Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Trails, May 1947

I don’t own this pulp, but I was able to read a PDF of it thanks to a friend of mine. Since I don’t have the actual issue, that’s the scan from the Fictionmags Index. The art is by Allen Anderson, whose work I associate much more with the Fiction House pulps, and it doesn’t really have his distinctive look. The Ace Western pulps, WESTERN TRAILS and WESTERN ACES, were sometimes considered salvage markets when a writer couldn’t sell a story elsewhere, but I haven’t really seen much evidence of that. I’ve found them to be pretty solid magazines with plenty of good authors on hand.

And certainly they weren’t considered salvage markets by veteran Western pulpster J. Edward Leithead, who had at least two stories in nearly every issue of those two pulps during the Forties, one under his own name and one under his most common pseudonym, Wilson L. Covert. I’m confident he wrote these specifically for the Ace pulps and never sent them anywhere else.

The story under Leithead’s name was nearly always a novelette. In this issue, it’s “Roundup of the Plundering Shotwells”, about a family of owlhoots, a father and six sons, but the seventh son wants nothing to do with being an outlaw. In fact, he’s in love the local sheriff’s daughter. But a clash with another gang draws our protagonist into gun trouble anyway, and it’s a bloody, fast-moving tale with several good plot twists, plenty of action, and a satisfying showdown at the end. Leithead is one of my favorite Western pulp authors, and this is a really nice example of his work.

The short story “Blizzard Boomerang” is by another of my favorites, Joseph Chadwick. It’s a little unusual for him in that it’s set in the snowy High Sierras during winter instead of somewhere in the hot Southwest, where his stories are usually set. It’s not a typical plot, either, as it’s about the clash between two men who deliver mail and freight to the remote mining camps, one by dogsled and the other on skis. This is a well-written, emotionally involving story, as you’d expect from Chadwick.

Kenneth L. Sinclair was a fairly popular Western pulp author but is forgotten today. His story, “Trail of the Invisible Herd”, is another story set during the winter and involves getting a herd to some grazing land even though the local range hog has blocked it off with a fence. This one is okay, reasonably entertaining, but the resolution of it seems pretty far-fetched to me. Maybe it’s not, Sinclair may know what he’s talking about, but I wasn’t convinced.

Frank Triem published dozens of Western pulp stories during the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties but is probably even more unknown today than Kenneth L. Sinclair. His story in this issue, “Say It With Sixes”, is about a young lawman waiting nervously for the return of an outlaw he knows is going to try to kill him. Hmm, that sounds vaguely familiar. But here’s the interesting thing. This issue of WESTERN TRAILS was published six months earlier than the issue of COLLIER’S that contained John M. Cunningham’s story “The Tin Star”, from which the movie HIGH NOON was made. The similarities are definitely there. Given the timing, I really don’t think Cunningham took any inspiration from Triem’s story. I believe it’s a coincidence, but it’s a striking one.

J. Edward Leithead’s second story in this issue is “Calaboose Cache” under the Wilson L. Covert pseudonym. It’s about a cowboy who returns to his hometown and is forced by circumstances to become the local lawman. He has to deal with a deputy he doesn’t trust, two competing gangs of outlaws, and the missing loot from a bank robbery that has to be recovered to keep the town from being ruined. It’s a complex yarn and pretty entertaining, although I didn’t think it was as good as the novelette under Leithead’s real name.

D.B. Newton is another longtime favorite Western author for me. His stories are always well-plotted, have plenty of action and interesting characters, and his prose is clean and sounds authentic without going in for overdone dialect. His novelette “Cowpoke on a Pistol Payroll” is about a down-on-his-luck cowboy who finally gets a job, only to find that he’s the bait in a scheme to start a range war. This is an excellent story that’s almost all action. Really enjoyable.

