Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, February 1937

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. Although there’s no cover credit on the TOC page and it’s unattributed on the Fictionmags Index, I suspect it’s the work of Arthur Mitchell. It looks like one of his paintings, and he did a lot of covers for ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE during this period.

The lead novella, “Gun Smoke on the Pecos”, is the third and final story in the Roaming Reynolds series by Charles M. Martin. I haven’t read the first one, but I read the second one a while back and liked it fairly well. In this story, Roaming Reynolds and Texas Joe, a pair of drifting cowboys/gunfighters/adventurers, return to their home country in West Texas and immediately find themselves mixed up in a range war. The plot is very much by-the-numbers, right down to the rancher the boys are working for having a beautiful daughter, and Martin’s heavy-handed pulp cowboy lingo and narrative style wear thin pretty quickly. If I’m being honest, and I try to be here, this is a rather mediocre story. And yet . . . the numerous action scenes work really well, the setting rings true, and Martin does a good job of playing up the epic, mythological clashes between Roaming Reynolds and the evil gunfighter on the other side. When they face off at the end, I could hear Ennio Morricone music welling up inside my head. So this novella has that going for it, anyway, and ultimately, that was enough for me, but you might feel differently.

Harry F. Olmsted is one of my favorite Western pulp authors. His story “Headboard Tally” in this issue packs quite a bit of plot in a few thousand words. It’s a revenge yarn, as a cowboy tries to track down the four men responsible for lynching his brother, but as it opens, he’s already killed three of the four and doesn’t know the identity of the final man. He finds out in what turns out to be a pretty far-fetched coincidence, but Olmsted writes well enough I’ll cut him that much slack. For a story that’s mostly bleak and dark, this one turns out to have a heartwarming element to it, as well. It worked for me, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

James P. Olsen, who also wrote a lot for the pulps as James A. Lawson, was a consistently good author, with many stories that tend toward over-the-top action. For that reason, “Malachi Murphy—Cowboy” is something of an oddity among Olsen’s work in that it’s a quiet little slice-of-life story about an old cowboy spending the winter at an isolated high country line camp. Not much happens, but it’s well-written and the title character is an interesting one.

I’ve read quite a few stories over the years by Hapsburg Liebe, real name Charles Haven Liebe. While his work is usually enjoyable, I’ve never considered myself a fan of his stories. “Bullet” is about a teenage boy whose father is an outlaw. When Bullet’s pa and another owlhoot rob a bank and are caught, it’s up to Bullet to save them from being lynched. This is a well-written, cleverly plotted story, one of the best from Liebe that I’ve read.

Darrell Jordan is best remembered for almost a hundred stories he wrote for the aviation and air war pulps, but he also turned out a few detective and Western yarns, including the novelette “Range War Nemesis” in this issue. The protagonist, young cowboy Brad Bannon, wants to repay the man who grubstaked his father twenty years earlier, but that effort lands Brad in the middle of a range war, and the fact that he’s a dead ringer for a notorious gunman complicates the issue. This isn’t a bad story and there are some nice action scenes, but the plot is pretty muddled and hard to keep up with. I don’t recall ever reading anything by Jordan before. I ought to try one of his aviation stories.

Sam H. Nickels wrote the long-running Hungry and Rusty series in WILD WEST WEEKLY as well as a lot of stand-alone stories under his own name and various house-names. His stories appeared outside of the pages of WILD WEST WEEKLY from time to time, too, as in this issue with “When the Sheriff Lied”. This is a pretty good action yarn with a protagonist who pretends to be an outlaw and winds up saving a lawman’s life. The reason behind the deception isn’t very surprising, but the story works effectively.

Ralph Condon was a life-long newspaperman who wrote several dozen stories for various Western pulps in the Thirties and Forties. “Red Trail” is about a cowboy and his grizzled old sidekick trying to track down a herd of stolen horses. It’s almost all action and fairly well-written, nothing special but entertaining enough.

There’s also a story by S. Omar Barker in his Boosty Peckleberry series, and that’s another one I don’t read. Just not a fan of humorous tall tales, I guess.

Overall, this is probably the weakest issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE I’ve read, with most of the stories falling into the readable but unmemorable range. The ones by Olmsted and Olsen are the best, but I wouldn’t put either in the top rank of those authors’ work. I believe I’ve now read all the issues of ALL WESTERN that I own and I probably won’t seek out any more.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Speed Western Stories, December 1945, Plus Blog Update

This issue of SPEED WESTERN STORIES features two stories by Edwin Truett Long, one under the transparent pseudonym Edwin Truett and one as by Wallace Kayton. Long died earlier in 1945, apparently from an illness he contracted while serving in Burma during World War II, so these may have been some of the last stories he wrote. Or they could be unacknowledged reprints. With a Trojan pulp, one never knows. Elsewhere in this issue are stories by William R. Cox, Laurence Donovan, James P. Olsen, William J. Glynn, and house-name Max Neilson. The cover is probably by H.W. Scott. This issue can be found on-line at the Internet Archive. With a line-up of authors like that, I may have to read it one of these days.

