off attempts by the local cattle baron (yeah, another of those pesky cattle barons) to force her off her ranch. Nice gritty action and an offbeat protagonist make this one work all the way around. I liked it a lot.

Next up is the novelette “The Saddle Pards at Buzzard Butte”, an entry in a series I usually skip, Swap and Whopper by Syl MacDowell. These are slapstick comedy Westerns starring a couple of hapless saddle tramps, Swap Bootle and Whopper Whaley. (Think sort of Abbott and Costello in the contemporary West, but not quite.) I decided I was going to read this one and stick with it to the end, no matter what. And I did. It’s a bizarre concoction featuring a guitar, road construction, and a baseball game. To my surprise, I actually smiled a couple of times. MacDowell was a good writer. His more traditional Westerns are usually pretty entertaining. Although it’s not saying much, this is my favorite Swap and Whopper story so far. Will that make me go back and dig out all the ones I’ve skipped in the past? Not likely. But if I come across another one, I’ll at least give it a try.

C. William Harrison is a consistently good writer, so it’s no surprise that his short story “Granger—Draw or Die!” is an enjoyable yarn. It’s about a cowboy who gives up that life to become a farmer and his inevitable clash with the cattleman who’s his former employer. Well done, with some good characters and action.

I’m pretty sure I read H. Bedford-Jones’s novelette “Dead Man’s Boots” in the November 1936 issue of THRILLING WESTERN in which it first appeared. It’s reprinted in this issue, and since it’s been more than 20 years since I read it the first time, I tackled it again. It’s a fine story (I’m not sure Bedford-Jones was capable of writing anything else) about a gun-swift drifter riding away from trouble in the border country and right into more trouble involving a double-cross partnership between a crooked saloon owner and a cattle baron. (Lots of cattle barons in this issue.) While the plot is suitably twisty and there’s plenty of action, I’ve always felt that while Bedford-Jones’s traditional Westerns are good, they’re not quite as strong as his historical and straight adventure yarns. “Dead Man’s Boots” is a prime example of that. There’s nothing wrong with it except that it reads like the sort of story that dozens of other Western pulpsters could have written just as well. Maybe that’s holding HB-J to a higher standard than I should, I don’t know, but that’s the way this story struck me.

I always enjoy Ray Gaulden’s work, too. His short story in this issue, “Boom Town Trouble-Shooter” is a mining story involving a boom town (no surprise there, considering the title) and yet another crooked saloon owner. Gaulden packs quite a bit of plot and action into a story of less than 10 pages and does a good job of it.

Ernest Haycox’s short story “Skirmish at Dry Fork” is a reprint from the July 25, 1942 issue of the slick magazine COLLIER’S. But it’s right at home in THRILLING WESTERN, as well. It’s about a group of cavalry troopers who visit a town for a celebration on payday and their inevitable clash with a bunch of cowboys leading to a saloon brawl. Then a young soldier falls for one of the soiled doves who works in the saloon, leading to more trouble. Since this is an Ernest Haycox story, you know it’s well-written, and while Haycox’s work sometimes leaves me a little cold, I really liked this one. Some nice action and very good characters and a few poignant touches make it work really well.

“Six-Gun Specter” is a short story bylined Johanas L. Bouma, rather than the more common J.L. Bouma. It’s a tale about a young man with two outlaw brothers who’s trying to escape his family’s shady past. A stagecoach robbery and a beautiful young woman prove to be turning points for him. This is a pretty good story marred by a very rushed ending.

Robert Ferguson is the author of “Medicine”, a short story about an Apache attack on an isolated ranch in Arizona. Ferguson published only a handful of stories. This is the only one I’ve read, and I didn’t like it at all. Didn’t care for the writing, didn’t like the characters, and almost didn’t finish it. That happens sometimes. Might’ve just been me.

Overall, I’d say this is an above-average issue of THRILLING WESTERN, based on the good cover by George Rozen, the stories by Ernest Haycox, Joseph Chadwick, and Alexander Wallace, and the offbeat elements in some of the other stories. And I even kind of enjoyed the Swap and Whopper yarn! Maybe I will check out some of the others in the series.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, Second July Number, 1955

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know the artist. I’ve said before that RANCH ROMANCES was a good Western pulp during the Fifties, and this issue is no exception. It leads off with “Stampede Valley”, a novella by J.L. Bouma, a prolific author of Western pulp stories and novels. Bouma used very traditional plots but handled them well. This one has a powerful rancher trying to crowd out the smaller outfits in the valley. The protagonist is a young cowboy who works for the cattle baron but comes to realize he’s on the wrong side. This is a well-written, enjoyable tale that seems a little rushed at the end, its only real drawback.

