Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fifteen Western Tales, October 1942

Wanted posters show up a lot on Western pulp covers. Usually, the outlaw depicted on the poster is standing there either shooting or about to shoot. You can't really tell if the fellow on the cover of this issue of FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES is also the one on the reward dodger, but there's a good chance he is. There are stories by some fine Western pulpsters in this issue: Philip Ketchum, William Heuman, Thomas Thompson, and Frank Bonham. Other well-known authors in this one include Joe Austell Small, R.S. Lerch, John Wilstach (better known for his adventure yarns in ARGOSY and elsewhere), Carl G. Hodges (best remembered for his mystery stories and novels), and Edwin K. Sloat. Then there are the ones I'm not familiar with--P.J. Delanoye, Roy B. Angell, and W.W. Montgomery--and house names Ray P. Shotwell and Lance Kermit. I'm going to name the hero in a Western novel Lance Kermit one of these days. I'm sure this is a good issue since the Popular Publications Western pulps were consistently top-notch.

UPDATE: As Paul Herman points out in the comments, this hombre is wearing a lawman's star, so he's not the outlaw on the wanted poster. And since there's powdersmoke coming from the barrel of his gun, I reckon we can figure he just ventilated the owlhoot in question. Dadgum it, I don't know how I missed that! Thanks, Paul.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, June 1947

This is a pulp that I own and recently read most of. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover art is by Peter Stevens, who did quite a few covers for ADVENTURE during this era.

This issue starts off with the initial installment of an espionage serial set in post-war China entitled “He Who Rides the Tiger” by James Norman. As I usually do with serials if I don’t have all the installments on hand, I skipped this one. It may be an excellent yarn, but I don’t see any point in starting a story I can’t finish. Some of the other installments can be found in issues posted online. Maybe I’ll get around to reading it someday. To be honest, though, that’s not very likely.

Next up is a Western short story by the always dependable Frank Bonham. “Last Drive” is about the final run of a stagecoach. The former driver who is almost completely blind goes along as a passenger, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s forced into taking over the reins when Apaches attack the stagecoach. This is a well-written story with a nice final twist.

It's unusual to find a Dan Cushman story in a pulp that’s not published by Fiction House. He was a regular contributor to LARIAT STORY, ACTION STORIES, and JUNGLE STORIES. His long novella in this issue of ADVENTURE, “The Cask of Khabar”, which is set in the Congo, would have been right at home in JUNGLE STORIES, and again to be honest, it’s the main reason I picked this issue to read. Because of his resemblance to a dead man, American trader and self-professed “jungle tramp” Craig Thebes finds himself mixed up with a gang of ruthless criminals. A couple of beautiful women are involved in the scheme, too, of course. At times in this story, it seems like Cushman is trying to do a jungle version of THE MALTESE FALCON. Thebes is certainly hardboiled, and his banter with the evil Sir Roger Humphries reads like Sam Spade and Casper Gutman trading veiled quips. I think the ending is a bit less dramatic than it could have been, but that’s the only drawback in an otherwise superb pulp yarn that just makes me eager to read more by Cushman.

Samuel W. Taylor wrote a lot of Western, detective, and adventure stories for a wide variety of pulps. His story in this issue is called “Do Not Molest the Miracles” and is billed as an “Off the Trail” story. That fits it pretty well. It’s a whimsical tale of elves building houses for needy veterans during the post-war housing crisis, only to run afoul of government red tape. As a general rule, whimsy isn’t something I really enjoy, but this story is well-written and mildly amusing. It would have made a good, lighter-than-usual episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

Steve Hail wrote Westerns and nautical adventures. His story story “Doghole Circuit” in this issue definitely fits into the latter category. It uses the old “disgraced skipper is forced by a catastrophe to redeem himself and pull of a daring stunt” plot. In this case, the catastrophe is an erupting volcano and a passenger liner that’s run aground just off the Big Island of Hawaii. To a confirmed landlubber like me, this plot probably doesn’t resonate as much as it would with somebody who likes and knows something about ships. But I still thought it was a pretty good story anyway.

Being an Oklahoman, Clifton Adams knew the oilfields pretty well and could spin a good yarn using that setting. “The Crazy Kind” is about a prizefight between two oilfield workers with a rich new lease as the stakes. This is a lighter-weight, more humorous story than most of Adams’ work, but it’s still well-written and very entertaining. I never worked in the patch, but I had relatives who did and have been around that world some, so I’ve always had a fondness for novels and stories set there.

