Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double Action Western, May 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. A hat that big has to have been painted by A. Leslie Ross. I don’t have any confirmation that he’s the cover artist, but I’m pretty confident in that opinion.

In “Winchester Express to Boothill”, the lead novella by Lee Floren, his pair of drifting heroes, Buck McKee and Tortilla Joe, are on their way to help an old friend who has run into trouble and summoned them. That’s a common set-up in Floren’s novels and stories. Blackbeard Smith has a horse ranch in Montana, and he’s been bushwhacked and confined to a wheelchair by his injury. Not surprisingly, he has a beautiful daughter. A range war is brewing with a neighboring spread that’s owned by another beautiful young woman. Not far away is a mining boomtown, and that’s connected somehow, too. Our intrepid pair hasn’t been on hand long when somebody takes a shot at Buck and tries to kill him.

Floren was a regular contributor to DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN. My opinion of his work has improved slightly in recent years, but this particular yarn is maddening in its inconsistency. I actually like Buck and Tortilla Joe quite a bit. As a cowboy detective, Buck is a very low-rent version of Hashknife Hartley, and Tortilla Joe, despite the stereotypical way in which Floren writes him, is a pretty smart, tough, capable hombre. The plot is interesting and so are the characters. There are some nice action scenes. But man, the whole thing is really muddled, as if Floren forgot what he was doing from scene to scene. Some bits are vivid and well-written, and some are so clunky and repetitive that they’re wince-inducing. And those two opposites can be on the same page! By the time I got to the end of this one—and I did finish it, no problem—I still wasn’t sure exactly what had happened. Call it an interesting misfire, which, unfortunately, describes all too much of Floren’s work.

Fortunately, next up in this issue is a long novelette by Roe Richmond, usually a dependable author when he’s not doing series characters. “War on the Chippewa” is a timber Western, a sub-genre where I haven’t encountered Richmond so far. It’s about two brothers, prodigal sons who return to help out their father in a rivalry with another timber baron. This is an excellent yarn with a lot of colorful background, emotional heft, and gritty action. At times it reminded me of Dan Cushman’s timber Westerns, and that’s a good thing. My only complaint is that the ending is maybe a little less dramatic than it could have been. But still a very good story.

Noel Loomis is a well-regarded author in both Westerns and science fiction. I haven’t really read that much by him in either genre, but he seems pretty consistent. “There Are No Trees in Kansas” is kind of an odd title, but it works in this story of a crusading newspaper editor’s clash with a crooked saloon owner who has a distinctive feature: his right hand is missing, cut off by Indians when he was a young man, and instead of a fake hand or a hook, like you usually find with characters like this, he has a short length of chain with a two-pound iron ball attached to it. That’s a pretty vicious weapon in a hand-to-hand fight! That colorful bit of business is probably the best thing about this story, but it’s an okay tale with some nice action and I enjoyed it.

I’ve always figured Harrison Colt had to be a pseudonym, but if that’s the case, no one has ever identified the author who wrote under that name, as far as I know. His story in this issue, “Gunsmoke Samaritan”, is about a rancher who’s framed for murder when, against his better judgment, he gets involved in a clash between two of his neighbors. This story moves along very nicely, is well-written, and has a likable protagonist.

Lauran Paine was an extremely prolific author of Westerns, especially novels. Although he published around a hundred stories in the Western pulps during the Fifties, he wrote more than a thousand novels, most of them published only in England under many different pseudonyms. Late in his life, quite a few of his novels were published in the United States by Walker Books under the name Richard Clarke and reprinted in paperback by Ballantine. I’ve read very little of his work. But his story in this issue, “The Challenge”, is excellent. It’s about a rancher who goes to work as an undercover deputy to infiltrate a gang of train robbers. The prose is straightforward and effective, the action is hardboiled. Just a good yarn.

W. Edmunds Claussen is a hit-or-miss author, for sure. Stories by him that I’ve read have ranged from okay to not very good. “Guns at La Paz” in this issue falls into the okay group. Set during the Civil War in Arizona, it's about a cavalry officer who’s being sent back to Washington, but before he goes, he and a friend of his who’s a civilian scout try to get to the bottom of an Apache ambush that wiped out a patrol. There’s some nice action in this one and a plot twist that’s predictable but still effective because it’s unusual for a Western pulp. It could have been a lot more unusual, but if it had, it probably would have rendered this story unpublishable. I don’t think Claussen will ever be one of my preferred authors, but so far he’s at least worth trying when I come across one of his stories.

Overall, this is a pretty decent issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN. While several of the stories have flaws, they’re all entertaining and held my interest just fine. I’ve read quite a few issues of this pulp over the past couple of years, and the reason for that is simple: most of my pulps are either in storage or hard to get to for other reasons, and I had a big stack of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN issues handy. I think there are four or five more unread issues in this batch, so I’ll continue spacing them out.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western Stories, February 1954

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my slightly ragged copy in the scan. I think the cover is by A. Leslie Ross, but I’m not absolutely sure about that. “15 Action-Packed Stories”, the cover proclaims, but what it doesn’t tell you is that eight of those are actually Special Features, Fact Features, and Departments—filler, in other words—leaving only seven pieces of actual fiction in this issue.

The lead story is “Judge Bates’ Boothill Court” by Lee Floren, the next to last entry in his Judge Bates series that started in 1940 and lasted for 26 stories, the last one being published in 1955. The stories appeared at first in various Popular Publications pulps and then moved over to various Columbia Publications pulps, where the majority of them appeared. After that, Floren used Judge Lemanuel Bates and his sidekick Tobacco Jones in several novels. Bates is the judge in a Wyoming cowtown and Jones is the local postmaster, and together they also own a ranch. They wind up involved in assorted mysteries.

