Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, August 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with a cover by Arthur Mitchell, an almost forgotten but consistently pretty good artist who did most of the covers for ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE. This was Dell’s flagship Western pulp (maybe its only Western pulp, I don’t really know), and although I haven’t read many issues, they’ve all been good so far.

This issue leads off with the novella “Deuce of Diamonds”, the second in a short-lived series by Charles M. Martin about a drifting cowboy and troubleshooter known as Roaming Reynolds. There are three stories in the series. I don’t have the first one, but I do have the third one in addition to this one and will be getting to it soon, I expect. In this one, Reynolds and his sidekick, a 16-year-old cowpoke called Texas Joe, drift their way into a range war when they interrupt a setup by two hardcases intended to result in the death of a rancher’s son. This leads to a bunch of action in the next twenty-four-hour span, including ambushes, fistfights, the discovery of a rustled herd, and a stampede.

Martin, who also wrote a lot for the pulps as Chuck Martin, has a distinctive style that I enjoy, although he does get pretty heavy-handed with the “Yuh mangy polecat” dialect. And his plots are very traditional, nothing that Western pulp readers haven’t encountered many times before. But he spins his yarns with such enthusiasm that I can’t help but enjoy them. Martin was a colorful character who supposedly made little grave markers for the villains he killed off in his stories and planted them in his backyard. I like his work, but reading it is always a slightly bittersweet experience for me because, like Walt Coburn, he eventually committed suicide. Making a living in the pulps definitely took a toll on some writers.

Sam H. Nickels was another Western pulp author who turned out hundreds of stories, many of them in a long-running series in WILD WEST WEEKLY about a couple of cowboys nicknamed Hungry and Rusty. He also wrote many stand-alone stories under the house-names common in that pulp. Now and then he published a story under his own name in a different pulp, such as “Mud in Mooney’s Eye” in this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE. The protagonist is known as Mournful Mooney because of his sad disposition, which is caused by his habit of running afoul of the law. Mooney, despite not looking like much, is hell on wheels when it comes to shooting and fighting. He seems like he ought to be a series character, too, but as far as I know, this is his only appearance. In it, he’s hired as a lawman to tame a wild town. The results are entertaining, if not particularly memorable. Nickels was a decent writer.

Harry F. Olmsted is one of my favorite Western pulp writers. He’s almost completely forgotten because he never wrote any novels, but he turned out more than 1200 pieces of shorter fiction. His story in this issue, “Empty Shells”, is about a sinister gunfighter who turns up in a frontier town looking for the son of a local rancher who has just taken over the spread after his father passed away. Clearly, the gunman is there to settle a score with the young man, who was something of a shady character himself, running with outlaws, before coming home and trying to settle down. Of course, Olmsted is too good a writer not to put a twist on what seems apparent. The prose is spare and clean, the dialogue isn’t overloaded with dialect (although there is a little), and the suspense builds steadily throughout this one. “Empty Shells” is an excellent story and a good example of why I enjoy Olmsted’s work so much.

Carson Mowre is better remembered as a pulp editor rather than a writer, but he turned his hand to fiction, too, now and then, and published several dozen stories, most of them Westerns. He contributes a novelette, “One Night in Ten Sleep”, to this issue. As the title indicates, all the action takes place in one night in the frontier settlement of Ten Sleep, where a stranger called Tennessee Parker rides into town and finds himself in the middle of a war between a crooked judge on one side and a crooked sheriff and deputy on the other. Parker plays the two sides against each other (I was reminded a little of Hammett’s RED HARVEST) because he has an agenda of his own that doesn’t become clear until the end of the story. This one features some of the most brutal and graphic violence I’ve encountered in a Western pulp yarn. It has interesting characters, the pace is swift and never really lets up, and I really enjoyed it. I’ll have to keep an eye out for more of Mowre’s fiction.

I normally don’t read the non-fiction features in Western pulps, but one in this issue caught my attention. It’s “The Blond Cossack” by Ed Earl Repp, whose work I usually enjoy. This is an interesting article about an outlaw known as Russian Bill, who was part of the Cowboy faction in Tombstone along with the Clantons and Johnny Ringo. Russian Bill claimed to be the son of a princess and told people he was forced to flee from Russia for political reasons after being a Cossack there. Whether there was any truth to that story remains unknown, but Repp’s recounting of it is vivid and interesting. Repp was known to use ghostwriters and the prose in this is a little toned down from his fiction, so another writer may have had a hand in it, but the Cossack parts of it read like Repp’s work to me.

I love S. Omar Barker’s cowboy poetry and the non-fiction columns he wrote for RANCH ROMANCES and TEXAS RANGERS, but his fiction usually isn’t to my taste. For ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, he wrote a series of humorous stories about a yarn-spinning old cowboy named Boosty Peckleberry. In this issue’s “All Ears”, Boosty is telling his bunkhouse mates about an alcoholic mule named Napolean. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t make it all the way through this one. This sort of stuff just doesn’t resonate with me, but I’m sure plenty of readers found it funny and charming because Barker was very popular for a long time.