I’ve found Giff Cheshire to be an inconsistent Western author, but most of his stories are pretty good and occasionally I run across one that’s excellent. “.45 Merrymaker” in this issue falls into the pretty good category. The protagonist is a young cowboy who plays the guitar and sings, and his friend is a bearded old-timer who plays the fiddle. I have no way of knowing if Cheshire intentionally based them on Roy Rogers and Gabby Hayes, but close enough for me! The plot is reminiscent of a B-Western, too, with a couple of swindlers out to bilk a town by promising to build a phony railroad. However, the way our heroes go about foiling that scheme requires a heapin’ helpin’ of willing suspension of disbelief, almost too much so. In the end, I cut Cheshire enough slack to enjoy the story.

“Four Horsemen From Hades” is a great title, and it goes with an entertaining story by Willard Luce, another forgotten pulpster who published 18 stories during the Forties and Fifties. An old-timer who works as the night watchman at a dam construction project in the Pacific Northwest has to solve a payroll theft in order to clear his son’s name. The plot is pretty easy to figure out, but Luce’s writing is smooth enough and his protagonist likable enough to elevate this one.

This is a good issue of WESTERN TRAILS, worth reading if you have a copy of the actual pulp. If you’re a member of the WesternPulps email group, you can find the PDF in the Files section of the group’s website.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Rangeland Romances, March 1955

A very late issue of this long-running pulp that debuted in 1937. The cover is by Frank McCarthy, an artist I associate more with paperback covers. The pulp era may have been winding down, but there are new stories in this issue by such long-time pulpsters as Norman Daniels, Arthur Lawson, Theodore J. Roemer, and Kenneth L. Sinclair, as well as a reprint by the prolific Western romance author Isabel Stewart Way. Pretty close to a last gasp (there was only one more issue of RANGELAND ROMANCES after this one) but I'll bet it was fairly entertaining.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, 2nd August Number, 1955

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with an excellent Kirk Wilson cover. I wasn’t familiar with Wilson’s work until the past few years, but I really like his covers, especially the ones he did for RANCH ROMANCES.

Walker A. Tompkins wrote some of the Jim Hatfield novels in TEXAS RANGERS that were reprinted in paperback by Popular Library during the Sixties. At that point, I had no idea who was behind the house name Jackson Cole or even that it was a house name, but as it turns out, some of the books I liked the most back then were actually written by Tompkins. So I’ve been reading and enjoying his work for close to 60 years now. He leads off this issue of RANCH ROMANCES with the novella “Land-Grabber Law”. Val Shannon, a troubleshooter for a large land and cattle combine, is sent to Arizona to arrest a ranch foreman who’s been rustling from the spread he works for. (Like Steve Reese in RANGE RIDERS, Shannon is also a deputy U.S. marshal, so he can go where he wants to and arrest people.) When he gets there, though, he interrupts some wedding plans and discovers that the situation isn’t as straightforward as he thought. It also involves a romantic triangle and a land grab, hence the title, and Shannon winds up riding deep into Mexico on the trail of a runaway groom and his new bride. There are only a few action scenes in this one, but they’re well-done and the story has a nice, complex plot. Tompkins wrote quite a few of the Steve Reese novels, and I have to wonder if this story is based on an unused outline he wrote for that series. Impossible to know at this late date, and it doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that in “Land-Grabber Law”, Tompkins delivers another well-written, entertaining traditional Western yarn.

Kenneth L. Sinclair is a familiar name from Western pulps. I don’t recall if I’ve read any of his work before. His story “Badman From Funnybone” is lightweight, as you’d expect from the title, but it’s not really an out-and-out comedy. A practical-joking cowboy accused of a bank robbery he didn’t commit runs into a beautiful female peddler on a one-way trail and winds up getting caught by the law because of it. The woman sets out to clear his name. As you’d expect, everything works out in the end, but the story flows along at a nice pace and the romance angle is well-handled.

Theodore J. Roemer wrote a couple of hundred Western and sports stories for various pulps from the mid-Thirties through the late Fifties. Despite him being fairly prolific, I don’t think I’ve read anything by him until now. His novelette in this issue, “Three Loves to Oregon” has a sappy title but is an excellent story. It’s about a saloon singer who wants to escape her past and does so by joining a wagon train bound for Oregon. The gambler who got her into that life comes after her, but by the time he catches up, the girl is already in a low-key romantic triangle with the wagonmaster and one of the farmers bound for a new life. With all that romance going on, there’s barely time to worry about the Pawnee war party that attacks the wagon train . . . Roemer does a great job with this setup and keeps things from bogging down in angst, which they easily could have. And not everything plays out the way I expected, which is always a bonus.

