Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Fiction Monthly, March 1936

I like the J.W. Scott cover on this issue of a little-remembered Western pulp that ran for about five years in the mid-to-late Thirties with a few name changes along the way, starting as WESTERN FICTION MAGAZINE, becoming WESTERN FICTION MONTHLY, then going back to WESTERN FICTION MAGAZINE and finally ending up as WESTERN FICTION. I don't own any of them and don't think I've ever laid eyes on an issue. But they had decent covers and plenty of good writers appeared in their pages. In this particular issue are stories by William MacLeod Raine, Alan LeMay, Harold Channing Wire, Hugh Pendexter, and the lesser-known Forrest R. Brown. I'm sure the readers who picked it up back then enjoyed it. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, July 30, 1923

A.G. Peck, an artist I'm not familiar with, painted the evocative cover on this issue of ADVENTURE. As usual, the line-up of authors inside is very strong: Harold Lamb, J. Allan Dunn, Georges Surdez, Hugh Pendexter, J.D. Newsom, Karl W. Detzer, Bill Adams, and Raymond S. Spears. Arthur Sullivant Hoffman was still the editor at this point. ADVENTURE was a great pulp, issue after issue.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, December 15, 1927

As we've discussed before, nothing says "adventure" quite like a pith helmet, and this cover by V.E. Pyles is proof of that. And, of course, the pulp's title is ADVENTURE, so that's a clue, too. As is the line-up of authors inside for a pulp-savvy reader: Arthur O. Friel, J.D. Newsom, Raoul Whitfield, Hugh Pendexter, Stephen Payne, F.R. Buckley, and Leonard H. Nason. The editor during this era was Anthony M. Rud, a well-known adventure pulpster himself. So the readers certainly knew what they would be getting for their quarter, and they probably were well-pleased with it, too.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, August 3, 1920

An unusual but effective cover by Dwight Franklin graces this issue of ADVENTURE. It's a good-looking issue all the way around with stories by W.C. Tuttle (the second Hashknife Hartley yarn, "A Whizzer on Willer Creek"), Harold Lamb (a Khlit the Cossack story), Hugh Pendexter, and Charles Beadle, among other writers lesser known these days. It's easy to see why ADVENTURE was regarded as one of the best pulps.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, March 1, 1935

The March 1, 1935 issue of ADVENTURE, which I own thanks to Scott Cupp, starts off with one of the magazine’s most iconic covers, the great sailor-and-monkey cover by Walter Baumhofer. The scan, as usual with pulps that own, is from the actual issue I read.

The lead story, which ADVENTURE bills as a novelette but is more like a 40,000 word short novel, is “The Loot of Santana”, a wonderful yarn by one of my favorites, W.C. Tuttle, featuring his best characters, range detectives Hashknife Hartley and Sleepy Stevens. They show up right away in this one (often Tuttle holds off on introducing them until later in the story), and no sooner do they ride onto the page than they discover the body of a murdered cowboy in a corral that’s supposed to hold a herd of horses. The horses are gone, of course, no doubt stolen by the same owlhoots who murdered the cowboy. Hashknife can’t pass up a mystery, so he and Sleepy soon find themselves mixed up in a complex plot involving a Romeo-and-Juliet-type of romance, the threat of a sheep empire moving in on a valley full of cattle ranches, a sinister roadhouse below the border, a bank robbery, and several more murders. Nobody can accuse Tuttle of not packing plenty of plot into his stories! When you read enough Hashknife stories they become a little formulaic, but it’s a great formula and nobody ever did it better than Tuttle. I had an absolutely great time reading this one.

Sadly, the quality of this issue takes a bit of a nosedive after that. The next two stories are pretty bland. Perry Adams’ “A Contract in Kabul” is about an American and a Scotsman trying to escape from Afghanistan when the Afghans are on the brink of going to war against the English. Maybe Robert E. Howard’s El Borak stories have spoiled me for stuff like this, but Adams’ story never generated much excitement for me. Edgar Piper’s “Down Hell’s Gullet” has a good title, but its plot about a ship’s captain trying to eliminate the use of snuff among his crew didn’t do much for me. There’s other man-against-the-elements stuff going on, but it didn’t hold my interest.

