Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Street & Smith's Top-Notch, March 1933

This issue of TOP-NOTCH has a good cover by John Coughlin, an artist I associate more with DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE, whether that impression is correct or not. The lead novella is by an author whose name wasn't familiar to me, R.E. Dupuy. But a little investigation revealed a pretty interesting story. Richard Ernest Dupuy was a newspaper reporter who served as an artilleryman in World War I, then stayed in the army and made a career out of it. But he had sold a few pulp stories before the war and took it up again in the late Twenties, placing a story in WEIRD TALES but concentrating on war and adventure yarns for various pulps. That came to an end when World War II began and Dupuy became the Director of Public Information at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, where he reported directly to General Eisenhower. It was Dupuy who announced to the world via radio when the invasion of Normandy began on D-Day. Pretty good for an old pulpster. After the war, Dupuy retired as a colonel and wrote military history books. I've never read anything by him, as far as I recall. There are only three other pieces of fiction in this issue of TOP-NOTCH, all of them by authors who wrote a lot of Westerns: Galen C. Colin, J. Allan Dunn, and Walker A. Tompkins, who has one of his Ozar the Aztec/Lost Race novelettes in this issue under the house-name Valentine Wood. Dunn, of course, wrote a lot of other genres besides Westerns, but he was a stalwart in that field. Quite a few issues of TOP-NOTCH can be found on-line, but this doesn't appear to be one of them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sea Novel Magazine, November 1940

SEA NOVEL MAGAZINE was a Munsey pulp that lasted for only two issues. This is the first. You can't blame its brief run on Rudolph Belarski, who provided a great cover, and I'd be willing to bet that the novel by J. Allan Dunn that takes up almost the entire issue was pretty good, too, based on Dunn's track record. As far as I can tell, "Northwest to Mutiny" was never reprinted, and this issue doesn't appear to be posted anywhere on-line, so I doubt if I'll ever read the story, but dang, it sounds good, doesn't it? There are some poems and one short story in this issue, as well, by authors I've never heard of: Ethel Talbot Scheffauer, Bob Ferris, Thomas J. Murray, and William Slavens McNutt.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, March 12, 1938

I don’t own this pulp, but thanks to the kindness of my friend Cullen Gallagher, I was able to read a PDF of its lead novelette, “Feud of the Haunted Corral”, featuring T.W. Ford’s best-known series character Solo Strant, also known as the Silver Kid. The cover on this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY is by H.W. Scott, and it’s an excellent illustration of the Silver Kid in action.

Solo Strant is a drifting gunfighter. He doesn’t hire out his gun, but he’s quick to pitch in when he sees someone being taken advantage of or an innocent person being threatened. As this yarn opens, that’s what happens when a gang of gun-wolves attacks a small ranch. Solo rides to the rescue, but as it turns out, he may not have done the right thing after all, since it looks like the rancher he rescued may be a murderer!

That’s the first mistake Solo makes in this story, but it’s not the last one. In fact, he seems uncharacteristically prone to making the wrong decisions. But that may have something to do with the extremely complicated plot Ford comes up with, which deals with a generations-long feud between two ranching families, assorted murders, mistaken identities, and the Haunted Corral, which is not a corral at all but rather an area of badlands where folks go in, but they seldom come out alive. The whole “shadow of the past” element in this novelette reminds me of many of Walt Coburn’s novels and stories.

“Feud of the Haunted Corral” is a fast-moving, entertaining story. Solo Strant is a likable protagonist, and I’ve enjoyed every story I’ve read about him. It’s pretty easy to spot the evil mastermind in this one, but that doesn’t take away from the pleasure of reading it. My thanks to Cullen for making that possible.

Elsewhere in this issue are stories by a number of WILD WEST WEEKLY stalwarts. Norman W. Hay, writing under the house-name William A. Todd, contributes a Risky McKee yarn. (All the Risky McKee stories are by Hay, and while William A. Todd is considered a house-name, it’s possible Hay wrote everything under that by-line. We’ll probably never know for sure.) There’s a Calamity Boggs story by Lee Bond. Guy L. Maynard pitches in with a Reckless Blaine story. (There are six Reckless Blaine stories, published in six consecutive issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY. I’d be surprised if Maynard didn’t cobble them together into a fix-up novel, but if he did, I can’t find any record of it.) J. Allan Dunn, Charles M. Martin, and Carl Raht contribute stand-alone stories. This appears to be a very good issue of one of my favorite Western pulps.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Pirate Stories, May 1935