Speaking of issues, I've been dealing with some health-related ones recently. Nothing serious, the blog's not going anywhere and neither am I, but it's left me without the time and energy to get everything done that I wanted to, including updating the blog. However, I'm hoping that normal posting will resume next week, although it may get sporadic now and then. 

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.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Super-Detective Stories, May 1935

This early issue of SUPER-DETECTIVE STORIES sports a nice dramatic cover by H.J. Ward, and there are some fine authors inside: Richard Sale, James P. Olsen, Emile C. Tepperman, the mysterious Margie Harris (has any of Harris's work ever been reprinted?), and lesser-known Sam Kellman, John Mallory, and Charles Molyneaux Brown. This was Kellman's only credit, so it's possible that was a pseudonym. Sale, Olsen, and Tepperman are enough to make this issue worth reading if I owned a copy, which I don't.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, August 1934

(I came across this post from January 26, 2008, several years before I started the Saturday Morning Western Pulp series, so I thought I might as well get some more use out of it, modified slightly and with some comments added.)

Since I had this pulp out a couple of weeks ago to look something up, I decided to go ahead and read it. I believe it’s the first issue of LARIAT STORY that I’ve read; I own only another issue or two of this particular pulp.

It doesn’t start off particularly well. The lead “novel” (actually more of a novella) is “The Ranch of Hidden Men” by John Starr. Originally, John Starr was the pseudonym of Jack Byrne, who was the editor of LARIAT STORY at the time this issue was published. At some point, though, it became a house name, probably a year or so later when Byrne left Fiction House (the publisher of LARIAT STORY) to become an editor at ARGOSY. Byrne may be the author of “The Ranch of Hidden Men”, or he may not. Either way, it’s not a very good story. It’s the old “drifter saves the ranch from the bad guys” plot, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s so stereotypical that a story using it needs either an unexpected twist, good writing, or both. This one has neither. It has a very tired, by-the-numbers feel to it, with a lot of florid writing that just pads the word count. Even that sort of prose can be effective (see the work of A. Leslie Scott, for example), but I don’t think it works here.

The novelette that follows, “Red Chaps” by Walter Clare Martin, is even worse, a humorous Western that’s not funny at all. I have a low tolerance for humorous Westerns; I like those by W.C. Tuttle (and Robert E. Howard), but that’s about it.

Things pick up, though, with “Whispering Knives” by C.K. Shaw, a novelette with another old plot, the hunt for the pieces of a treasure map that was split up among the prospectors who discovered a mother lode of gold, but Shaw has a nice hardboiled style that makes it a readable yarn. (C.K. Shaw was actually Chloe Kathleen Shaw, one of the most successful female Western pulpsters. I need to read more of her work.) 

The four short stories that follow are even better: “Old Renegade” by Earl C. McCain concerns the hunt for a wild, killer bull in the South Texas brush country, with some rustling thrown in for good measure; “The Six-Gun Payoff” by the always-dependable Gunnison Steele (really Bennie Gardner, father of the late Barry Gardner, who was known to many of you) is an effective short-short about the redemption of an old outlaw; “Snake Sign” by Walt Coburn (one of my favorite Western pulp authors) is a murder mystery, not too hard to figure out but fun; and “The Water Cure” by E.B. Brunt is a fairly realistic cattle baron vs. small ranchers yarn set in the 1920s.

The issue is wrapped up by another “novel”, “The Fifth Horseman” by James P. Olsen. Olsen, under the name James Lawson, wrote spicy, hardboiled detective yarns about Dallas Duane, a PI who works in the Western oilfields, and I really like the stories I’ve read from that series. (I wound up reading all the Dallas Duane stories and writing the introduction for a collection of them called DYING COMES HARD, published by Black Dog Books and still available.) “The Fifth Horseman” is a little more serious. Again, the plot is one that had whiskers even in 1934: a gang of old outlaws get together again to help an old friend from the owlhoot trail who has reformed and settled down. The hero is a young outlaw who had fallen in with them. Anybody who has read very many Westerns will know how this one is going to play out, but Olsen spins his tale with such enthusiasm, including a number of over-the-top action scenes, that I found it pretty entertaining. This is the first Western story I’ve read by him, but I wouldn’t hesitate to read more.

My copy of the pulp is coverless and I can't find a picture of it on-line, so I can’t post a cover scan. (The Fictionmags Index has that cover scan now. You can see it above.) It came from the collection of Barry Gardner, who’s mentioned above. Barry collected hundreds of pulps that contained his dad’s stories, but he didn’t care that much about the condition, so many of them are brittle and coverless, like this issue. I don’t really care, either, as long as I can read them and enjoy the stories, and I have to say that despite a couple of clunkers, the August 1934 issue of LARIAT STORY is pretty darned good.

