Review: Hell Range in Texas - J.E. Grinstead

Recently I read some pulp stories by J.E. Grinstead that I enjoyed, so I decided to pick up a novel by him and give it a try. HELL RANGE IN TEXAS is a 1958 paperback from Avon that was published originally under the title LAW OF THE TRAIL as a 1940 hardback by Dodge Publishing, one of the lending library publishers. This is probably an expansion of Grinstead’s novella “The Law of the Trail Herd”, which appeared in the September 1926 issue of the pulp THE FRONTIER. The Avon paperback I read (that’s my copy in the scan) says that it’s revised, but I don’t know what that revision consisted of. It’s possible Grinstead just went back to the pulp version after adding material to make it longer for the hardback edition. That’s pure speculation on my part, however, just the sort of thing that makes sense to me.

This story takes place in Texas (of course) in the days following the Civil War when the cattle industry is just getting started in the state and herds have started being driven up the trails through Indian Territory to the railhead in Kansas. The setting is a little unusual, though, in that the action takes place along the Little River in central Texas, rather than in West or South Texas like most Westerns. I’ve driven across the bridge over the Little River just south of Cameron, Texas, many times, and I’ve always thought it was a scenic stream and would make a good setting for a Western. That’s what Grinstead has done.

Most trail bosses in Western fiction are the protagonists, or at least sympathetic characters, but not Shag Sanders in this novel. He’s the bad guy in the first half of the book, stealing cattle from local ranchers as he heads north and buying rustled stock cheaply from outlaws. Old cattleman Montgomery Jackson (who, just as you suspect, has a beautiful daughter) is determined to put a stop to this, leading to a gun battle with Sanders and his crew shooting it out with the cowboys from Jackson’s spread.

However, one of Sanders’ men, young and gun-handy Frank Carleton, goes over to the other side and throws in with Jackson and his bunch, becoming a staunch ally in Jackson’s clash with a rival rancher who works with the crooked trail drivers. Matters are complicated by the fact that Jackson’s beautiful daughter is supposed to marry the rival rancher’s son.

You might also suspect that all this is going to lead up to a big showdown, and you’d be right. Along the way, Grinstead gives us plenty of colorful characters and Old West dialogue without getting too heavy-handed about it.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that Grinstead was an actual cowboy at one time in his life, but my memory was playing tricks on me and I was absolutely wrong about that. However, he was a newspaperman in Texas in the early 20th Century, owning and publishing the newspaper in Kerrville, Texas, a hundred miles or so southwest of where this novel is set, and he was also involved in politics. No doubt he knew quite a few old cattlemen who had been around during the era about which he wrote in his fiction. Because of that, there’s an undeniable air of authenticity about Grinstead’s work that I enjoy.

However, based on this novel, he may be one of those writers who’s better at shorter lengths. HELL RANGE IN TEXAS is pretty slowly paced, and there’s not as much action as there might have been. The action that’s there is sometimes not very well-written, either. Late in the book, there’s a long chase scene/gun battle that really drags and is hard to follow. Or maybe it’s just me. That’s always a possibility.

I give this novel thumbs-up on the setting, characters, and dialogue but found it disappointing because it didn’t capture my interest and drag me along in the story the way I like for fiction to do. I’ll certainly continue to read Grinstead’s stories when I come across one in a Western pulp, and I’ll probably enjoy them. I’ll even check my paperback shelves sometime and see if I have any more of his novels. But I don’t think I’ll be doing that any time soon.

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: 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.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Gun-Swift Western, September 1938

This is a pretty obscure Western pulp. I don't know how many issues there were, since only one has been indexed on the Fictionmags Index. This is Volume 1, Number 5. Nor do I know who painted the cover. But the group of authors inside is a decent one: Ed Earl Repp, J.E. Grinstead, Hapsburg Liebe, Carmony Gove, and Clem Yore. Those hombres generally knew what they were writing about.

UPDATE: On Facebook, John Locke provided some information from the magazine AUTHORS & JOURNALISTS about GUN-SWIFT WESTERN and its editor/publisher (?) Z.S. Sklar. From the October 1939 issue:

Who Is Z.S. Sklar?