PIRATE STORIES was a short-lived adventure pulp edited and published by Hugo Gernsback. This is the fourth of only six issues. The cover is by Sidney Reisenberg. Two of the authors inside are prolific and well-respected pulpsters: J. Allan Dunn and Nels Leroy Jorgensen. I hadn't heard of any of the others, who include Norman White Jr., Jack Covington, and Jaques Edouard Durand. This is Durand's only credit in the Fictionmags Index. I wonder if he was really J. Allan Dunn. Nothing to base that on, just a stray thought.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, March 28, 1931

This isn't a particularly dramatic Mountie cover on this issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, but I don't recall coming across a Mountie on a DFW cover before, so I find it interesting. I don't know who painted it. There's certainly a decent group of authors in this issue, including Hulbert Footner, Fred MacIsaac, J. Allan Dunn, J. Lane Linklater, and Edward Parrish Ware. Those are all prolific, well-respected pulpsters. I don't own this issue, but I think it would be worth reading if I did. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, November 1933

This is a pulp that I own. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover painting is by R. Farrington Elwell, and the Table of Contents lists its name as “Last Stand”. Elwell did a number of covers for ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, and they’re pretty good. I read some of the stories in this one, but not all of them.

This issue leads off with the first installment of a serial by Walt Coburn, “Feud Valley”. Coburn is one of my favorite Western authors, but I happen to own a copy of the novel FEUD VALLEY and I intend to read it one of these days, so I skipped this part.

Next up is a story by J.E. Grinstead, another authentic cowboy author who is becoming one of my favorites, too. This one has the odd title “Pudd’n’ Foots”. It’s about a drifting cowpoke with big feet and seemingly no talent for ranch work at all. When he signs on with a new spread, he’s the object of ridicule by most of the crew, although two of the men do take a liking to him. That doesn’t stop them from poking fun at him, too, though. I wasn’t sure about this one—you know I’m not generally a fan of comedy Westerns and that sure seemed to be where this yarn was heading. But then part of the way through it takes a sharp turn into dark territory and follows that up with some dramatic, very well-done action. Funny name or not, I wound up really enjoying “Pudd’n’ Foots” and need to read more by Grinstead.

I tend to dislike animal stories even more than comedy Westerns, so “The Big Bull of Five Rivers” by George Cory Franklin, which has its protagonist an elk, wasn’t really to my taste. I wound up skimming this one.

I feel kind of bad about it, but “Shanty Loses a Battle” by Norrell Gregory suffered the same fate. This lighthearted story is about a couple of cowboys trying to raise money so that an old ranch woman can build a new house. I had so much trouble working up much interest in it that I wound up losing track of the plot. This is another one that’s just not for me.

I’m just not having much luck with Western pulps these days, am I? But next up in this one is “Muzzle Flame”, a novelette by the usually dependable J. Allan Dunn. No comedy here, as it starts out (consider yourself warned) with some brutal action, including the range hog villain callously killing a dog. With my soft spot for dogs, I almost said, “Nope, that’s it”, but I kept reading. The fight is over water rights in this one, and Dunn manipulates the plot in really expert fashion, heaping up trouble on his protagonist until you wonder how the poor guy is ever going to get out of it, but at the same time having things proceed in a logical, believable way. And the action scenes are top-notch. I wish the bad guy had missed the dog and sent it scurrying off howling, but other than that, this is a really, really good story.

Finally, we have “Picketwire Drills a Well”, one in a series of tall tales narrated by a cowboy known as Picketwire Pete. Pete has developed a breed of giant cattle, you see, big enough to knock a railroad car off the tracks by rubbing against it, and finding water for his herd of giant cattle is a problem because they can drink a river dry in a matter of minutes . . . If you’re thinking this sounds like a Pecos Bill yarn, you’re right. I don’t know if those folk tales had any influence on author J.W. Triplett, but it certainly seems like they might have. This is another one where I didn’t make it to the end.

Even though I’ve complained about some of the stories, this issue is still a vast improvement over that issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN I read last week. I’m confident that the Coburn serial is good, and the stories by Grinstead and Dunn are both very good. Even the stories I didn’t like and didn’t finish seem to be competently written and other readers might enjoy them a lot more than I did. They’re just not the sort of yarns that resonate with me. If you happen to have this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, don’t hesitate to give it a try. I’m glad I read what I did out of it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, December 12, 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, complete with tape around the edges applied by some previous owner. The cover art is by Albin Henning, who appears to have done more interior illustrations for the pulps and the slicks than he did covers. I think this one is okay, but I don’t like it as well as the covers by R.G. Harris and H.W. Scott, who did most of the WILD WEST WEEKLY covers during the Thirties and Forties.