Since Lee Floren was a very inconsistent writer, I always go into one of his stories with fairly low expectations. That way, if it turns out to be a good one, I’m pleasantly surprised. “Judge Bates’ Boothill Court” is one of the good ones, I’m glad to say. Bates and Jones travel to a different town for once as Bates is called on to replace another judge who’s been wounded in an ambush. As it happens, the young man accused of trying to kill the other judge is well-known to Bates and Jones, and they don’t believe he’s guilty. Not surprisingly, somebody tries to kill both of them soon after they arrive, and they’re off on a case that involves danger, a few pretty girls, and a villain who’s so obvious that he might as well be wearing a sign on his back. While there aren’t any surprises in this yarn, Floren spins it with skill and enthusiasm, and there are only a few instances of the clumsy writing he’s prone to at times. I enjoyed this one quite a bit.

The long-running series by Lon Williams featuring Deputy Marshal Lee Winters is well-regarded, and it’s unusual because many of the stories feature supernatural elements. I’ve read several of them, though, and so far, I’m not a fan. “Misfortune’s Darling” in this issue is the first one I’ve read that doesn’t have anything supernatural in it. Instead, Winters investigates a series of murders and robberies plaguing travelers in his area. There’s a side plot that serves no real purpose. I realize this is damning with faint praise, but this is the best of these stories I’ve read so far. I’m willing to read more, but my patience with them is getting stretched kind of thin.

Richard Brister is a fairly dependable Western writer. His story in this issue, “Big Man in This Town”, is about a banker who turns to murder to save his failing institution. But of course things don’t play out the way he hopes. This isn’t a bad story and is decently written, but there’s not much to it.

The same can be said of John T. Lynch’s short-short “Hassayampa Hassle”, a tall tale about a whiskey drummer who drinks from a magical river that’s supposed to prevent people from telling the truth. It’s supposed to be a comedy, but it’s not really funny and just sort of ends without making any kind of point.

I’ve read a few stories by A.A. Baker that were okay, but “Death at the China Mine” in this issue isn’t one of them. It’s about a mine cave-in and a stagecoach carrying a lot of cash, I think. The plot is so muddled and the writing so poor that I just skimmed through it.

“The Golden Spike” by Gene Rodgers is a little better. A golden spike is used to complete the last link in a railroad in Oregon, and a couple of outlaws decide to steal it out of the ground. Again, things don’t play out according to plan. This short-short is somewhat entertaining, and at least it has a beginning, middle, and end.

Finally, we come to Seven Anderton’s novelette “Peaceful Pilgrim”. Thank goodness for Seven Anderton, I say. This story is about a hired gun who’s tried of fighting in senseless range wars, so he decides to go back to where he came from, the Pecos country in West Texas. So what happens as soon as he gets there? He gets mixed up in a range war, of course, as the local cattle baron decides to force all the small ranchers and sodbusters out of the valley any way he has to, including burning them out and killing them. But standing in his way is the protagonist Hank Sawyer, who finally has something worth fighting for besides pay.

You can tell from that description that this is a very traditional plot we’ve all read and seen many times before. But Anderton’s writing is top-notch as always, Hank Sawyer is a good protagonist, and there are some well-done action scenes. The only flaw in this story is that the ending isn’t as dramatic as it could have been, a tendency that I’ve discovered is common in Anderton’s Westerns. He seems to prefer not to give the reader the kind of action-packed showdowns that I like in my Western reading. That’s his choice, and I’ll still read his stories because his prose is very good, but that keeps him from becoming a real favorite of mine.

This is a very typical issue of a Columbia Western pulp edited by Robert W. Lowndes: a couple of good but not great stories by Floren and Anderton and the rest poor to mediocre. I’ll keep reading them because from time to time Lowndes got his hands on a real gem despite not being able to pay much. But I’ve learned not to expect a great deal from them. The covers are usually pretty nice, though.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double Action Western, January 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know who painted the cover. It’s not a great cover, in my opinion, but it’s not really a bad cover, either. And the map of Texas has El Paso not quite in the right place. They didn’t think they could slip that past a born-bred-and-forever Texan like me, did they? But on to the stories.

Seven Anderton is an unjustly forgotten writer who had a decent career in the Western, detective, and sports pulps from the late Twenties to the late Fifties, producing around a hundred stories during that run, many of them novellas or novelettes. But he never wrote an actual novel as far as I know, which is probably one reason he’s forgotten. His novella “Her Name is Battle” leads off this issue, and the title is literal: the heroine is named Esther Battle. She’s a Western girl born and raised who has been at an Eastern school the past few years, but as the story opens, she’s returning to claim the ranch she’s inherited from her uncle. During the trip, she makes some allies: a giant Swede who wants to become a cowboy, and an actual down-on-his-luck cowboy who winds up being hired as Esther’s foreman. Naturally, there’s an evil banker who wants to take over the ranch, even if it means kidnapping or killing Esther before she arrives.

As far as the set-up goes, there’s nothing in this story we haven’t read many times before, but Anderton populates his yarn with distinctive, well-developed, and even colorful characters. His writing is smooth and funny at times, tough and gritty at others. “Her Name is Battle” is just a well-written, very entertaining story with a few welcome twists. Unfortunately, it kind of limps to an ending that’s not as satisfying as it could have been, which is something I’ve noticed in other stories by Anderton. It’s like he pulls back rather than going for a big finish. However, that didn’t stop me from enjoying this story, and I won’t hesitate to read more by him.

During the Thirties, Cliff Campbell was a personal pseudonym for writer and editor Abner J. Sundell. In the Forties, it became a Columbia Publications house-name used by numerous authors on Western, detective, and sports stories. The actual author of “Killer From Texas”, a novella in this issue by-lined Cliff Campbell, hasn’t been determined as far as I know, but whoever it was did a pretty good job. Drifting cowpoke Homer Kale rides into a Wyoming settlement figuring on having a quiet drink, but before you know it, he’s been accused by a beautiful girl of murdering an old prospector, and he’s locked up in jail before being taken out by a lynch mob. Homer barely escapes that necktie party and goes on the run from the law, knowing that the only way he can save his life is by finding the real killer. It’s a time-worn plot, to be sure, but “Campbell” spins his yarn with skill and enthusiasm, combining some surprisingly lighthearted scenes with a grotesque and suitably evil villain, some other colorful characters, and enough gritty action to keep things interesting. I couldn’t even make a guess who actually wrote this one, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I’d read a couple of stories by W. Edmunds Claussen before and had a mixed reaction to them. One I thought was kind of okay, the other I didn’t like. His novelette in this issue, “Gun-Smuggler Trail”, falls into the kind of okay category. It has a pretty good plot: fiddlefooted adventurer Burt Moffat returns to his family’s ranch in New Mexico to find that his father and his brother (a U.S. marshal) have both been murdered, and outlaws are using the ranch to smuggle guns across the border to Pancho Villa in Mexico. The smuggling gang uses an old ghost town as its headquarters. The story is atmospheric and violent, but Claussen’s convoluted style can be hard to read and follow. So this is sort of a miss, but an interesting one that might have been a really good story in different hands.