Col. John J. Boniface, who writes under the pseudonym of Wilton West and various others for the adventure magazines, sends us a heavy sheaf of correspondence which he defines as a serial entitled, "The Mystery of Z.S. Sklar."

The opening installments of this engrossing serial relate to the call of a magazine entitled Gun-Swift Western, of 19 Avon Place, Springfield, Mass., for manuscripts. The call brought a manuscript last spring from Col. Boniface under one of his pennames, Gordon Strong. Not hearing from the manuscript, the author wrote several letters of inquiry, which were never answered, although the letters were not returned. The Railway Express Agency, in whose hands the matter then was placed, had no better luck, reporting: “Unable to contact the party.”

THE AUTHOR & JOURNALIST, writing in behalf of the author, had a little better luck. In response to its inquiry, came a brief typewritten note: “Magazine has been discontinued.--Z.S. Sklar.”

Acting on this information, the author put the matter into the hands of the post office department. Though declining to take action, the inspector at Boston, Mass., informed him that other writers had complained, and reported that their manuscripts were later returned by the Double-Action Publishing Co., of New York. But Cliff Campbell of the D-A group reported when queried that he had no record of the yarn.

Final appeal was made to the police department of Springfield--and here the mystery not merely persisted, but deepened. Quoting from the letter of John L. Maloney, chief of police:

“While I have caused a thorough investigation to be made, I am unable to locate Z.S Sklar or the Gun-Swift Western magazine at 19 Avon Place, this city. Inquiries were made of the janitor of the above-mentioned address, which is an apartment block in the residential section, who informed our investigating officer that Sklar or this magazine company which you mention has never been located at that address. Inquiries were also made of the letter carrier who delivers mail in this district, who states that he has never delivered mail to Sklar at 19 Avon Place. He is not receiving mail at our local post office. His name does not appear in our city or telephone directory.”

Evidently it all never happened--but others who are in like position must join the author in wondering how come that the magazine did receive manuscripts at that address, return some, and contrive that others were returned through the Double-Action group. We hate to see a masterly and persistent job of sleuthing for a lost manuscript, such as that conducted by Col. Boniface, end up in a blind trail.

 
From the November 1939 AUTHOR & JOURNALIST:

 
Responding to the editorial in our last issue, relating to the mystery of Gunswift Western and Z.S. Sklar, Louis H. Silberkleit, president of Winford Publications, Inc., writes: “Gunswift Western was not connected in any way with the Double Action Group. It so happens that when the magazine was discontinued, the editor, who certainly did run his business from 19 Avon Place, Springfield, Mass., approached us for a job, and was hired. He asked if we would permit him to have his mail forwarded from Springfield to this office. We said yes. That's all we know about the situation.”

I'm always fascinated by stuff like this, and many thanks to John Locke for providing it.

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. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, July 4, 1931

Yesterday's pulp was dated July 4, 1931, and so is today's. This is an All-Star Number of ARGOSY, according to the cover, and I can't argue with that claim. The cover is by Paul Stahr, who painted many great ones for ARGOSY, and inside are stories by H. Bedford-Jones, Theodore Roscoe, George F. Worts, Robert Carse, Ray Cummings, J.E. Grinstead, William Merriam Rouse, and Lt. John Hopper. You won't find a lineup of pulp authors much better than that one.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, May 1944

As usual with a Fiction House pulp, the cover of this issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE features both exciting action and a pretty girl. I don't know who the artist was, but I think he did a good job. Inside are stories by top Western pulpsters Wayne D. Overholster, J.E. Grinstead, M. Howard Lane, and Curtis Bishop, as well as house-name John Starr (if I had to guess, I'd say Bishop, but that's purely a guess) and much-better-known-for-his-science-fiction Clifford D. Simak. I've read a few of Simak's Western stories and found them to be very good. I like the title of that John Starr yarn: "Six Sins in My Holster". The editor must not have been quite at the top of his game, though. That title really needs an exclamation mark at the end of it.

UPDATE: The cover art is by Norman Saunders, used originally on the October 1937 issue of ACTION STORIES. Thanks to Sheila Vanderbeek for the info!