Like Charles M. Martin, J.E. Grinstead was an actual cowboy at one time in his life, and his stories have a ring of authenticity. “Six-Gun Music” begins with a violent encounter in a saloon between a down-on-his-luck stranger and a local gunman/bully, and that leads to rustling and ambushes. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read by Grinstead in the past, and this is one of his best stories.

Galen C. Colin is another very prolific pulpster who’s mostly forgotten today. His story “Death Takes the Trail” is actually a dying message mystery, although not a very complicated or clever one. It leads to a good action scene, though. While I’ve read better by Colin, this is an okay yarn.

Overall, this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE is a solidly entertaining Western pulp. The stories by Olmsted, Mowre, and Grinstead are the best, and the others are all enjoyable with the exception of the S. Omar Barker tall tale, and other readers might like that a lot better than I did. I have several more issues of ALL WESTERN on hand and will be getting to them soon, I hope.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Street & Smith's Top-Notch, December 1932

TOP-NOTCH, despite its name, definitely played second-fiddle to ARGOSY, ADVENTURE, BLUE BOOK, and SHORT STORIES when it comes to adventure pulps, but even so, it published some good fiction. I like the title "Fandango Island", Fred MacIsaac was a dependable author, and John Coughlin's cover illustrating the story is pretty good. Also in this issue are stories by Leslie McFarlane (ghost of the Hardy Boys!), Galen C. Colin, Lee Bond with a Western novelette under the house-name Tex Bradley, Kenneth Gilbert, Tom J. Hopkins, Ben Conlon with a serial installment under the house-name Ralph Boston, and a Zip Sawyer story by Reginald Barker writing as Vance Richardson (I have no idea who Zip Sawyer was; not a bad pulp character name, though). That's a solid enough line-up I suspect this was an entertaining issue.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Underworld Magazine, June 1929

This cover by W.C. Brigham is eye-catching for a couple of reasons: the sheer brutality of the scene depicted, plus the use of a swastika in the logo well before it gained notoriety for other reasons. THE UNDERWORLD MAGAZINE was an early gang pulp published by Harold Hersey, and if I recall correctly, a lot of Hersey's pulps used a swastika in their logos. There are some good authors in this issue including James P. Olsen and Galen C. Colin (both probably best remembered for their Westerns), Henry Leverage (one of the stars of the gang pulps, and he appears twice in this issue, once as himself and once under the name Carl Henry), Armitage Trail (the author of SCARFACE), veteran pulpsters Anatole Feldman and Harold Ward, and a couple of one-shot authors, Mack Ozark and W. Jeremiah Evans. Mack Ozark especially sounds like a pseudonym to me. I've read almost nothing from the gang pulps, and I really think I should explore them more. Just a matter of finding the time.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, January 1928

Now that is one suspicious-looking hombre. Don't reckon I'd trust him at all. But he gives us an eye-catching cover by H.C. Murphy Jr. There are some fine authors in this issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE, led by Eugene Cunningham with two entries, one a short story and the other an installment of a serial, plus Walt Coburn, S. Omar Barker, and Galen C. Colin. I'm not familiar with Jack Smalley, the author of the cover-featured story, or E.L. Marks, U. Stanley Aultman, and Charles Penvir Gordon, who wrote the other stories in this issue. But Cunningham, Coburn, and Barker are more than enough to make me figure this one would be worth reading if I had a copy. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double-Action Western, January 1951

Yet another Old West poker game that ends in powdersmoke and hot lead! This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, complete with a pencil-scribbled address, 547 W. Main. Whenever I see something like this, I always wonder: What was located at 547 W. Main? Why did one of this pulp’s previous owners have to grab a pencil and write that address on whatever was handy . . . like the January 1951 issue of DOUBLE-ACTION WESTERN? With that cover date, which was an off-sale date, this issue would have been on the newsstands and magazine racks during December 1950. But that doesn’t mean that’s when the address was written on it. Could have been then, could have been any time since then until the time the copy came into my hands. We’ll never know. But I like to ponder such things anyway.