The lead novelette in this issue is “Long-rider’s Loot” by William A. Todd, a house-name used on the Risky McKee series by Norman W. Hay. Hay wrote hundreds of stories for WILD WEST WEEKLY under half a dozen pseudonyms and house-names, including approximately three dozen about a young rancher in Arizona named Risky McKee, who raises and trains horses. This is the first Risky McKee story I’ve read. In it, a drug-addicted outlaw named Hypo Crawley (great name) escapes from prison and tries to recover the loot from a bank robbery he hid several years earlier. Crawley double-crossed his gang and stole the money from them, so they’re after it, too, and hope he’ll lead them to it. Risky finds himself in the middle of all this, assisted by his sidekick Sufferin’ Joe, a hypochondriac old codger always complaining about one ailment or another acting like he has one foot in the grave. This is a pretty decent, if standard plot, and Hay throws in a couple of nice twists in before the end. There’s a great line that put a smile on my face: “He’s so crooked he could hide behind a corkscrew.” Sufferin’ Joe is a good character, too, definitely comedy relief but also tough and competent when he needs to be. The only real problem about this story is Risky himself, who is such a bland and shallow character that he’s barely there on the page. I don’t know if he comes off better in the other stories—I’d certainly read more of them because I like Hay’s writing overall—but he keeps this yarn from being anything more than average.

Hay is also the author of the second story in this issue, a stand-alone called “Six-gun Wages” published under the house-name Philip F. Deere. This is a much better story about a young cowboy who discovers a rustling operation along the border between Arizona and Mexico. It’s a well-written tale and one of the characters who seems like a villain turns out not to be, which is always a nice twist. I enjoyed this one quite a bit. As I said, I like Norman W. Hay’s work. As far as I can tell, he published only a handful of stories under his own name, and maybe that’s the way he wanted it, but I think that’s kind of a shame. I wish he’d written some Western novels.

J. Allan Dunn wrote more than 150 stories about Texas Ranger Bud Jones for WILD WEST WEEKLY. I’ve read only one other one before now, and I liked it fairly well with a few reservations. The Bud Jones yarn in this issue is called “Hide-out” and opens with a gang of desperate outlaws fleeing with the loot from a bank robbery they’ve pulled. Bud is the Ranger who sets out to track them down, but he seems stymied when their trail mysteriously disappears, until he figures out the clever trick they’ve pulled. No reservations on this one. It’s a solid, well-plotted yarn with a great showdown at the end.  By the way, has anyone ever tried to figure out how much Dunn wrote? His total wordage has to be right up there with Frederick Faust, H. Bedford-Jones, and Erle Stanley Gardner.

Lee Bond wrote two long-running series about good guy outlaws and the lawmen who dogged pursue them, the Long Sam Littlejohn series that ran for some 50 stories in TEXAS RANGERS and the Oklahoma Kid series in WILD WEST WEEKLY which was even more popular, lasting for approximately 70 stories. “Boot Hill Gamble” is the Oklahoma Kid novelette in this issue, and it finds the Kid (whose real name is Jack Reese, but that’s hardly ever used) on the trail of some outlaws who held up a stage, murdered the driver and guard, and got away with $30,000 in gold bars. The Kid is blamed for this crime, and the only way to clear his name is to round up the real culprits. This is a very standard plot, as usual for Bond, but he does a good job with it and includes plenty of well-written action, which is his strong suit. I like the Long Sam yarns considerably more than the ones featuring the Oklahoma Kid, but Bond’s work is nearly always worth reading although it seldom rises to the top rank of Western pulp fiction.

Claude Rister wrote more than a hundred stories for the pulps, mostly Westerns but with some detective, adventure, and aviation yarns mixed in. He also wrote a number of Western novels under the pseudonym Buck Billings. His story in this issue, “Outlaw Option”, is about a cowboy who’s had a bit of a shady past coming to the aid of an old-timer who’s about to be finagled out of his ranch by a slick gambler. In order to do that, the protagonist enlists the help of several other former owlhoots. There’s nothing special about the plot in this one, but Rister writes well and isn’t as heavy-handed with the dialect as some Western pulpsters can be. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by him and need to read more.