It's always nice to run into a story in a pulp by an author I’ve met. Jeanne Williams was still writing highly regarded historical novels in the Eighties and Nineties and I met her at several Western Writers of America conventions. Her story in this issue, “Rails Into Santos”, is about the clash between the construction boss and a female doctor during the construction of a railroad line in South Texas. There’s no real action, but the emotional stakes are high and the story is very well-written and satisfying.

“The Lonely Dusk” is by Donald Bayne Hobart, a long-time stalwart of the Western pulps, especially those in the Thrilling Group. He’s probably best remembered for his Masked Rider novels, a number of which were reprinted in paperback during the Sixties and Seventies. This short tale about a ranch widow and a former suitor who rides back to see her is another one that doesn’t have any real action, but again it’s well-written and the emotions of the characters are handled very well. It’s a little unusual for Hobart, but he does a good job of it.

“Galahad in Levis” is by Will Cotton, who published a couple of dozen Western and detective yarns during the Fifties. That seems to be the extent of his work. This one starts out as a lightweight tale about a hapless cowboy and a mail-order bride mix-up, but then it turns a lot darker and winds up with a surprising and very effective twist.

There’s also an installment of “Longhorn Stampede” by Philip Ketchum, which I didn’t read. This was published as a novel under the same title by Popular Library in 1956 with a cover by A. Leslie Ross. I don’t know if I have this one on my shelves or not, but Ketchum is always worth reading.

Then there are the usual features on pen pals, astrology, and movies, plus a poem and cartoon or two. Also as usual, I just glanced at those.

This issue is heavier on the romance than is common during this era of the magazine's run. Despite the title, many of the stories in RANCH ROMANCES during the Fifties were just traditional Western yarns with little or no romantic element. But romance plays a major part in every story in this issue. It’s also a really top-notch issue with the stories ranging from very good to excellent. This is one of the best pulps I’ve read in a while, and if you happen to own a copy, it’s well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Star Western, August 1953

This is a pretty sedate cover, but I like it a lot anyway. There's a nice sense of impending menace to it, and that's a really beautiful woman. I don't know the artist. The authors inside this issue of STAR WESTERN are good ones, as well: Joseph Chadwick, Will Cook, Frank Castle, J.L. Bouma, Van Cort (Wyatt Blassingame), Kenneth L. Sinclair, and Cy Kees. Even this late in the game, STAR WESTERN was a very good Western pulp.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Adventures, August 1941

WESTERN ADVENTURES was Street & Smith's third-string Western pulp after WESTERN STORY and WILD WEST WEEKLY, but it had plenty of good authors and stories in it. This issue features yarns from Brad Buckner (really Ed Earl Repp) and Rolland C. Lynch (rumored to have ghosted for Ed Earl Repp), plus William R. Cox, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, Jim Kjelgaard, M. Howard Lane, and Kenneth L. Sinclair, none of whom have anything to do with Ed Earl Repp, as far as I know.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Super Western, December 1937

An action-packed Norman Saunders cover graces this issue of SUPER WESTERN, a pulp that lasted only four issues before its name was changed to VARIETY WESTERN (which wasn't that successful, either, running only eight issues before another name change). But SUPER WESTERN had some excellent covers while it lasted, and stories by some good writers, too, including in this issue Tom Roan, S. Omar Barker, George Bruce Marquis, and Kenneth L. Sinclair.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Aces, June 1940

This issue of WESTERN ACES sports a nice action cover from Jerome Rozen. Inside are stories by some top Western pulpsters, including L.P. Holmes, John G. Pearsol, Larry A. Harris, Tom J. Hopkins, Lee Floren, Kenneth L. Sinclair and some lesser-known authors.