Bill Burchardt’s stories and novels are often set in Indian Territory. “The Deputy’s Daughter” finds one of Judge Parker’s deputy marshals using his own daughter as bait to catch an owlhoot. It’s not a terrible story, but the writing never really caught my interest and there’s not much of a payoff. I’ve enjoyed other Burchardt stories more in the past.

The novelette “Renegade’s Girl” finds two lawmen transporting a convicted killer by train over a snowy Montana landscape to the town here he’ll be hanged. The outlaw’s victim was the twin brother of one of the lawmen. This is an excellent set-up, and since the author is Walker A. Tompkins, one of my favorites, it’s no surprise that this is a taut, suspenseful yarn. Tompkins is always good, and he’s at the top of his game in this one.

There are three more short stories in this issue. “Sinner Man” by Talmage Powell is about a traveling preacher, his beautiful daughter, and a vengeance-seeking gunfighter. “Woman for a Hoeman” is a terrible title for a cattlemen-vs.-sodbusters story by Ed La Vanway. “To Brand a Maverick” is a rare Western by Milton Lesser/Stephen Marlowe under his Adam Chase pseudonym that’s about the son of an outlaw deciding whether to go straight or follow in his father’s footsteps. All are well-written, and all have rather limp endings that really dilute their effectiveness. But they’re all readable.

There are also some assorted features and short fact articles I didn’t read, as usual, as well as the third of four serial installments of THE VENGEANCE RIDERS, a novel by Joseph Chadwick under his pseudonym Jack Barton. I didn’t read the serial, either, but I have the Popular Library edition of the novel and I might get around to reading it one of these days. Chadwick is usually good. And this is a good issue of RANCH ROMANCES based on the stories by Tompkins and Bouma, even though the rest of the fiction is pretty forgettable. It also has some nice interior art by Everett Raymond Kinstler.

UPDATE: Here's the paperback edition of THE VENGEANCE RIDERS.

Brand Rider - Ed La Vanway

Ed La Vanway’s name was only vaguely familiar to me, but I came across this Dell paperback by him, with a nice cover by John Leone, and was intrigued enough to pick it up and read it. Further investigation into the author reveals that he published a couple of dozen stories in the Western pulps from the late Forties to the late Fifties, when that market was drying up, and also wrote five or six Western novels, most of them from library publisher Avalon Books.

BRAND RIDER appears to have been La Vanway’s first novel, published by Dodd, Mead in 1958 and reprinted by Dell in 1961. It’s a save-the-ranch yarn, and also a cattlemen-versus-sodbusters yarn, as gunman John Lane is hired by a cattle baron to take over a ranch in which the cattle baron has a financial interest. The ranch actually belongs to a beautiful young woman, the daughter of the cattle baron’s recently deceased partner. In a nice twist, she’s the one who wants to go after the sodbusters and run them out by force if necessary, and the gunman/protagonist who’s reluctant to do so, because in this case he believes the farmers may be within their rights.

In addition to this, there’s a banker who may or may not be crooked, a deputy sheriff who’s definitely crooked (he’s an old enemy of the protagonist), a couple of different romantic triangles, a murder for which our hero is framed, and a stampede. Plenty of elements for a solid traditional Western.

Is that what La Vanway delivers? Well . . . sort of. The plot is good, the characters are interesting, and La Vanway does a fine job with the Texas setting, which makes me think he probably was a Texan. I couldn’t find any biographical info about him on-line. The action scenes, when they eventually break out, are handled well. But the book is very slow-paced and John Lane spends a lot more time thinking and brooding than he does riding and shooting. Call me shallow, but I like plenty of powder-burning in my Westerns.

Overall, I’d say BRAND RIDER is a slightly below average traditional Western, but there was enough I liked that I don’t consider the time spent reading it wasted. And La Vanway’s Texas feels authentic enough that I’m tempted to read something else by him, although I won’t rush right out to do so. If any of you have read his work and have any recommendations, I’d be glad to hear them.