“Gunslick Trio From Hell” is by Charles D. Richardson Jr., another author whose work I’ve found to be okay at best. In this story, a reformed outlaw who has become the respected mayor of a frontier settlement has his past crop up to haunt him in the form of three members of his old gang. Things play out about like you’d expect them to, but in rather bland fashion and nobody in the story is really all that likable. And overall, I didn’t like the story much.

Lee Floren’s work is hit-and-miss with me, but mostly I like his stories. “Triggers for a Texan” in this issue is another interesting yarn that’s not particularly well-written, but I liked it considerably better than Claussen’s novelette. It’s about a Texan who has sworn off using a gun because of violence in his past, but when he gets involved in a Wyoming range war, he has to choose whether to pick up a Colt again. We’ve all read this plot many times before, but Floren does a decent job with it, attempting a few stylistic tricks that don’t quite come off but don’t keep it from being an entertaining yarn.

Chuck Martin, who often wrote as Charles M. Martin as well, is another dependably entertaining Western pulpster. His story “Gun or Gallows” in this issue is about a young marshal working for Judge Isaac Parker, the famous Hanging Judge. He has to arrest an old friend of his for murder, but he doesn’t believe the man is guilty, so the two of them set out together to find the real killer. I didn’t like this one as much as the other stories I’ve read by Martin, but it’s not bad. The ending is a considerable stretch, though.

Lon Williams is a pretty well-regarded author because of his series of Weird Western stories about Deputy Sheriff Lee Winters. I’ve read a few of those, though, and I’m not really a fan. His contribution to this issue is a short stand-alone story called “Stolen Waters” about a crooked lawyer and forger getting his comeuppance. It’s a very minor story but reasonably well-written.

Overall, this issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN is probably a below average Western pulp, with the best story being the “Cliff Campbell” house-name yarn, and the Seven Anderton story is good, too. None of the others are terrible, but they’re not very memorable, either. Don’t rush to your shelves to see if you have this issue. If you do read it, go in with low expectations and it’ll probably provide at least some entertainment.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Rangeland Sweethearts, October 1940

RANGELAND SWEETHEARTS was a short-lived (three issues) Western romance pulp from Popular Publications. This is the first issue. I don't know who painted the cover. As usual with the Western romance pulps, most of the authors are men who wrote traditional Western pulp yarns, too: Art Lawson, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Lee Floren, Rolland Lynch, and John Paul Jones. Not familiar with that last one other than the historical figure of the same name, but this one wrote quite a bit for the Western pulps from the Twenties to the Fifties. Of course, there are some female authors on hand, too: the very prolific Isobel Stewart Way, Leta Zoe Adams, and Myrtle Juliette Corey. I don't own this issue, but with those authors, I imagine it's pretty good. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Famous Western, Summer 1942

I don't own this issue of FAMOUS WESTERN, so I haven't read it. But I like the cover, which is credited on the Fictionmags Index to someone named Cooper, who did only a couple of pulp covers and a few interior illustrations. It has a nice dramatic look to it, though, and I like the color scheme. Inside are stories by Barry Cord (Peter Germano), Archie Joscelyn, Lee Floren, Zachary Strong (who was usually E.B. Mann), and lesser-known names Costa Carousso, Carleton Carr, and Steve Lynch. Maybe not the strongest lineup, but Germano, Mann, and Joscelyn are always worth reading, and Floren sometimes is. Don't know about the other guys. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Yarns, March 1943

This is a fairly short-lived Western pulp from Columbia Publications, edited, as usual, by Robert W. Lowndes. I don't own this issue or, for that matter, any issues of WESTERN YARNS. But the cover caught my eye. It's by Sam Cherry and is one of Cherry's earliest Western pulp covers. A pretty good job, too, if you ask me. All the authors inside are well-known Western pulpsters: Ed Earl Repp, Archie Joscelyn, Lee Floren, Chuck Martin, and Ralph Berard. Maybe not the same level as the usual authors in WESTERN STORY or DIME WESTERN, but still some enjoyable yarn-spinners there.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western Romances, September 1950

I don't know who painted the cover on this issue of REAL WESTERN ROMANCES, but it's eye-catching, to say the least. The same artist did several other covers for REAL WESTERN ROMANCES during this time period. The style is pretty distinctive. As always with the Columbia pulps, it was edited by Robert W. Lowndes. Inside this issue, the best-known author is Lee Floren. House-names Mat Rand and Cliff Campbell are on hand, too, as well as Roger Dee (Roger D. Aycock, probably best remembered for his science fiction stories), Burt Thomas, and a few other authors I hadn't heard of: W.P. Brothers, Ennen Reeves Hall, and Val Gendron. It wouldn't surprise me if some of those are pseudonyms, but it's entirely possible they're not. I don't own this issue and it doesn't seem to be on-line anywhere. I'm not sure I would have bought it if I'd seen it on the newsstand in 1950 . . . but with that cover, I would have thought about it. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double Action Western, September 1950

Since posting my review of Harry Sinclair Drago's novel APACHE CROSSING earlier this week, I've discovered that the novel also appeared in the September 1950 issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN, also under the Will Ermine name. I don't have that issue so I can't compare the texts, but the book is fairly short in the Popular Library paperback edition, 160 pages, and the pulp version runs 68 double-columned pages of, I assume, fairly small type, so it may or may not have been expanded for book publication. Also in this issue are a short story by Lee Floren and a short-short by W.G. Wyatt, who has only two credits in the Fictionmags Index, the other one being a novella in the May 1950 issue of BLUE RIBBON WESTERN. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the W.G. Wyatt name was a pseudonym, maybe for editor Robert W. Lowndes. That's pure speculation on my part, though. I think the pulp cover is by A. Leslie Ross, but it's hard to be sure because the hombre doesn't have a hat on. Ross's hats are unmistakable.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 5 Western Novels Magazine, June 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. My copy isn’t in the greatest shape, but that’s it in the scan, featuring a nice, evocative cover by Clarence Doore. You can feel the sweltering heat just looking at it, can’t you? One oddity of note is that it’s 5 WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE on the cover and the masthead on the title page, but FIVE WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE on the spine, the indicia, and the page headers. I’m going to make the arbitrary decision to use the version with the number when I refer to it in this post.