The lead novel in this issue—and at 60 pages of small, double-columned type, it actually is pretty close to novel length—is “Satan’s Home Spread” by Galen C. Colin. I’ve seen Colin’s name on plenty of Western pulp TOCs, but I don’t recall reading anything by him until now. In this story, our protagonist Brad Towler has escaped from prison in Montana, where he was locked up for a crime he didn’t commit, and headed for Arizona, where he hopes to find the outlaw Sonora Jackson, who framed him and got him sent to prison. No sooner does Brad arrive in the cowtown of Loder than he encounters gambler and gunman Apache Crockett, whose younger brother Tom just happened to be Brad’s cellmate in prison and who was also framed for a crime he didn’t commit by the villainous Sonora Jackson. Crockett convinces Brad to pose as notorious gunman Buck Briggs so he can infiltrate Jackson’s gang, but he neglects to tell Brad that Briggs is wanted for murder, so Brad soon finds himself behind bars again with a lynch mob howling for his blood. Oh, and the rancher Buck Briggs supposedly shot in the back has a beautiful daughter, and Brad falls for her right away even though she hates him because she believes he gunned down her father.

Got all that? If it sounds like there’s enough coincidence and back-story for a Walt Coburn yarn, that’s because there is, and Colin piles it fast and thick. And honestly, before the end of the story he kind of loses control of the plot, so that several twists stretch our suspension of disbelief past the breaking point.

Despite that, “Satan’s Home Spread” is an entertaining tale, no doubt about that. Brad is a good protagonist, the action moves along at a fast pace, and a very appealing little dog figures heavily in the plot, which isn’t something you see a lot of in Western pulps. I own one novel by Galen C. Colin and I’m sure I’ll read it eventually, but probably not right away.

Next up is the short story “Only Dead Men Leave” by an author I’m not familiar with, Floyd C. Day. It’s about a young man blackmailed into joining an outlaw gang to keep his father’s crimes from being exposed. It’s okay but utterly forgettable. Day only published a few stories, but for different publishers so he seems to have been a real guy, not a house-name.

“Test of Guilt” is by T.W. Ford, a very prolific and generally dependable pulpster who wrote scores of Western and sports yarns. It’s a low-key story about a rancher who has to determine whether his ne’er-do-well brother-in-law is really a murderer. It’s a minor story that Ford probably wrote in a couple of hours, but it’s well-written and effective enough to be entertaining.

The issue concludes with the short story “Hell’s Postmaster” by Cliff Campbell, which was a Columbia Publications house name. Whenever I see a house name, I always suspect that the actual author already has a story in the same issue under his own name or another pseudonym, so I immediately thought that T.W. Ford might be the author of this tale about a two-fisted, fast-on-the-draw postmaster, a stolen gold shipment, and a hidden mine. Based on the style, which includes heavy use of what I call “Yuh mangy polecat” dialect, I don’t think it’s Ford’s work after all. So I don’t know who wrote this yarn, but it has enough over-the-top action in it that I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Overall, I wouldn’t call this an outstanding issue, but every story in it is readable, and despite some reservations about the plotting, I’m glad I finally read a story by Galen C. Colin.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Popular Western, September 1936

A great cover by A. Leslie Ross on this issue of POPULAR WESTERN, and by coincidence, the lead novel is by A. Leslie Scott, writing under his A. Leslie pseudonym. Other authors on hand in this issue are Syl MacDowell (as himself and as Tom Gunn with a Sheriff Blue Steele novelette), Tom Curry, Galen C. Colin, Miles Overholt, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Frank Carl Young, Eugene A. Clancy, Dabney Otis Collins, Claude Rister (as Buck Billings), Charles D. Richardson Jr., and house-names Jackson Cole, Buck Benson, and Sam Brant. Not an all-star lineup, maybe, but with Scott, Curry, Gardner, Overholt, and MacDowell, probably pretty good reading.

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: All Western Magazine, December 1936

The Gun-Totin' Redhead, a fixture on the covers of Western pulps from Popular Publications, even shows up on Dell's ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, as in this cover by Arthur Mitchell. She doesn't appear particularly angry in this one, more like annoyed, but she's still ready to burn some powder and throw some lead. It's a safe bet that plenty of powder gets burned inside this issue, with stories by Tom Roan, Charles M. Martin, Hapsburg Liebe, Sam H. Nickels, Galen C. Colin, house-name Clay Starr (who might well have been Martin, too), and lesser known authors Victor Kaufman and Stanley Hofflund.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Cowboy Stories, June 1935

Well, this cowpoke has all kinds of problems, what with being thrown off that horse and having a rattlesnake waiting for him on the ground. I don't know the artist, but he's painted a scene I wouldn't want to find myself in. Inside this issue of COWBOY STORIES are yarns by plenty of good writers, though, including James P. Olsen, W. Ryerson Johnson, Wilfred McCormick, S. Omar Barker, Carmony Gove, and Galen C. Colin. COWBOY STORIES was a long-running Street & Smith pulp, never as popular as WESTERN STORY or WILD WEST WEEKLY but with consistently good covers and authors. 