Next up is Part 2 of a 4-part serial by Hugh Pendexter, “The Woods-Runner”. It’s probably pretty good, but I generally don’t read serial installments unless I have the whole thing, so I skipped this one.

Things take a considerable turn for the better with Eugene Cunningham’s short story “The Red Mare”. Cunningham is best known for his Westerns, of course, but this story is set in 17^th Century England and is about a notorious highwayman, an eloping noblewoman, some schemers, and the magnificent horse of the title. Actually, this one would have worked just as well as a Western, but the setting makes for a refreshing difference.

Rounding out the issue is “Tyrannical and Capricious Conduct” by Roy Churchill, another nautical story about a tough boatswain’s mate and an incompetent young sailor who turns out to have a secret. It’s not the sort of story that immediately grabs my attention, but the ending is okay.

So this issue of ADVENTURE is a bit of a mixed bag: a classic cover, an excellent short novel by Tuttle, a very good story by Cunningham, and the rest of the contents not very impressive (with the caveat that I didn’t read the Pendexter serial installment; it’s probably pretty good, too, given Pendexter’s reputation). It’s certainly an issue worth having for its good points.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: All Star Adventure Fiction, May 1936

There's almost an all-star line-up of writers to go with that action-packed cover on this issue of ALL STAR ADVENTURE FICTION. Stories by Hugh Pendexter, J. Allan Dunn, Frank Richardson Pierce, Eugene Cunningham, and Anthony M. Rud, among others. Prolific, long-time, well-respected pulpsters, each and every one.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, October 1, 1930

I didn't know you could still buy pith helmets, but I checked on Amazon and they have a bunch of 'em. I'll have to give that some thought. In the meantime, here's another great issue of ADVENTURE with stories by H. Bedford-Jones. Arthur O. Friel, Hugh Pendexter, L. Patrick Greene, and an article by W.C. Tuttle. No wonder ADVENTURE is regarded as one of the best pulp magazines ever published.

Now Available From Black Dog Books

Black Dog Books has six new titles now available for order, and it's a pulp bonanza!

The Garden of TNT by William J. Makin—The compete adventures of the Red Wolf of Arabia. With an introduction by Mike Ashley.

Dying Comes Hard by James P. Olsen—Two-fisted investigator "Hard Guy" Dallas Duane knocks the crime out of these oil field mysteries. With an introduction by James Reasoner.

The Voice of the Night by Hugh Pendexter—Jeff Faschon, Inquirer, is called in to solve a string of baffling mysteries. With an introduction by Evan Lewis.

Tarrano the Conqueror by Ray Cummings—A war between worlds as Tarrano the Conqueror attempts to take over the Earth. With an introduction by Tom Roberts.

Death Has An Escort by Roger Torrey—Crime comes in many forms, great and small—but no crime compares to murder! With an introduction by Richard A. Moore.

and

Windy City Pulp Stories No. 15—celebrating H.P Lovecraft and the Street & Smith comics.

As noted above, I wrote the intro for DYING COMES HARD, and it's a really good book, as purely entertaining as anything I've read recently. I'm sure the others are all great as well and I look forward to reading them. I've read some of the Red Wolf of Arabia stories in BLUE BOOK and really enjoyed them. Roger Torrey is another long-time favorite of mine. Tom Roberts does a beautiful job with these books, and if you're a pulp fan you can't go wrong with anything he publishes.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Quick Trigger Western, May 1936

This is another obscure Western pulp, at least to me, but man, what a line-up of authors!  There are only three stories in this issue, listed as novels but probably more like novellas, but the authors are W.C. Tuttle, Eugene Cunningham, and Hugh Pendexter.  All of those are pretty big names in the pulp field.  Tuttle is a long-time favorite of mine, Cunningham has a great reputation and what little I've read of his work has been good, and Pendexter is an old hand from the glory days of ADVENTURE.  I haven't read any of Pendexter's work, but I know his stories are highly regarded.  I'll bet Walker Martin can offer an opinion on them.  The cover of this issue itself is nothing special, but I'll bet the contents are pretty darned good.  (And judging by the listing in the Fictionmags Index, they're not reprints, either.)