I’ll sometimes make an exception to my policy of not reading serial installments. If it’s the final installment, or by an author I particularly like, and the story wasn’t published later as a novel that I might read someday, I’ll give one a try. The final installment (of three) of “Salmon Sweepstakes” by Robert E. Pinkerton wraps up this issue. Pinkerton wrote a lot of stories and serials for the adventure fiction pulps, but I don’t recall ever reading anything by him before. This story is about the rivalry between salmon fishermen in the Pacific Northwest following World War I. I started it but couldn’t get interested in it, so I wound up setting it aside. If I’d been able to read the whole thing, I might have liked it better.

The stories by Cushman, Bonham, and Adams are good enough that I have to consider this a pretty solid issue of ADVENTURE. None of the other stories are bad, and I can't count off for serials because they're just the nature of the beast, so to speak. So I'd say that if you have a copy of this one, it's worth pulling off the shelf and giving it a shot.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western, September 1948

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat tattered copy in the scan. I’m not sure of the cover artist. Might be Robert Stanley, who did a lot of Western pulp covers for Popular Publications during this time period. But it might not be.

DIME WESTERN, like the other Popular Publications Western pulps, always had good authors, but there’s a particularly strong lineup in this issue, leading off with a surprisingly good Walt Coburn novella, considering how late this story came in his career. “Shoot or Git Shot!” is a son-of-an-outlaw yarn, where a widowed rustler leaves his six-year-old son with the father of his late wife. The old-timer raises the boy to be a good man, rather than an owlhoot. But as usual in a Coburn story, there’s a lot of back-story and not everything is as it appears to be at first. There’s nothing in this one you won’t see coming, but it’s well-written and has a nice epic feel to it for a novella. Plus there’s a great, brutal fistfight and a spectacular shootout to wrap things up. Coburn was inconsistent by this point, but “Shoot or Git Shot!” is as good as most of his stories from ten or twenty years earlier.

Frank Bonham probably would be annoyed that one of the main things he's remembered for these days is his slightly embittered essay “Tarzana Nights” about his time spent ghostwriting Western pulp stories for Ed Earl Repp. But he was an excellent writer and that’s on display in “Good Squatters Are Dead Squatters”, his short story in this issue. It’s a big rancher vs. small rancher story, but it’s very well-written and does a fine job of capturing the Texas Panhandle country. The resolution is maybe a little hard to swallow, but this is still a good story from a consistently good writer.

Clifton Adams was one of the best of the hardboiled Western writers who broke into the pulps in the late Forties and then went on to write dozens of excellent novels during the Fifties and Sixties. His story in this issue is a novelette about a wounded outlaw on the run called “There’s Hell in His Holster!” It’s a good story in its own right, but it has some historical significance, too. I believe it’s the first appearance of Tall Cameron, who, a couple of years later, would be the protagonist of Adams’ iconic Gold Medal novels THE DESPERADO and A NOOSE FOR THE DESPERADO. Neither of the novels is an expansion of this story, which is sort of an alternate universe take on the character, but Adams took a lot of Tall Cameron’s history from this tale.

Wilbur S. Peacock was a pulp editor as well as a writer. He turned out scores of Western, detective, and science fiction yarns and appears in this issue of DIME WESTERN with a short-short called “Reward of Merit”, about an old sheriff who’s been pushed out of his job in favor of a younger man. It’s well-written but the ending falls flat as far as I’m concerned. I generally like Peacock’s work but think this one was a misfire.

I’ve read good things about George C. Appell’s stories but don’t recall if I’ve ever read anything by him before. His short story “The Search” relies on a gimmick: not revealing one character’s true identity until the very end of the story. That’s kind of interesting, and the search of the title, a hunt for hidden loot, has promise, but overall the plot is muddled enough that it’s hard to follow and I didn’t care much for this story, either.

Peter Dawson, actually Jonathan Glidden, brother of Frederick “Luke Short” Glidden, was always dependable, and he comes through in this issue with the novelette “It’s Your Town—Die in It!” The story concerns a new marshal who believes he’s been roped into a town-taming job under false pretenses. He wants to abandon the job and leave town, but a beautiful new seamstress just arrived in the settlement, so maybe she’ll provide a reason for him to stay and have a showdown with the local hardcases. There’s really not a lot to this story, but it’s well-written and entertaining.

This issue wraps up with a novella by an author I’ve read quite a bit by lately, E. Hoffmann Price (although he’s credited incorrectly as E. Hoffman Price on the cover, TOC, and the story itself). “The Cowman Who Damned His Brand” has a very intriguing twist: the protagonist, a prospector who enjoys hunting for gold, falls in love with a woman who wants him to buy a ranch and settle down. So he buys a spread and inserts himself into the middle of a range war, fully intending to be a failure so he can convince the girl he needs to go back to prospecting. Of course, things don’t work out as he planned. This offbeat plot and Price’s talent for storytelling combine to make this a very good yarn.