(Now, here's the gut punch from the past. Three days after I posted this, a wildfire burned down our house and my studio and destroyed this pulp along with all my others, except for a lone issue of ARGOSY that survived somehow, as well as 40 years' accumulation of books and comics. Some of you probably remember that. Definitely a low point. However, we rebuilt a bigger and better house on the same property, I have more books and pulps, by far, than I'll ever get around to reading, and my writing career has rolled along. I still miss the cats who died in that fire, but our two dogs survived and lived another six years after that. Somebody once told me that you never really get over the things you love and lose, but you learn how to get along with that loss. Lot of truth in that. Meanwhile I think that's a pretty good cover by Fred Craft, and I'm glad to be able to bring it to you today.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Quick Trigger Western Novels Magazine, March 1937

This issue of QUICK TRIGGER WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE sports an evocative cover by H.W. Scott and contains only two stories, a novella by Charles M. "Chuck" Martin that's long enough it probably ought to be considered an actual novel, as the magazine's title suggests, and a short story by James P. Olsen, as well as a poem by Raymond S. Spears. All three of those authors were top-notch pulpsters, so I'm sure this is a fine issue and I wouldn't hesitate to read it if I owned a copy. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Spicy Western Stories, September 1939

The cover of this issue of SPICY WESTERN STORIES is credited to Delos Palmer in the Fictionmags Index, and I don't doubt that's right, but Allan Anderson must have seen this cover at some point and been impressed by it. At first glance, I sure took it for Anderson's work. This issue includes stories by some Spicy stalwarts: E. Hoffmann Price, James P. Olsen (writing as James A. Lawson), Edwin Truett Long (writing as Luke Terry), and Laurence Donovan (twice, once as himself and once as Phil Strange). There's also a story by house-name Ken Cooper, and two by little-known authors Hart Williams (his only credit in the FMI) and Alf Foote (only two stories listed in the FMI). My hunch is that those last two were pseudonyms, but really, who knows? Not me, that's for sure. This issue doesn't appear to be on-line, so if you don't own a copy (I don't), you'll have to be content with looking at the cover. But at least it's a good cover.

UPDATE: I've discovered belatedly that I've posted this cover before, several years ago. I've been posting pulp covers on the weekends for well over a decade now, so I suppose it's inevitable that a rerun creeps in by accident now and then. As I said above, though, it's a good cover, so I'm going to leave it here. Anyway, this post has a little more information in it than the original one did.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, April 1935

This issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE sports a nice dramatic cover by Emery Clarke (who also did a bunch of Doc Savage covers in the late Thirties and early Forties) and a really strong group of authors inside. There are stories by Walt Coburn, Eugene Cunningham, James P. Olsen, Bennett Foster, Richard Wormser, Ralph Condon, house-name John Starr, and Fred J. Jackson, unknown to me but who wrote hundreds of stories in a career that lasted from 1906 to 1937. That's a good long run! Coburn, Cunningham, and Olsen are favorites of mine and Foster and Wormser were dependable pulpsters, as well. Plenty of good reading in this issue, I'll bet.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, December 1934

I'm not a big fan of artist Fred Craft, but I'll admit that his cover for this early issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE is pretty dynamic. And the line-up of authors in this issue can't be beat: Walt Coburn, Eugene Cunningham, Tom Roan, Richard Wormser, James P. Olsen, C.K. Shaw, Archie Joscelyn, and house-name John Starr. Lots of good reading there, I'll bet.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Cowboy Stories, July 1935

That's a nice dramatic cover on this issue of COWBOY STORIES. I don't know the artist, but he did a good job. Other than James P. Olsen and S. Omar Barker, this issue doesn't have many well-known authors on hand. The other stories are by Jay Kalez, William E. Brandon, Eben Garrett, Victor Kaufman, Paul R. Morrison, Butler Van Steenbergh, Carl F. Happel, and house-name Ken Martin. It's understandable if you're saying "Who?" in response to most of those. Doesn't mean the stories aren't enjoyable, though.