Calling this 5 WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE was something of an exaggeration, of course. The contents actually consist of three novellas, two novelettes, and a bonus short story. This title was, for the most part, a reprint pulp. There’s only one original story in this issue, and that’s the novella that leads things off, “Pistol Partners” by Lee Floren.

Now, Lee Floren has never been one of my favorite Western authors, but I’m coming to enjoy his work more over time. Also, this story features his longest-running series characters, Buckshot McKee and Tortilla Joe, a couple of drifting cowpokes who always manage to wind up in the middle of dangerous situations and sinister mysteries. I’ve read several novels starring Buck and Joe and enjoyed them. In “Pistol Partners”, they’ve come to New Mexico to answer a call for help from an old friend who is sick and has to go to the hospital. He wants Buck and Joe to take care of his pet cat for him.

That cat turns out to be a tame mountain lion named Madagascar Jones. The “hospital” in which the old friend is holed up is a boarding house run by a beautiful former madam, and all the boarders are beautiful saloon girls, one of whom is the unlikely bride of the old codger who summoned Buck and Joe. A ruthless cattle baron wants the old-timer’s land, several men have been killed, supposedly by the mountain lion Madagascar Jones, and Buck and Joe get shot at several times. This is the goofiest Lee Floren story I’ve read, rivaling W.C. Tuttle’s Sheriff Henry yarns in places. But it’s also full of action, well-plotted, and a lot of fun. There are a few examples of the slapdash writing common in Floren’s work—a guy rides up on horseback, for example, and in the very next paragraph he came up on foot and his horse is hidden in the brush—but if you can forgive that, and I can, “Pistol Partners” is pretty darned enjoyable.

William Hopson’s novelette “Trail Drive Boss” first appeared in the September 1945 issue of POPULAR WESTERN. As you can tell from the title, it’s a trail drive yarn in which a young cattleman butts heads with a crooked town boss who controls the only water in the area and uses exorbitant prices to steal herds. There’s also a beautiful woman involved, of course, and not everything is as it seems at first. Hopson was inconsistent but mostly very good, and this is an excellent tale that I enjoyed.

“Sixgun Sweepstakes”, a novella by Walker A. Tompkins, is a reprint from the June 1948 issue of POPULAR WESTERN. Tompkins is a long-time favorite of mine, and he doesn’t disappoint in this story about a town-taming lawman from Texas who’s the marshal of a town in Washington state. He throws in an intriguing angle about the friction between ranchers and wheat farmers but never really does anything with that plot element. Instead, this is a Fourth of July story with a rodeo and a big celebration highlighted by a stagecoach race. One of the marshal’s old enemies shows up in town before the shindig begins, and the romantic triangle between the two of them and the beautiful daughter of a state senator complicates matters before the villain’s true plan is revealed.

Tompkins is in good form in this story. There’s plenty of action, a fight on a train, the stagecoach race, and a few plot twists. It would have been better if the fight had been on top of the train (anybody who’s read much of my work knows I love those scenes), and a running shootout during the stagecoach race would have been nice. But that’s just me. “Sixgun Sweepstakes” is a solid yarn that would have made a good 1950s Western movie.

The novella “Dead Man’s Gold” by Larry A. Harris first appeared in the June 1948 issue of THRILLING WESTERN. A young man’s search for a fortune in gold supposedly hidden by his crazy uncle in the Devil’s River country of Texas puts him in conflict with a crooked banker and a corrupt lawman. The story moves right along and there’s plenty of action, but the writing is pretty flat and bland and the protagonist is so stupid that it stretches the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief too far. He does one dumb thing after another just to keep the plot going. Harris wrote hundreds of stories for the pulps but only a few novels, all of them featuring the Masked Rider. One of those was reprinted in paperback, Harris’s only book publication that I know of. I’ve read a few things by him in the past and found them okay at best. This one is a clear misfire.

The short story “Reunion at Amigo” is by veteran Western writer Allan K. Echols and originally appeared in the June 1948 issue of MASKED RIDER WESTERN. It’s about an old outlaw who has escaped from prison and is searching for his son. It’s pretty well-written overall, but the final twist is so obvious that it detracts quite a bit from the story’s appeal.

This issue wraps up with “The Necktie Party”, a novelette by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson from the July 1948 issue of EXCITING WESTERN. At first glance, this is a cavalry vs. the Apaches yarn, but as it turns out, there’s more to it than that as a young lieutenant tries to save a civilian scout from being lynched, prevent a new Indian war, and round up the bad guys, all at the same time. As always, Wheeler-Nicholson brings an undeniable air of authenticity to a story with a military background. This is an enjoyable tale weakened by an ending that’s not very dramatic and resolves things too easily.

As far as I remember, this is the first issue of 5 WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE, so I don’t have any basis to compare and say how it stacks up against the others in the series. Just as a Western pulp, though, I think it’s a little below average. I was surprised at how good the Floren story is, and there’s nothing wrong with the Hopson tale, but the entries by Tompkins, Wheeler-Nicholson, and Echols were good but could have been better, and the one by Harris just isn’t very good. I really like the cover by Clarence Doore, though. Overall, probably worth reading, but don’t rush to your shelves to see if you have a copy.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western Stories, August 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know who did the cover. The background looks like A. Leslie Ross’s work to me, but the figures don’t. Whoever painted it, I think it’s a fairly effective cover. Since it was a Columbia pulp, REAL WESTERN STORIES had a reputation as a low-budget production, but editor Robert W. Lowndes regularly turned out enjoyable magazines, and I was eager to find out if this issue was one of them.