Saturday Morning Bonus Pulp: Double Action Western, November 1944

What did I tell you about those Old West barber shops? It just wasn't safe going into those places, as the cover on this issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN proves. This issue has only three stories in it, a novel by Galen C. Colin, an author I've never read, and short stories by Chuck Martin, whose work I've read and enjoyed in the past, and Basil Wells, an author I'd never even heard of. But a quick check of the Fictionmags Index reveals that Wells broke into the pulps in 1940 and as still writing stories for small press magazines as late as the Nineties! There weren't very many pulpsters still active at that point.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, August 1936

This is a pulp I own and read recently. The scan is from the copy I read. Arthur Mitchell, who was a pretty prolific pulp cover artist, mostly in the Thirties, painted the cover. ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, from what I’ve read of it, was a pretty good Western pulp.

It opens with the novella “Deuce of Diamonds” by Charles M. Martin, who also wrote a great deal for the pulps under the name Chuck Martin. This one features drifting cowpoke and gunman “Roaming” Reynolds, as well as his sidekick, young Texas Joe. There are three stories in this short-lived series, all appearing in ALL WESTERN, and this is the middle one. Reynolds and Texas Joe find themselves helping out a couple of old ranchers (one of whom has a beautiful daughter, of course) who are being plagued by rustlers. Reynolds suspects that local cattle baron Griff Tyson, owner of the Deuce of Diamonds spread, is behind the trouble. Tyson is quite a gunfighter himself and likes to shoot playing cards out of the air, his favorite being the two of diamonds, hence the name.

This story is very heavy on the “yuh mangy polecat” dialect, and there’s nothing in the plot or characters you haven’t seen many, many times in Western pulps, but Martin, like Walt Coburn, was an actual cowboy and the background details of his stories always ring true now matter how standard the plots are. Also, he writes in a very terse, clipped style that I like quite a bit. Martin was something of an eccentric and had a “cemetery” in his back yard where he planted miniature tombstones bearing the names of the villains he killed in his stories. And also like Coburn, he came to a bad end, committing suicide when he had played out his string as a writer. I enjoy his work because of his distinctive style, but I wouldn’t put him in the top rank of Western pulpsters. I never hesitate to read one of this stories, though.

Sam H. Nickels was the author of the Hungry and Rusty series that ran in WILD WEST WEEKLY. I haven’t read any of those, but I suspect, based on the characters’ names, that they’re humorous yarns. The protagonist of Nickels’ story in this issue of ALL WESTERN, “Mud in Mooney’s Eye” is Mournful Mooney, and while it’s not full-fledged slapstick and has some decent action, it’s definitely on the lighter side. Mooney is a sad-sack character who always attracts bullies, but actually he’s a dangerous gunman and a whirlwind with his fists, as he proves in this story when he’s hired to pin on a lawman’s star and clean up the border town of Vacaton. This story is okay, readable but nothing special.

“Empty Shells” by Harry F. Olmsted is definitely a cut above that. This is a tense, well-written yarn that finds a killer known as the Montana Kid searching for a young man who has left the owlhoot trail behind him and returned home to try to reclaim his late father’s ranch. There’s an air of brooding vengeance about this one that shows why Olmsted is one of my favorite Western pulp authors.

I enjoy S. Omar Barker’s cowboy poetry and Western non-fiction, but his short stories usually don’t appeal to me. I’ve mentioned many times that with few exceptions, I’m not a fan of comedy Westerns, and the blurb on the Table of Contents for “All Ears”, Barker’s story in this issue is “A Boosty Peckleberry Laugh Riot”. (I think the editor misspelled “Laff”.) This is one of a series of tall tales spun by the old cowpoke Boosty Peckleberry to entertain the other cowboys in the bunkhouse. It concerns a mule that created the Grand Canyon. I didn’t care for it.

J.E. Grinstead wasn’t a cowboy himself, but he came from pioneer stock and was a newspaperman in Oklahoma and Texas not long after those places were still the frontier. After retiring from newspaper work, he became a prolific Western author, and his fiction has the same air of authenticity as that of Coburn and Martin. His story in this issue, “Six-Gun Music”, is about a tramp who comes stumbling from the desert into the wild border town of San Tomas and finds himself in the middle of some sinister goings-on. It’s a tough, well-written yarn and I really enjoyed it. I think I need to read some of Grinstead’s novels. I read one, WHEN TEXANS RIDE, many years ago but none since, although I’ve read some of his pulp stories.

The final story in the issue is “Death Takes the Trail” by Galen C. Colin, a vengeance tale in which a young cowboy tries to track down the men responsible for killing his foster father. It has some nice action and moves right along, but the plot is pretty thin and seemed to need at least one more twist.

Overall, this is a good but not great issue of ALL WESTERN. The stories by Olmsted and Grinstead are excellent, with the novella by Martin worth reading if not quite up to the level of those other stories. None of the others really impressed me. But still, good enough that I won’t hesitate to read another issue sometime.