UPDATE: This cover is by Tom Lovell. Thanks to those who identified it as his work.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, May 1940

The cover on this issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE has a lot going on, and I like it. I don't know the artist, but if I had to venture a guess, I'd say A. Leslie Ross or H.W. Scott. But I could be completely wrong about that. I know I'm right about there being some good authors in this issue, starting with Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, James P. Olsen, and Art Lawson. There's a Bart Cassidy story, and that's probably Olmsted, too, as well as one by house-name John Starr, who could be almost anybody. Frank H. Richey, who has one of the cover-featured stories, wrote only half a dozen stories in the late Thirties and into 1940; this appears to be his last one. I don't know anything about him. The other story in this issue is by the more prolific but equally obscure Don Stuart. All I know about him is that he's not "Don A. Stuart", the pseudonym of legendary science fiction editor/author John W. Campbell.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Book Magazine, Fall 1938

All you have to do is look at how much is going on in this great cover to know it's by Norman Saunders. Holy cow! They just don't get much more pulpish than this one. Inside this issue of DETECTIVE BOOK MAGAZINE are a Duncan Maclain novel by Bayard Kendrick, a reprint of an Amusement Inc. story by Theodore Tinsley, and more yarns by James P. Olsen, Stewart Sterling, and Franklin H. Martin. Looks like a fantastic issue.  

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Trails, May 1936

This looks like a pretty good mid-Thirties issue of WESTERN TRAILS, with a cover by William F. Soare and entries in two long-running series, Duke Buckland by Frederick C. Davis and Bert Little by Clyde B. Warden. The other authors on hand are all top-notch pulpsters, as well: Philip Ketchum writing as Carl McK. Saunders, Frank Gruber, James P. Olsen, Peter Germano (as Peter Germane), and Bruce Douglas.

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 Western Pulp: Big-Book Western Magazine, April 1947

Injury to a hat alert! And considering where that bullet is headed, it might just put a hole in the BIG-BOOK WESTERN MAGAZINE logo, too. This issue has the usual sterling line-up of authors often found in a Popular Publications Western pulp: Harry F. Olmsted, Stone Cody (Thomas Mount), D.B. Newton, Tom Roan, Roe Richmond, James P. Olsen, W.F. Bragg, and Lee E. Wells. Prolific and well-regarded pulpsters, all. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Spicy Western Stories, May 1940

Many of the usual suspects are on hand for this issue of SPICY WESTERN STORIES. The cover is by H.J. Ward. Inside are stories by Laurence Donovan (twice, once under his own name and once as Larry Dunn), Edwin Truett Long (also twice, as Luke Terry and Dale Boyd), James P. Olsen as James A. Lawson, and a couple of little-known authors who might or might not have been pseudonyms or house-names, George Vail and Carson West.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Cowboy Stories, November 1934

Great cover by Tom Lovell on this issue of COWBOY STORIES, and some fine writers inside, too: Philip Ketchum, James P. Olsen, Archie Joscelyn, S. Omar Barker, John Colohan, house-name Ken Martin, and some lesser-known writers, H. Fredric Young, Lee Willenborg, and Rand Rios. This one would sure catch a potential buyer's eye on the newsstand.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Top-Notch Magazine, First May, 1931

Yep, just polin' down the river on a raft with a machine gun. Think what a different book THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN might have been if Huck and Jim had had themselves a machine gun. They might have had some real adventures then. But not to get too far afield here . . . TOP-NOTCH had some good authors, as you'd expect from a Street & Smith pulp. In this issue are stories by James P. Olsen, George Allan England, house-name Valentine Wood (with a Kroom, Son of the Sea yarn), and Warren Elliott Carleton, among others. Not big names, but Olsen was always dependable no matter what the genre and quite a bit of England's work has been reprinted. Despite its name, I've never considered TOP-NOTCH to be in the upper rank of pulps, but I'm not sure why I feel that way, since I've read very little of what was published in it, mostly just the few stories that Robert E. Howard had there and the Ozar the Aztec stories written by Walker A. Tompkins under that Valentine Wood pen-name. (Speaking of that, the final Longarm novel I wrote, LONGARM AND THE BLOODY RELIC, was inspired by those Ozar stories and has a character in it, a ship's captain, named Valentine Wood. For whatever that's worth.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Short Stories, August 1942

Not many Western pulps had Halloween covers, at least that I've been able to find, and I think I've used all of them in past years. So this year I'm just going to fall back on an old favorite, Norman Saunders, with this cover for WESTERN SHORT STORIES. "All-Star Stories", it says, and based on the authors inside, that's a pretty solid claim. In this issue, you'll find stories by D.B. Newton, Dean Owen, H.A. DeRosso, Tom W. Blackburn, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), James P. Olsen, Hapsburg Liebe, Ralph Berard (Victor White), James C. Lynch, and Raymond W. Porter. Those are all prolific, well-regarded pulpsters.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: New Western, September 1940

I feel like I ought to know who painted the cover on this issue of NEW WESTERN. The hat on the cowboy with the red bandanna looks awfully familiar. I kind of want to say Walter Baumhofer, but I don't really think that's right. Anyway . . . There are some popular, prolific writers in this issue: Barry Cord (Peter Germano), James P. Olsen, John G. Pearsol, Rolland Lynch, Lee Floren, and Glenn H. Wichman, along with Marian O'Hearn, who appeared most often in RANCH ROMANCES and the other Western romance pulps.