A friend of mine is a fan of Seven Anderton’s work, and based on his recommendation I’ve read several of Anderton’s stories over the years. His novella “Cyclone in Petticoats” leads off this issue. It opens with a determined young woman named Ruth Horn arriving from the East in the Western town where her uncle owns the bank. He’s her last living relative, or so she thinks. Actually, the bank was robbed and her uncle was killed a short time before she got there. During the journey, she’s made the acquaintance of veterinarian “Bones” Egan, who fills her in on the troubles in the area brought on a corrupt banker and a crooked cattleman, and Ruth decides to stick around, run the bank, and break the hold that the two villains have on the town and the basin where it’s located.

This is a very well-written story with lots of good dialogue, interesting characters, and a well-handled romance between Ruth and Egan. Anderton keeps things moving along at a nice pace. What there’s a shortage of is action. The story is almost over before anybody burns any powder. The big showdown/battle is pretty good, mind you. I enjoyed “Cyclone in Petticoats” mostly because of Anderton’s excellent prose.

If you’ve never read any of Lon Williams’ stories about Deputy Lee Winters . . . well, there’s really nothing else in the Western pulps like this lengthy series. Winters is always running into bizarre situations, often with a hint, or more than a hint, of the supernatural. Sometimes, as in “A Desert Hippocrates”, the story in this issue, the threat facing Winters is just weird. The plot involves a pair of British doctors in the Old West performing some rather odd surgeries. Williams’ work has a very distinctive voice, which I like, but I’ve found the Lee Winters series to be hit and miss for me, and probably more misses than hits. This one is an average entry, mildly entertaining, but somehow it doesn’t quite work.

Lee Floren makes his first of two appearances in this issue with the short story “A Trap for a Skunk”, under the pseudonym Lew Smith. I’m not a big fan of Floren’s work, but his stories usually move along at a nice clip and this one is no exception. The plot concerns a couple of old-timers who have to take drastic action to save a young friend of theirs from the cattle baron who’s plotting to kill him. This isn’t a bad yarn, but I thought it was sorely lacking one final twist that it needed. The ending is really flat.

A.A. Baker worked for Grayhound Bus Lines and wrote Western novels and short stories on the side, publishing steadily but never achieving much fame in the genre. I don’t recall ever reading anything by him before, but his short story in this issue, “Abel Cain Strikes Back”, is pretty good. Abel Cain is a frontier judge keeping law and order in a California mining boomtown. In this yarn, a mob storms the jail not to lynch a prisoner but to free him so that he can lead his rescuers to a new gold strike. Baker throws a nice twist into the mix and comes up with an entertaining story featuring good characters and some nice action. Baker wrote more than thirty Abel Cain stories between 1948 and 1959, and I wouldn’t mind reading more of them.

Richard Brister wrote hundreds of Western, detective, and sports stories for the pulps as well as a dozen or so Western novels. His short story in this issue, “Learn and Live”, concerns an encounter between a notorious outlaw and the consumptive doctor who patches up a bullet wound for him. It’s well-written and clever, a pretty good yarn.

“Boothill Double-Cross” is by Crag Martin, an author about whom I know absolutely nothing except that he published nine stories in various Western pulps in the early Fifties. This one is about a young sheriff trying to clear the name of a friend of his who has been accused of robbing the local bank. It’s a very predictable story with nothing that stands out about the writing or the plot. Average at best, partially redeemed by some decent action at the end.

“The Lie” is by Fred Landreth, his only credit in the Fictionmags Index. That always makes me wonder if the name was a one-time pseudonym. I don’t know about that, but this short-short about a youngster visiting the camp of two notorious outlaws, bent on taking up a career as an owlhoot himself, is well-written. There’s not much to it, but I enjoyed it.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a big fan of Lee Floren’s work, mostly because it’s so inconsistent. I think his early novels about drifting adventurers Buck McKee and Tortilla Joe are my favorites of what I’ve read by him. Floren wrote another long-running series about two-fisted jurist Judge Lemanuel Bates and his sidekick, postmaster Tobacco Jones. More than two dozen of these yarns were published in various pulps. Floren’s novelette in this issue, “Loco Lead”, is the next to last Judge Bates story in the pulps, although he would continue to write novels about the character throughout the Sixties. This is a pretty good one featuring a would-be killer employing an unusual method in an attempt to commit murder. The plot is solid, there’s some nice action, and I found Judge Bates and Tobacco Jones to be likable protagonists. The only sign of Floren’s frequent carelessness is that one of the characters changes names almost paragraph to paragraph, sometimes called Bart Smith and sometimes Luke Smith. I suppose Stan Lee would have explained that by saying that his full name is Barton Lucas Smith. Also, Lowndes should have caught that, but I doubt that he did much diligent line editing on these stories. I don’t recall ever reading any of the stories in this series before, but based on “Loco Lead”, I wouldn’t hesitate to try another one. I might even check and see if I have any of Floren’s Judges Bates novels on my shelves.

Overall, I’d say this is a very average issue of REAL WESTERN STORIES. The best story is Seven Anderton’s novella, which is very good although I thought it could be better. Lee Floren surprised me by contributing my second-favorite story in this issue with “Loco Lead”, followed by A.A. Baker with a tale about another frontier judge, Abel Cain. The other stories are all readable with varying degrees of entertainment value. If you’re inclined to check out any of these stories for yourself, you can find the entire issue on-line here.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double Action Western, September 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover is another by A. Leslie Ross, even though it’s not credited as such. The distinctive hats make me confident that it’s Ross’s work, as does the sketchiness of the background which was common on his pulp covers from this era.