There’s also a Texas Triggers novelette by Walker A. Tompkins to round out this issue, but that series was fixed up into a novel called TEXAS TRIGGERS, and since I happen to own that book, I didn’t read the novelette. I’ll get to it when I read the book.

Overall, this isn’t a bad issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. All the stories are readable and fairly entertaining. But it’s not an outstanding issue, either. It's about as average as you can get with a Western pulp. Fortunately, with WILD WEST WEEKLY, that means it’s enjoyable enough to be worth reading if you have a copy.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, September 20, 1930

I really like the cover by Paul Stahr on this issue of ARGOSY. Stahr doesn't get mentioned a lot when people talk about great pulp cover artists, but I think his work was consistently excellent and he really gave ARGOSY a distinctive look. The lineup of authors inside this issue is very strong, too: a Whispering Sands story by Erle Stanley Gardner, short stories by F. Van Wyck Mason and Anthony M. Rud, and serial installments by Roy de S. Horn, J. Allan Dunn, Eustace L. Adams, and J.E. Grinstead. Those serials are frustrating to readers and collectors now, but the readers back in 1930 must have enjoyed them. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Street & Smith's Wild West Weekly, January 8, 1938

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat battered copy in the scan. The cover art is by H.W. Scott, and it’s an excellent depiction of T.W. Ford’s series character Solo Strant, also known as the Silver Kid because of the silver conchos on his shirt and hatband, the silver-inlaid butts of his guns, and the silver death’s-head clasp on his hat's chin strap. Ford was tremendously prolific in several genres—Western, sports, detective, and aviation—as well as working in the pulps as an editor, but the Silver Kid series is probably his magnum opus. He wrote approximately 60 Silver Kid stories, all of them novella length, which is a pretty significant body of work. They appeared in WILD WEST WEEKLY from 1935 to 1941, then in various Columbia Western pulps from 1942 to 1952. Solo Strant is a small but deadly gunfighter/adventurer who’s not above selling his gun skills if he believes it's for a worthy cause.

In this issue’s lead novella, “Traitors Ride the Sundown”, Strant is hired to find out who’s trying to murder a rancher who has a spread in the Sundown Hills. On the way to take the job, he runs into trouble at an outlaw roadhouse in Bad Man’s Pass but is helped out by a friendly old-timer who is headed in the same direction. When Strant reaches his destination, he has to deal with several bushwhackings and murders before he untangles what’s going on. There are a couple of occasions where someone is about to give him some vital information, only to wind up dead. The plot is pretty simple and straightforward and doesn’t contain any surprises, but I really enjoy the way Ford writes. His punchy, action-packed style really races along and Solo Strant is a very likable protagonist. I’ve read several Silver Kid novellas before and always enjoyed them. “Traitors Ride the Sundown” is also quite entertaining. If somebody were to reprint this series, I’d certainly be a customer for it. Until then, I’ll read ’em where I find ’em.

Ben Conlon is best remembered for writing the Pete Rice stories, which appeared in the character’s own magazine and also in WILD WEST WEEKLY, under the pseudonym Austin Gridley, but he wrote a couple of hundred Western, sports, and adventure yarns for various pulps and under various pen-names over the years. He has a stand-alone story, “Texas Blood”, in this issue under his own name. It’s about a young former Texas Ranger starting a ranch in New Mexico and running into rustling trouble. The stereotypical pulp Western dialect is really thick in this one. Everybody talks that way. My Mangy Polecat Threshold is higher than most people’s, but Conlon overdoes it to the point that I almost gave up. I’m glad I didn’t because, other than the dialogue, his writing is pretty clean and swift and vivid, and the plot has some clever twists leading to a smashing climax. I wound up enjoying the story quite a bit.

J. Allan Dunn wrote approximately 160 stories for WILD WEST WEEKLY about a young Texas Ranger named Bud Jones. This issue’s yarn is called “Buckshot and Bullets” and finds Bud trying to head off a war between Texas cattlemen and Mexican sheepherders. I nearly always enjoy Dunn’s work, but a couple of things about this one bothered me, the most troublesome that he seems to think Houston is the capital of Texas, not Austin. Also, he has all the Texans referring to the Mexicans as “Mexies”, a term I don’t think I’ve ever heard. That said, this is a pretty well-written, exciting tale with some nice action. Bud Jones is a very likable protagonist, too.