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western, August 1933

I'm not sure that shade of red hair appears in nature, but it appears on several different DIME WESTERN covers in 1933 and it's certainly eye-catching. Equally eye-catching is the group of authors in this issue: Max Brand (Frederick Faust), T.T. Flynn, Harry F. Olmsted (twice, as himself and a Tensleep Maxon story as by Bart Cassidy), Stephen Payne, J.E. Grinstead, and John Colohan. That's a potent pack of pulpsters.

While I don't own a copy of this issue, I have read the Max Brand novella, "Guardian Guns". It was reprinted under the title "The Stage to Yellow Creek" in THE LOST VALLEY, one of the Max Brand collections published by Five Star and Leisure. It's an excellent, action-packed yarn about a stagecoach journey, a bag full of money, a gang of outlaws, and one of Faust's typical good badmen as the protagonist. I enjoyed it a lot. It's almost long enough to be considered a novel.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western, October 1933

Now that's a sock on the jaw! In addition to a dynamic cover, this issue of DIME WESTERN also features some great Western pulp authors: Harry F. Olmsted (with a novella and a poem, and he's also possibly the author of the Tensleep Maxon story under the pseudonym Bart Cassidy), Walt Coburn, Ray Nafziger (twice, once as himself and once under the name Grant Taylor), J.E. Grinstead, and Dabney Otis Collins. Definitely an issue worth reading!

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.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, May 1933

Well, that's got to be kind of a shock, when you're just riding along and this big ol' bird swoops down and attacks you. I don't really care much for this cover, but it's bizarre and eye-catching, I'll give it that. And as usual with ALL WESTERN, the authors inside are good ones, including Murray Leinster, T.W. Ford, W. Wirt, J.E. Grinstead, Anthony Rud, and William E. Barrett.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, March 1943

You could always count on LARIAT STORY covers for an eye-catching mix of powder-burning action, stalwart heroes, and beautiful gals. This issue is no exception. I don't know who did the art, but I like it. Inside this issue are stories by some fine writers, as well: Walt Coburn, Norbert Davis, W.F. Bragg, Eli Colter, J.E. Grinstead, and house-name Bart Cassiday, who was sometimes Harry F. Olmsted and might be here, I don't know. But I know LARIAT STORY covers usually make me want to write a story to fit the scenes on them. I'll bet I could work this into a book somewhere . . .

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Big-Book Western Magazine, June-July, 1936

An excellent, action-packed cover on this issue of BIG-BOOK WESTERN MAGAZINE. I don't know who the artist was, but he did a good job. Inside are stories by William Colt MacDonald, Ed Earl Repp, James P. Olsen, Art Lawson, Foster-Harris, and J.E. Grinstead, all top-notch pulpsters. Hard to beat a Popular Publications Western pulp.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Romances, November 1931

WESTERN ROMANCES was Dell's attempt to compete with RANCH ROMANCES, I supppose, and judging by this issue, they did a pretty good job of it, at least where the quality of the cover and fiction is concerned. That's a nice Oklahoma Land Rush cover by Sidney Riesenberg. Inside are stories by top-notch pulpsters Murray Leinster, F.V.W. Mason, J.E. Grinstead, Anthony M. Rud, and Kenneth Perkins. The editor was Archibald Bittner, who also wrote pulp fiction as Wayne Rogers.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story, May 1945

You know I love covers like this (I have no idea who the artist is) and titles like "Blood-Brand of the Devil's Corral". Les Savage Jr. was a fine Western pulp author, and there are other top-notch pulpsters in this issue such as William R. Cox, Tom W. Blackburn, and J.E. Grinstead. I definitely would have picked this one up back in 1945 if I could afford it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: New Western, July-August 1936

This cover has the stalwart hero and the angry, gun-totin' redhead, but the other guy's not an old geezer. I guess the old-timer was busy back at the ranch that day and missed the shootout. There's a good collection of stories in this issue of NEW WESTERN by top-notch pulp authors Frank C. Robertson, W.T. Ballard, J.E. Grinstead, James P. Olsen, and Jack Bechdolt.