I don’t recall if I’ve read anything by Richard Brister before (and I’m too lazy to look it up), but I’m impressed by his lead novelette in this issue. “Death Rides for Doom Ranch” (I’m betting editor Robert W. Lowndes came up with that title) has an unusual protagonist: a doctor sent to prison for the mercy killing of his best friend who had cancer. After escaping, the doctor heads west, where a disastrous train derailment gets him involved with a rancher and the rancher’s beautiful daughter. At this point, I was expecting a save-the-ranch story, albeit with an offbeat protagonist, but that’s not what Brister has in mind. Instead he introduces the local sheriff, who’s in love with the rancher’s beautiful daughter, and what we get is a story that mixes psychological suspense and soap opera, with very little action. What’s surprising to me is how much I enjoyed it anyway as Brister kept me flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen. That takes some skillful writing. I’m going to have to delve deeper into Brister’s work.

As we all know from the Internet, Leo Tolstoy has taught us that there are only three plots in fiction: A man goes on a journey. A stranger comes to town. Godzilla versus Megashark. (I’m sorry. I just really like that meme.) Barney Stuart’s short story “He Just Walked Away” takes place entirely in the small town of Tall Timber, Montana, so it doesn’t really fit the first category, and there are no monsters in it, so this must be a “stranger comes to town” story. The stranger is a bad guy, too, and it looks like he’s going to cause considerable trouble until one of the locals takes action against him in an unusual manner. There’s a sort of twist ending that’s not very surprising, but it is effective. This is Barney Stuart’s only credit in the Fictionmags Index. A pseudonym? Who knows? But it’s a decent little yarn.

“Command Performance” is by David James, a fairly prolific pulpster whose work appeared only in pulps from Columbia Publications, which always makes me suspect a house-name. Be that as it may, this story has an interesting protagonist, too: a former New York City police detective who has to move west for his health and winds up becoming the sheriff of a mining town. A famous female opera singer comes to town for the opening of its new opera house. The sheriff has a crush on the opera singer and gives everybody he arrests the choice of sitting in jail or buying a ticket for the opening night performance. That results in a packed house, but cowboys and miners being what they are, chaos ensues. This is a decent setup and the story is mildly amusing, but in the end it doesn’t amount to much and seems like it needed another plot angle or two to make it interesting.

C.C. Staples wrote about 50 Western and adventure stories for various pulps between the late Thirties and the early Fifties. His story in this issue, “Golden Boy”, is about an Arizona Ranger on the trail of a horse thief turned murderer and kidnapper. It’s not bad, plenty of action and fairly well written. I’m not going to rush out and look for more stories by Staples, but I enjoyed this one.

Robert Sidney Bowen is probably best remembered for his air war stories, but he wrote quite a few Western and detective yarns, too. “Gambler’s Pot” in this issue is a rare Western pulp story in that it’s written in first person, by a crooked gambler who has a plan to bilk a successful rancher. Naturally, things don’t work as he expects. There’s really not much to this story, but Bowen was a good enough storyteller to make it readable, if not memorable.

Norman Ober wrote a lot for the Columbia pulps, mostly sports stories but some Westerns, too. His story in this issue, “Election in Creek Bottom”, is a comedy about a crooked saloon owner running his own candidate in the election for sheriff, only to have the scheme backfire on him. It’s a fairly amusing yarn and could have made a good movie starring, say, Don Knotts.

“Drygulch Range” by E.E. Clement uses the save-the-ranch plot that I thought I was going to get in Richard Brister’s story, only this novelette doesn’t have an offbeat protagonist. Instead, our hero is the usual drifting cowpoke, in this case stalwart Texan Steve Crane who is on his way to the Black Hills of South Dakota to start a horse ranch there. A reference to the Spanish-American War places the time period of this one around the turn of the century. Crane encounters a pint-size rustler hunter and then the little boy’s beautiful older sister shows up and mistakes Crane for a rustler, too, at least at first. A little bit later, a bushwhacker tries to ventilate him. Yep, our boy Steve shore is ridin’ into trouble.

While the plot of this one may not be anything new, Lowndes does an excellent job of spinning an entertaining yarn. He gives us a tough, likable protagonist, plenty of action, and a few humorous touches. Some of the “yuh mangy polecat” dialogue is so over the top, I’m convinced his tongue was firmly in his cheek as he wrote this, but if he’s making a little fun of the genre’s conventions, he’s doing it in a very affectionate way. I enjoyed this one a lot, and I’m going to have to go through my stack of Columbia Western pulps looking for more E.E. Clement stories.

There are also several fact-based features by Lauran Paine, Lee Floren (writing as Lee Thomas), and A. Hyatt Verrill, but as usual I just skimmed these. I don’t actually read features in a Western pulp unless they’re about some historical subject in which I’m particularly interested.

This is a pretty solid issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN, another good example of how Lowndes, as an editor, could make something out of almost nothing (the magazine’s tiny budget). There are no truly outstanding stories, although the Brister and the Clement novelettes come close, but they’re all readable and entertaining.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western, June 1942

I don't know who painted the cover on this issue of REAL WESTERN, but I like it. Very dramatic. There's a nice group of writers inside, too: E.B. Mann, who takes up most of the pages with a novel-length story (I wonder if it was ever reprinted under another title), Wilbur S. Peacock, Anson Hard, Brett Austin (who was really Lee Floren), and house-name Cliff Campbell.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Max Brand's Western Magazine, July 1952

MAX BRAND'S WESTERN MAGAZINE started out as a reprint pulp, using older stories not only by Frederick Faust under his Max Brand pseudonym and other pen-names but also stories by other Western pulpsters. As time went on, though, the magazine published more and more new stories. By the time the July 1952 issue came out, there was only one reprint in the Table of Contents, a John Colohan story from the July 1936 issue of DIME WESTERN. Authors with new stories in this issue include Philip Ketchum, Ray Townsend, Lee Floren, Allan K. Echols, Cy Kees, Robert L. Trimnell, and Marvin De Vries. Most of those may not be big names, but they published regularly in the Western pulps. And that dramatic cover, which I like, is by H.W. Scott.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 2 Western-Action Books, Winter 1951

Double covers are usually pretty good. There's still enough room for a decent scene, while the triple covers (such as on the Thrilling Group's TRIPLE WESTERN) are often too small to be very effective. I like this double cover on the Winter 1951 issue of 2 WESTERN-ACTION BOOKS. I don't know the artist(s). I believe this is a Fiction House pulp, although officially it was published by Fight Stories Inc. As you'd expect from the title, there are only two stories in it, both novellas. One is by Lee Floren, not a favorite author of mine but one capable of decent work. The other is by Dave Ricks, and it's his only credit in the Fictionmags Index. My sneaking suspicion is that the name is a pseudonym, possibly for Lee Floren since he has the other story in this issue. But I don't know and would be happy to learn more about him, if any of you have any info.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western Stories, August 1950

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. I think the cover is by A. Leslie Ross. The hat and the face look like Ross’s work to me, but maybe someone who is better than I am at artist identification can pin this down for us.