The most prolific series of all in WILD WEST WEEKLY starred Billy West, the young owner of the Circle J ranch in Montana, and his two friends who work for him, feisty, redheaded Joe Scott and cantankerous old codger Buck Foster, along with Sing Lo, the ranch’s Chinese cook. Upwards of 450 novelettes starring this bunch were published between 1927 and 1941, written by half a dozen different authors under the house-name Cleve Endicott. I’d read a few of them before and enjoyed them. The story in this issue, “Gun-Fight Valley”, is by Norman L. Hay, who probably wrote more Circle  J novelettes than anyone else. Our heroes are in Arizona on a cattle-buying trip when they get drawn into the mystery of a missing wagon train. What they find turns out to be somewhat unexpected. This is a nicely plotted yarn with plenty of excellent action. Billy, Joe, and Buck are standard characters but are handled well and I enjoy reading about their exploits. I’d love to see some of this series reprinted someday.

Evidently, “Burro Bait” by Phil Squires is part of a humorous series about a young man from Missouri called Hinges Hollister who goes west to become a cowboy. The story is told in the form of letters between Hinges and his mother and girlfriend back home. The dialect is so thick as to be almost indecipherable, and the humor falls flat. Not to my taste at all, and I didn’t finish it.

The issue wraps up with “Tommy Rockford Bucks the Nevada Wolves” by one of my favorite Western writers, Walker A. Tompkins. By WILD WEST WEEKLY standards, the Tommy Rockford series wasn’t that prolific: approximately 50 stories in a dozen years, 1931-43. But it’s a good one, and Tommy Rockford is one of my favorite characters from this pulp known for its series characters. He’s a young railroad detective, and if they had ever made any Tommy Rockford movies, Roy Rogers would have been perfect to play him. In this yarn, which takes place in Arizona and Mexico, despite the title, Tommy takes on an outlaw gang that has traveled from Nevada to Arizona to visit another gang and see their hideout. This leads to a stagecoach holdup, an attempted bank robbery, and Tommy being captured by the outlaws. I found this one to be something of a disappointment because, despite all those plot elements, it never comes together as a very compelling story. It’s more a case of just throwing things in the pot until there are enough pages. Even worse, Tommy does something that’s so out of character, it just about ruined the story for me, and it wasn’t even necessary to make the plot work. I think it would have been more effective handling things a different way. The story is readable enough because Tompkins’ prose is always smooth and just races right along, but this is easily the worst of the Tommy Rockford series I’ve read so far.

So what you have in this issue is definitely a mixed bag. The cover is excellent, the Silver Kid and Circle J stories are both very good, the Bud Jones story is flawed but entertaining, the Tommy Rockford story definitely sub-par, the Ben Conlon story okay but with overdone dialect, and the Hinges Hollister story not for me at all. I still like WILD WEST WEEKLY, but this is far from my favorite issue. It does make me want to read more Silver Kid and Circle J stories, though.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Clues Detective Stories, April 1939

That's a pretty daring cover on this issue of CLUES DETECTIVE STORIES, especially for a pulp published by Street & Smith, an outfit that could be a little stodgy from time to time. The art is by Modest Stein, not a favorite artist of mine, but I have to admit, I like this one quite a bit. Inside are stories by Donald Wandrei, Otis Adelbert Kline, J. Allan Dunn, J.J. des Ormeaux, Robert C. Blackmon, and Harry Lee Fellinge, all of them prolific and dependable pulpsters. I don't own this issue or any issues of CLUES, as far as I recall, but it seems like a pulp that would have been worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Pirate Stories, March 1935

I don't believe I've ever run across a mention of PIRATE STORIES before. It was a short-lived adventure pulp edited and published by Hugo Gernsback of AMAZING STORIES fame. This is the third of six issues. I like the cover by Joseph Sokoli. The idea of airborne pirates preying on ships at sea is an interesting one. The feature story in this issue is by Captain Dingle, an author I've been meaning to read for a long time now but still haven't. Backing it up are yarns by the always dependable J. Allan Dunn, George Allan Moffatt, and an author I'm unfamiliar with, J. Winchcombe-Taylor, who certainly has a distinguished-sounding name. I may have to steal that for a character one of these days.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, October 1951

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover is by Sam Cherry, who did nearly all of them for TEXAS RANGERS during this era.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue, “Riders of the Storm”, is attributed to Tom Curry in the Fictionmags Index, the final Curry novel in the series. However, having read it, there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that it’s actually by A. Leslie Scott. It’s Scott’s work, through and through. I was tipped off to this by my friend Anders Nilsson, who told me that the story was rewritten into a Walt Slade paperback called TRIGGER TALK that was published by Pyramid Books five years later under the Bradford Scott pseudonym.