This is a solid issue of DIME WESTERN with top-notch stories by Coburn, Bonham, Dawson, and Price, and the stories I didn’t much care for are readable and might be more to someone else’s taste. If you have a copy of it, it’s well worth pulling down from the shelf and reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western Magazine, December 1945

Injury to a Hat alert! This one was drilled cleanly by a bullet, looks like. I believe this is a Robert Stanley cover. It also looks like there are some good authors in this issue of DIME WESTERN MAGAZINE, which comes as no surprise. On hand are Walt Coburn, Frank Bonham, William R. Cox, C. William Harrison, and Bob Obets, as well as Jackson V. Scholz, better known for his sports stories. Another good issue of one of the top Western pulps.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Star Western, September 1948

One of Popular Publications' flagship Western pulps, along with DIME WESTERN, STAR WESTERN was still going strong in the late Forties, with this issue being a prime example. Behind that dramatic Robert Stanley cover are stories by a really fine group of writers: T.T. Flynn, Tom W. Blackburn, Frank Bonham, Van Cort (Wyatt Blassingame), John Jo Carpenter (John Reese), Kenneth Perkins, and writer/editor Art Lawson with two stories, one under his name and one as by William Fargo.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western Magazine, June 1946

I'm not quite sure of everything that's going on, but dang, what a great cover anyway! Pure action and drama. I'm sure there's a lot of that in the stories in this issue of DIME WESTERN, too, since the authors are Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, Frank Bonham, William R. Cox, Van Cort (Wyatt Blassingame), and Ralph Perry. By this point, Coburn (supposedly) wasn't at the top of his game because of his drinking, but I still enjoy his work from all eras of his career.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western, May 1950

That's another Old West poker game interrupted. On this issue of DIME WESTERN, the words "Combined With WESTERN RANGERS" were added to the title, although I'm not sure why since the pulp WESTERN RANGERS hadn't been published for many years at that point. A couple of years after this, that title was spun off for a short run of its own. Maybe Popular Publications was just testing with the waters with this move. At any rate, there are some fine authors in this issue, including Frank Bonham, Wayne D. Overholser, George C. Appell, John M. Cunningham, and Dee Linford, as well as a Tensleep Maxon story by house-name Bart Cassidy. I like this cover but have no idea who painted it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Speed Adventure Stories, July 1945

I think if I had been around during the Thirties and Forties, I would have been writing for the Spicy and Speed line of pulps. This issue of SPEED ADVENTURE STORIES features three authors better known for their Westerns: L.P. Holmes, Giff Cheshire, and Frank Bonham. Also on hand are the legendary E. Hoffmann Price and Spicy/Speed stalwarts Victor Rousseau (writing under his own name for a change, instead of Lew Merrill, Hugh Speer, or Clive Trent) and Edwin Truett Long, writing under the very transparent pseudonym of Edwin Truett. I've enjoyed stories by all these authors and know I would enjoy the yarns they've contributed here, too.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fifteen Western Tales, February 1943

That lawman better look out behind the door. Or maybe he could just go read this issue of FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES, which features stories by L.P. Holmes, Frank Bonham, Philip Ketchum, and William Heuman, among others. One thing to remember about FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES is that its definition of "Tales" includes columns and articles, too, not just fiction. I'm not sure I consider that quite on the up and up, but as long as the stories are good I don't mind cutting them a little slack.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western, July 1948

This is a pulp that I own and read recently, and as usual in those cases, the scan is from the actual issue I read. DIME WESTERN, like all the Popular Publications Western pulps, was a consistently entertaining magazine, and this issue is no exception.

Tom W. Blackburn was one of the heroes of my childhood, although I didn’t know that at the time. I say that because he wrote the scripts for the Davy Crockett episodes of THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY that featured Fess Parker. There was no bigger fan of Davy Crockett in the early Sixties, when those shows were being rerun on a regular basis, than I was. I sang the theme song all the time, too, and Blackburn wrote those iconic lyrics. In recent years I’ve read some of his pulp stories and liked them. His novelette that leads off this issue, “Quest of the Thirty Dead”, is an excellent hardboiled Western yarn about a bounty hunter tracking down the members of an outlaw gang who raided a town and burned down a hotel as a distraction while they looted the banks, resulting in thirty fatalities. There are a few plot twists and plenty of action in this one, and it comes to a very satisfying conclusion.

J.H. Holland is an author I’m not familiar with. His short story, “Get Up and Fight Again!” is next in this issue. It’s set right after the Civil War and concerns a former Union soldier who goes west to find the sister of a friend who died in the Andersonville prison camp. Naturally enough, the sister is having trouble with the local range hog, and the ex-soldier takes up her cause. Holland seems to have been a real person but didn’t publish much. This is the first story of his listed in the Fictionmags Index. It’s fairly well written but never generates much suspense, and the ending seems rushed, as if Holland was too inexperienced to know how to develop the situation. It has some nice bits of action and description, though.