The lead novella in this issue is “Gun-Hung Range” by W. Edmunds Claussen. In a 12-year career from the mid-Forties to the late Fifties, Claussen produced around 80 stories for the Western pulps. Most of his output appeared in various Columbia Publications pulps, such as this issue of REAL WESTERN STORIES. But he also sold to some of the other publishers and authored half a dozen Western novels for Lion Books, Avon, Pocket Books, and Dodd, Mead, plus several volumes of historical non-fiction. I don’t recall reading anything by him before this novella, which uses the old plot of a villain trying to force out some small ranchers and grab their land because the railroad is coming through. The protagonist is a fairly interesting character, a rancher who is emotionally tortured because he’s married to a saloon floozy with whom he has a son but is actually in love with a beautiful schoolteacher. Unfortunately, the writing isn’t very good, with clunky prose that sometimes doesn’t flow very well and is hard to follow. The big battle at the end isn’t bad but doesn’t fully redeem the story. I have a couple of Claussen’s novels on my shelves, but I’m not going to be in any hurry to read them.

M.G. Baker published a dozen stories in various Columbia Western pulps in the late Forties and early Fifties. I suspect that the name might be a pseudonym or house name, but that’s all it is, a suspicion. Baker’s story in this issue, a novelette called “A Target For His Coffin”, is a first-person yarn, somewhat unusual for the Western pulps, narrated by the sheriff of a mining town who has 24 hours to uncover the identity of a killer and save a young visitor from the east from being lynched. It’s an okay story, a little predictable but reasonably entertaining.

T.W. Ford was a very prolific pulpster, turning out hundreds of Western, sports, and detective tales, as well as being an editor and writing a few novels, sometimes under the pseudonym Weston Clay. He has a novelette called “Boothill Brand” in this issue, and it’s a good hardboiled Western yarn in which an outlaw answers a call for help from an old flame and returns to the town where he was betrayed and framed for rustling. Plenty of action, the writing is decent (Ford was never much of a stylist), and I enjoyed this one quite a bit, not surprising since Ford was pretty consistent in his work.

Allan K. Echols is another very prolific Western pulp author/novelist. His story “Renegades Die Twice” is another pretty hardboiled yarn about the meeting between an old outlaw who’s dying and wants to make amends for his crimes and a younger owlhoot who has a clever plan. As usual in this type of story, things don’t work out as either man plans. You can see the twist coming, but it’s still effective and makes this a good story.

C.H. Cogswell authored several dozen stories during the Fifties, all appearing in Columbia Western pulps. His story in this issue, “Just One More Raid!”, is a well-written, poignant tale about an honest rancher and his best friend, an outlaw who wants to go straight and settle down, but before he does, he has to pull one more job . . . You know this story isn’t going to end well, but Cogswell does a good job with it.

Lon Williams is best remembered for his long-running series of supernaturally tinged tales about Deputy Sheriff Lee Winters, but he wrote quite a few stand-alone Western stories, too, including “Poady Hangs a Multitude” in this issue. It’s about a meek little hombre who’s elected sheriff as a joke, but he comes up with a bizarre way to bring law and order to a wide-open mining camp. This one maybe stretches credibility a bit too far. It’s an interesting story but not a particularly good one.

“Gun Mission” by W.F. Day is about a young man who teaches himself to be a fast gun in order to get revenge on a man who humiliated him. But when he returns to his hometown to accomplish this, he finds himself mixed up in something more complicated and has to change his plans. Lots of action in this one, and it’s pretty well-written. Day published only a handful of stories and I don’t know anything about him, but based on this yarn, he was a decent writer.

The issue wraps up with “Boothill Medico” by Brett Austin, a pseudonym for Lee Floren. This is a short-short about a doctor having to operate on a patient he has a grudge against. The writing is decent, but it seemed to lacking a final twist it should have had.

Overall I’d say this is a below-average issue of a Western pulp with a few good stories but nothing outstanding, and some mediocre but not terrible stories. I don’t consider the time spent reading it wasted, but it’s probably the weakest issue of a Robert Lowndes-edited pulp that I’ve read so far, proving that he couldn’t always work miracles on an almost non-existent budget.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western, December 1944

This cover by A. Leslie Ross is another good example of how the Western pulp art directors loved the colors red and yellow. Nearly all of this issue of REAL WESTERN is taken up by the novel "Buckskin Marshal" by Will Ermine, really Harry Sinclair Drago. I think I have the paperback version of that book on my shelves somewhere. I'll have to check. The lone short story is by another familiar name, Lee Floren. I generally like Ross's work, and I think this is a good cover.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: .44 Western Magazine, October 1940

Well, there's a cover that's coming right at you. I don't know the artist. I thought that little squiggle by the left stirrup might be a signature, but if it is, I can't make it out. Whoever painted it did a good job. .44 WESTERN MAGAZINE, like all the Popular Publications Western pulps, had good covers, good authors, and great story titles. Authors in this issue include Ed Earl Repp, Lee Floren, John G. Pearsol, Jay Karth, Le Roy Boyd, Jack Sterrett, and Eugene R. Dutcher. Maybe not an all-star lineup but probably worth reading.