I was baffled as to how a Hatfield novel by Tom Curry wound up being rewritten into a Walt Slade paperback, so I went to my shelves to see if I had a copy of the pulp version. Sure enough, I did, so I pulled it down and read it. I knew within a few pages that Scott was the actual author, not Curry, which explained why he felt free to cannibalize it for that paperback.

The story itself is an excellent entry in the Hatfield series. It opens with Hatfield and a fellow Ranger discovering a ship perched atop a bluff about twenty miles inland from Galveston. Hatfield theorizes that it was carried there by a tidal wave generated by a gigantic hurricane. That seems pretty far-fetched, but hey, it’s a pulp yarn so as I always say, sure, why not. Unfortunately for the new recruit riding with Hatfield, a gang of outlaws are unloading something from the ship and open fire on the two Rangers. The new fellow is killed, and Hatfield is wounded and knocked unconscious. When he comes to and finds his friend dead, he sets out on the owlhoots’ trail, which leads him to Galveston, which has indeed suffered tremendous damage from a hurricane. (The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900? It’s possible. The Hatfield novels weren’t very consistent with their time period, taking place anywhere from the mid-1870s to the late 1890s, depending on the author.)

The plot involves smuggling guns to Mexican revolutionaries and takes Hatfield from Galveston to the Big Thicket in East Texas and finally to Brownsville, down at the tip of Texas on the Rio Grande. It’s a little unusual in that it involves several action scenes on ships. Scott seems to have been trying to break away from his usual formula in the early Fifties, but it didn’t do him any good. His final Walt Slade novella in THRILLING WESTERN appeared earlier in 1951, and the next Hatfield novel in TEXAS RANGERS after this one, “Trail of Hunted Men”, was Scott’s last. But as I’ve mentioned before, he moved right on to paperbacks and probably made more money in the long run. “Riders of the Storm” is a very good story and I’m glad I was prompted to read it. There are also some good interior illustrations by H.L. Parkhurst in this novel.

Next up in this issue is Ralph Yergen’s short story “Vengeance on the Hoof”. It’s written mostly from the point of a view of a horse, a technique I don’t usually care for, and it’s a little hard to read because there’s quite a bit of animal abuse in it. However, Yergen won me over with this story about an outlaw’s horse, and it comes to a satisfying conclusion. Definitely better than I expected it to be.

“The Horsehair Noose” by Leslie Ernenwein is a reprint from the November 1945 issue of THE RIO KID WESTERN. It’s something of a rarity for a Western pulp because it’s a dying message mystery story. In order to prevent a range war, a sheriff has to figure out who murdered a local cattleman, based on a name scrawled in the dirt by the dying man and a few other clues. It’s not a particularly good dying message story, mind you, but I like Ernenwein’s style and I enjoyed this yarn.

“Buffalo Men” is by another veteran, dependable pulpster, J. Allan Dunn. It's a novelette reprinted from the September 1940 issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES. Set in the buffalo hunting era, it’s about the founding of Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle and the epic battle there between a few dozen buffalo hunters and a force of a thousand Indians led by the legendary Comanche chief Quanah Parker. In the first half of the story, Dunn sticks pretty close to the historical facts other than inventing a couple of fictional protagonists to be on hand for the battle, along with a renegade hunter to serve as a minor villain. He even has Bat Masterson on hand, which he was in one of his early exploits. In the battle itself, Dunn strays pretty far from history, having one of his fictional characters make the famous long-distance shot that was actually made by Billy Dixon, and changing the outcome of that shot, as well. Despite that, it’s a very well-written story and captures the feeling of the time and place quite well.

The short story “Payoff in Lead” is another reprint, this time from the October 1946 issue of THE RIO KID WESTERN. The author is Joseph Chadwick, one of the most dependable authors of hardboiled Western tales, and it’s a good one. An embittered ex-Confederate heads west on the trail of the carpetbagger who stole his land and his fiancée after the war. The protagonist finds the man he’s looking for, but things turn out much differently than he expected. A gritty, very satisfying story.