Dean Owen’s stories are always good. “A Brave Man Dies But Once”, set in Virginia City, Nevada, during the silver boom, is narrated by traveling cigar salesman Sam Kincaid, who is more than he seems. A crisis forces him to make a choice about which way his life is going to go, and not surprisingly, it all leads to the satisfying conclusion of an excellent tale.

By this point in Walt Coburn’s career as a writer and a two-fisted drinker, rumor has it that his manuscripts were heavily rewritten by editors, so it’s impossible to say how much of the novella “Hell With a Running Iron!” is Coburn’s work and how much came from some Popular Publications staffer. Most of it, however, reads like Coburn to me. The plot is fairly simple for one of his yarns—big ranching syndicate frames a small rancher for rustling so it can gobble up his spread—but as usual Coburn has a large cast of characters with a lot of back-story. Sometimes Coburn throws in so many elements his stories don’t really have a chance of making sense, but thankfully that’s not the case here. It’s a good story with some nice action and the undeniable sense of authenticity that you find in most of Coburn’s work. Not in the top rank of his efforts, but for the late Forties, not bad at all.

George C. Appell had a nice career writing for the pulps, slicks, and digests from the mid-Forties on through the Sixties, as well as producing a number of novels. His story “Last Roll Call” concerns the aftermath of the Battle of the Little Big Horn and a couple of soldiers from the 7^th Cavalry who may have survived the massacre. It’s a good plot, and Appell writes very well. I’ve seen a lot of his work around but haven’t read much of it. Based on this story, I probably should.

I started reading Frank Bonham’s juvenile novels when I was a kid, with no knowledge of his career as a writer for the Western pulps. He did a lot of stories with unusual protagonists, and “Payment Past Due” is one of them. The hero is a doctor from the East with a dark secret in his past who heads west to make a new start. Eventually, of course, that secret will come out and the doctor will have to find out if he’s as good with a six-gun as he is with a scalpel. Bonham is another writer whose work is just about always good, and I enjoyed this story quite a bit.

Every so often I run across a pulp story written by someone I’ve actually met. That’s the case with Thomas Thompson’s “The Hangin’ Plague Hits Tonto Basin”. Thompson was at the WWA convention in Fort Worth in 1986 and I got to say hello to him there. I don’t remember much about it except that he was pleasant enough and looked a lot like the actor Al Lewis, who played Grandpa Munster. He was the story editor on BONANZA for many years, so I was a fan of his work there, but I’m not sure I’ve ever read any of his pulp stories before this one. I’ll definitely be looking for them from now on, though, because “The Hangin’ Plague Hits Tonto Basin” is maybe the best story in this issue of DIME WESTERN. It’s a variation on the old sheepmen-versus-local-cattle-baron plot, with an ex-con caught in the middle, but it’s very well written with a great hardboiled tone and plenty of action. I really enjoyed it and want to read more by Thompson, soon.

That wraps up this issue of DIME WESTERN, and it’s a very good one, with only one weak story (and it’s not terrible) and the others ranging from good to excellent. That’s not surprising, given DIME WESTERN’s consistent quality. If you have any issues or come across some, chances are they’ll be well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 10 Story Western, July 1945

Now that's a cover! Two tough hombres riding the cowcatcher of a locomotive barreling down the tracks! From the looks of it, they're having a shootout with the bad guys, too. I've got to write a scene with a setup like this in it. What's inside this issue of 10 STORY WESTERN looks good, too, with stories by William Heuman, Frank Bonham, Tom W. Blackburn, Gunnison Steele, Giff Cheshire, Philip Ketchum, and Barry Gardner (actually Bennie Gardner, who was also Gunnison Steele).

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story, January 1945

The Fiction House Western pulps nearly always had good covers and good authors inside, and this issue is no exception. The lead story by Frank Bonham, "The Canyon of Maverick Brands", is one that was reprinted in a Leisure paperback collection of his work. Other authors include top-notch pulpsters Barry Cord (Peter Germano) and Chuck Martin. There's also a novelette by Wayne C. Lee, almost forgotten now but once a prolific author of paperback original Westerns. And also a very nice guy, as I know since I spent a couple of hours sitting next to him at a book signing during one of the Western Writers of America conventions. I was next to him because I was signing as "Justin Ladd", the author of the Abilene series from Pocket Books. Seated on my other side was Elmer Kelton, who had a line out the door. Wayne and I didn't have much to do, so we were able to have a long, pleasant conversation. It's a nice memory from that convention.