Wolf Dog Range - Will Watson (Lee Floren)

First of all, there are no wolf dogs in this book. There’s a town called Wolf Dog, as well as a river and a mountain range, but no actual wolf dogs. The novel was published originally in hardback by lending library publisher Phoenix Press in 1946. Then it appeared in the October 1947 issue of COMPLETE COWBOY NOVELS MAGAZINE with a great cover that I posted here on the blog a while back. I liked that cover enough that it inspired me to seek out a copy of the book. What I wound up with is the 1951 Lion Books paperback edition. That's my copy in the scan above. But like the pulp version, this cover is misleading, too, as no fight between a hatchet-wielding hombre and a fella shooting at him ever takes place in the book’s pages.

Now that we’ve covered that, what’s WOLF DOG RANGE actually about? It’s a range war story, as tough cowboy Pete Manly travels from Texas to Montana to answer a summons for help from Jeff Ring, the old-timer who raised him. Ring has relocated his ranch to Montana, and now the owner of the neighboring spread is trying to force him out. Ring is in financial trouble, too, because the local banker absconded with the deposits and left the old rancher almost broke. Pete figures something shady is going on, especially when some badmen hold up the train he’s coming in on, for the express purpose of murdering him. He survives that attempt, of course, and also makes the acquaintance of a beautiful young woman who’s also traveling to the town of Wolf Dog. (Why is everything in the area called Wolf Dog? Unfortunately, the author never tells us.) When he arrives, Pete sets out to get to the bottom of several suspicious happenings and prevent his old friend’s ranch from being taken over.

You can tell from that brief description that WOLF DOG RANGE is a very traditional Western novel. That’s not surprising, because the author, “Will Watson”, was really Lee Floren, who made a living for several decades by writing very traditional Western yarns for the pulps and for a variety of paperback publishers. Floren is a maddeningly inconsister writer. I don’t know much about his background, but when he’s writing about cattle and ranch life, his work has a ring of authenticity that at times rivals Walt Coburn. The long sequence in this book about a roundup carried out during an unexpectedly early snowstorm is excellent, as is the aftermath of a chinook wind that melts the snow. Floren’s action scenes are generally good to very good, too. Where his writing gets clunky is in dialogue and in the scenes were the characters are interacting without any gunplay or fisticuffs. Some of that is so perfunctory that it reads like scenes he outlined but forgot to flesh out. There’s too much of that in WOLF DOG RANGE.

And yet . . . there are some great characters in this book, including the old rancher’s Apache sidekick and a Chinese range cook who reminded me of Connie from Milton Caniff’s classic TERRY AND THE PIRATES. There are also some poignant moments that work really well. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve never been a fan of Floren’s work and so I haven’t read that much by him, but without a doubt, WOLF DOG RANGE is the best of his novels that I’ve read so far, and I’m not saying that to damn with faint praise. It’s not without its flaws, but I found it to be a solidly entertaining traditional Western.

It could’ve used some wolf dogs, though.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Complete Cowboy Novel Magazine, October 1947

That's a nice dramatic cover on this issue of COMPLETE COWBOY NOVEL MAGAZINE. I don't know who the artist is, but the cover certainly caught my eye. "Will Watson", the author of the lead novel, was really Lee Floren, who also has one of his Buckshot McKee stories in this issue under his real name. The only other author in the issue is Tom Dowling Jr., a complete unknown to me. WOLF DOG RANGE, the novel version, was published in hardback by Wells, Gardner, Darton & Co. (never heard of 'em) in 1949, and reprinted in paperback by Lion Books in 1951, both editions still under the Will Watson name. I like the pulp cover enough that I'm tempted to see if I can find a copy of the novel, even though I'm not really a fan of Lee Floren's work.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double-Action Western, July 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a big fan of Lee Floren’s work, despite him being both prolific and popular for a long time. I picked up this pulp to read anyway, even though he’s the author of the featured novel, “Smoky River Gunsmoke”. And for a change, unlike most pulp “novels”, this one probably is close to actual novel length. Ace Double length, anyway.

And for another change, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Yes, the writing is clumsy at times. Floren’s attempts at humor usually fall flat. The plot, a standard cattlemen vs. homesteaders yarn, is nothing we haven’t read and seen a thousand times before. But the characters have unexpected depth to them, even the bad guys. The main villain does some things that make him a poignant, almost tragic figure. He’s still evil, mind you, but there’s more to him than that. Also, the action scenes are great. I think I’m coming to the realization that Floren was just one of those writers who had a distinctive style, for better or worse (and sometimes it’s both), and I appreciate that. After reading this one, I may actually seek out more of his work.

Richard Deming was a top-notch mystery author whose work I’ve long admired, so I was a little surprised that his short story in this issue, “Reluctant Killer”, isn’t very good. This tale of a deadly gunman’s quest for a normal life is well-written, but it’s pretty slow and talky and not much happens.

I’m not that familiar with Charles D. Richardson Jr. I think I’ve seen his name in Western pulps, but that’s all I know about him. “Ride ’Em, Cowgirl” is a horse race story, with the cowgirl of the title trying to replace her injured beau in an important race. There’s nothing really wrong with this one, but it never caught my interest.

I’ve read several stories by Lloyd Kevin and the only novel he published, a hardboiled sleaze novel from Monarch Books. His novelette in this issue, “Schoolmaster From the East”, could well be a reject from RANCH ROMANCES. The title character comes to a Western town and finds himself in the middle of a conflict over water rights, as well as falling for the beautiful daughter of the rancher who controls the source of that water. Although I think it could have used a more dramatic title, I enjoyed this story. The author doesn’t fall into the trap of making his protagonist more competent than he logically should be, and the mystery element is worked out fairly well. This is the second-best story in the issue, after the Floren yarn.

Richard Brister, another author whose name is familiar to me, rounds out things with the short story “No Whiskey on Hobnail”, in which a rancher attempts to rehabilitate a young criminal from the big city. This is also a pretty good, effective story and makes me want to read more by Brister.

So, overall, this isn’t an outstanding issue of DOUBLE-ACTION WESTERN, but it’s a good one. Surprisingly good in the case of the Floren novel. That’s happened to me on occasion before, not being a fan of a writer’s work and then coming to appreciate and enjoy it. We’ll see if that comes about again.