This issue wraps up with a new short story, “A Man’s Job” by Caddo Cameron, whose real name was Charles Richard Beeler. It’s about a young cowboy holding down a line camp by himself for the first time and his encounter with some outlaws. Another good one, with some nice action and a very likable protagonist.

Overall, this is a very solid issue of TEXAS RANGERS with stories ranging from good to excellent and not a really weak one in the bunch. I’m glad the question of who actually wrote the Hatfield novel caused me to pull it off the shelves and read it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, December 10, 1934

When he was still a practicing attorney in California, Erle Stanley Gardner often had Chinese immigrants as clients and was very sympathetic to them and the injustices some of them suffered. I'm surprised he didn't write more stories set in Chinatown. "The Black Egg" in this issue of SHORT STORIES appears to be one of them, judging from the cover. I don't own this issue, it doesn't appear to be on-line anywhere, and I don't believe the story has ever been reprinted, so I don't know anything else about it. But since it's by Erle Stanley Gardner, I'm willing to bet it's good. (I wish more of Gardner's pulp stories would be reprinted, by the way.) There are some other excellent authors in this issue, including Donald Barr Chidsey, J. Allan Dunn, Harry Sinclair Drago, and Clifford Knight. And the usual red sun in the cover by Frederick Witten is huge this time around.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, October 10, 1935

This issue of SHORT STORIES features a good French Foreign Legion cover by Pete Kuhlhoff, although he's credited as E.H. Kuhlhoff. He was a good artist, as you can see here, but he's best remembered as a gun expert who contributed scores of articles and columns on the subject to various pulps. This issue has an excellent group of writers inside, as well: Clarence E. Mulford, Frank Richardson Pierce, J. Allan Dunn, James B. Hendryx, Bob Du Soe, Richard Howells Watkins, Henry Herbert Knibbs, and forgotten pulpsters Perry Adams, Alexander Lake, and Don Cameron Shafer. Plenty of good reading in those pages, I'll bet.

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: All Star Adventure Fiction, September 1935

I'm not sure I've ever heard of ALL STAR ADVENTURE FICTION, let alone come across a copy. But I'm also not sure why it's not better known and wasn't successful at the time, running for only seven issues. It had decent covers by J.W. Scott, including this one, and some fine authors. This issue features stories by Donald Barr Chidsey, J. Allan Dunn, Frank Richardson Pierce, Lemuel de Bra, Rollin Brown, and Arthur Hawthorne Carhart, all of them fine pulpsters who appeared regularly in the top magazines. Their stories here may well have been rejects from ARGOSY, ADVENTURE, etc., but they were probably still pretty good.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, May 26, 1934

This is a dandy, very dynamic cover by Walter Baumhofer. The action seems to almost leap off the page, to use a cliché that happens to be accurate in this case. This issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY features the usual assortment of series and stand-alone stories, heavy on the series. In this case, The Whistlin' Kid by Emery Jackson (J. Allan Dunn), Sonny Tabor by Ward M. Stevens (Paul S. Powers), Shorty Master by Allan R. Bosworth, Hungry and Rusty by Samuel H. Nickels, and the Bar U Twins by Charles E. Barnes. The stand-alones are by Lee Bond, George C. Henderson, and Kent Bennett (who was actually Samuel H. Nickels, his second story in this issue).

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.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Action Stories, March 1932

That's a very striking cover by William Reusswig on this issue of DETECTIVE ACTION STORIES. And you'd be hard put to come up with a better group of writers: Frederick Nebel (with a Sgt. Brinkhaus story; I have the Altus Press collection of these stories and really need to get around to reading them), Carroll John Daly, J. Allan Dunn, J. Lane Linklater, Robert Turner, and Edward Parrish Ware. That's a fine bunch of pulpsters. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Greater Western Magazine, June 1935

Considering the five authors in this issue of GREATER WESTERN MAGAZINE, all with new stories, apparently, it's a little odd who gets top billing on the cover: Rollin Brown. Now, as far as I know, Brown was a prolific, well-respected Western pulpster who ghosted for Ed Earl Repp as well as writing a lot under his own name. But deserving of top billing over Max Brand, Clarence E. Mulford (with a Hopalong Cassidy story, to boot!), and J. Allan Dunn? I wouldn't think so. The fifth author is Ralph Cummins, also a prolific, long-time pulpster but not a household name then or now.