J.W. Scott liked to use blondes on his Western pulp covers instead of redheads, but he teams them with the usual Stalwart, Red-Shirted Cowboy and Wounded Old Geezer, as on this issue of WESTERN SHORT STORIES. Ed Earl Repp is the author with the biggest name in this one, and he's on hand twice, once as himself and once as Brad Buckner. Other authors include the distinctively named Carmony Gove, Jack Sterrett, Rolland Lynch, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, Harold F. Cruickshank, Luke Tyler (who sounds like a house-name but apparently wasn't), and Ken Jason and John Cannon, who were house-names. I don't own this issue or any other issues of this pulp, as far as I remember, but it looks pretty good. For a lower-rung Western pulp, WESTERN SHORT STORIES ran a long time, from December 1936 to January 1957.
I really like the dramatic cover on this issue of WESTERN NOVEL AND SHORT STORIES. I think it's by J.W. Scott, but as always when it comes to art, I could be wrong about that. I'm not familiar with the author of the lead novel, James Dorn, but he appears to have been very prolific over a two-year span from 1939 to 1941, turning out two dozen stories, mostly novellas and novelettes, during that period. Then nothing. Such things always make me wonder what happened to cut short what appeared to be a promising career. Or was James Dorn a house-name? Likely we'll never know. Ken Jason, definitely a house-name, also appears in this issue, as do Ed Earl Repp and Mojave Lloyd. I don't own this issue, and the copy in the scan from the Fictionmags Index has some water damage, but it looks like a mighty fine Western pulp anyway.
On this issue of WESTERN NOVEL AND SHORT STORIES, J.W. Scott gives us his version of the Iconic Trio: the Stalwart Cowboy, the Gun-totin' Redhead, and the Old Geezer. The Old Geezer is tied up instead of wounded, and the Redhead doesn't look particularly angry, but the Cowboy is definitely stalwart and wearing a red shirt, to boot. (Red shirts on Western pulp covers don't have the same meaning as red shirts on STAR TREK, by the way.) A fine bunch of writers can be found inside this issue, too: Eugene Cunningham, Harry Sinclair Drago, Larry A. Harris, Raymond S. Spears, and Ken Jason, a house-name but usually used by one of the top authors. I don't own this one, but it looks like a top-notch Western pulp that's probably well worth reading.
We have three characters in the J.W. Scott cover on this issue of WESTERN NOVEL AND SHORT STORIES, but it's not the usual trio of Stalwart Cowboy, Wounded Old-timer, and Angry, Gun-Totin' Redhead. Even so, this is a pretty effective cover. I like the jodhpurs on the blonde. Inside are stories by Ed Earl Repp, as himself and as Brad Buckner, Rolland Lynch, Carmony Gove, and Ken Jason, a house-name used by, among others, D.B. Newton, Jonathan Glidden (better known as Peter Dawson), Bennie Gardner (better known as Gunnison Steele), Victor H. White, and editor Robert O. Erisman. So there's really no telling who wrote the Ken Jason story in this issue. I like the story's title, though: "Gun Raiders of Silver City". "Last Notch in a Killer's Colt" and "Satan's Gun-Ghost" are also good titles.
Although I don't believe the Stalwart, Fur-Hatted Hero on this cover has a mustache (it's kind of hard to tell), I think the unknown artist intended for him to look like Errol Flynn. That's the way it appears to me, anyway. ADVENTURE TRAILS was a short-lived pulp from Manvis Publications, one of the lower-rung pulp publishers. The biggest name in this issue is Rodney Blake, who was really the great H. Bedford-Jones, although it's unlikely that readers of the time knew that. Also on hand are house-names Ken Jason and James Hall, plus little-known pulpsters such as Rex Evans, Lon Taylor, and Beech Allen. I'm sure the HB-J yarn is worth reading, and I'll bet some of the others are, too.
