Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Frontier Stories, Winter 1944

I featured this issue of FRONTIER STORIES several years ago, but I’ve since acquired a copy and just read it. Unfortunately, that copy is completely coverless, including the spine, but I’m not a fan of that Sidney Reisenberg cover anyway and all the pages are complete and easily readable, so I’m all right with that. Once again, the scan is from the Fictionmags Index, but my comments below are new.

Les Savage Jr. is one of my favorite Western writers. His mountain man novella “Queen of the Long Rifles” leads off this issue. That title is somewhat deceptive, and I suspect editor Malcolm Reiss may have come up with it. The story features a strong female character in Mira Phillips, the daughter of a trading post owner in the Big Horn Mountains during the fur trapping era. The actual protagonist is Batteau Severn, a French-Canadian trapper who clashes with a ruthless New Englander trying to take over the fur trade. This winds up as an out-and-out war between the two factions, which provides Savage with the opportunity for plenty of big, sweeping action scenes, as well as some brutal fistfights and one-on-one showdowns. This is a terrific story, full of excitement and a vividly portrayed, historically accurate setting. Batteau is a tough and very likable hero, Mira is a fine heroine, there are several top-notch sidekicks, some thoroughly despicable villains, and several surprisingly poignant moments. Savage could just write the heck out of a yarn like this. I loved it.

Tom W. Blackburn was also a consistently excellent Western author. His novelette “Devil’s Cache” starts with a freighter following the trail of whoever stole four of his horses. Not very far along, though, the story takes an abrupt turn and appears momentarily that it’s about to turn into a lost race yarn. That’s not how things play out, but the plot is still fairly off-beat for a Western pulp tale. This one is very well-written and I enjoyed it a lot, too.

Sometimes reading a pulp is educational. “Red Reckoning” is about a stagecoach trying to make it across the country to San Francisco before a ship can sail around South America and reach the same destination. An enormous wager is riding on the outcome. The protagonist is a frontier scout hired to help the stagecoach make the journey safely. Naturally, there’s a lot of trouble and treachery along the way, as well as romance with the daughter of the stagecoach line owner who made the bet. It’s a well-written yarn that moves along at a nice pace. I had never heard of the authors, Frankie-Lee Weed and Kelly Masters, so I did a little research on them, and that’s where the educational part comes in. My first thought was that they might be a husband-and-wife writing team, but nope, turns out they were just occasional writing partners who had much more prolific careers on their own. Kelly Masters published a few stories under his real name, but most of his work, which consisted mainly of slick magazine stories and boys’ adventure novels, was published under the pseudonym Zachary Ball. A couple of his novels were adapted as episodes of the original Walt Disney TV show. Frankie-Lee Weed published quite a few stories in the Western romance and love pulps under her real name, as well as the pseudonym Saliee O’Brien. Under the O’Brien name she went on to publish numerous historical romance novels in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. I remember seeing those books when they were new. So both authors went on to bigger (not necessarily better) things but got their start in the pulps.

Curtis Bishop was a Texas newspaper reporter who followed the rodeo circuit while also writing scores of Western and sports stories for various pulps, along with a number of juvenile sports novels and some well-regarded Western novels. I haven’t read much by him, but everything I’ve read has been very good. So I expected to enjoy “Turning Trails”, his novelette in this issue set in Texas during the days right after the Civil War. It starts off strong with a former Confederate officer having left his home and headed west after the war, as many actually did. He arrives in San Antonio and gets mixed up in the clash between the beautiful blond owner of a nearby ranch and the brutal, corrupt Reconstruction authorities who run things in Texas at this point. Then it becomes a trail drive story as the protagonist tries to help the young woman get a herd of cattle across the Red River into Indian Territory before the crooked sheriff can seize them. Bishop writes with a nice sense of time and place, but this story goes off the rails in the second half as he makes a number of geographical errors (I mean, I understand dramatic license, but that only goes so far, especially when you’re a Texan writing about Texas), and the plot twist that fuels the story’s resolution stretches willing suspension of disbelief ’way past the breaking point. I just didn’t accept that things could ever happen that way—and I’m a guy who has no problem with, say, Jim Hatfield’s almost super heroics. So this story, despite having some good stuff in it, wound up being a major disappointment.

This issue wraps up with the novella “The Conestoga Pirate” by another of my favorite authors, Dan Cushman. It’s an important story in Cushman’s career because it introduces his series character, the good guy outlaw Comanche John, although in this story and the next one in the series, he’s called Dutch John. This story was reprinted in the Leisure Books collection NO GOLD ON BOOTHILL, but since I have the original pulp version, that’s what I read. I hadn’t read any of the Dutch/Comanche John stories until now, although I think I own them all in one form or another.

Something about “The Conestoga Pirate” struck me as familiar right away, and a glance at the story intro in NO GOLD ON BOOTHILL explained why. Cushman used parts of this novella in his later novel NORTH FORK TO HELL, which I read several years ago, although he dropped Dutch John from that version. In this one, Dutch John is more of a supporting character, although an important one. The protagonist is young Wils Fleming, who, along with the old-timer Bogey and the disreputable gunfighter/outlaw Dutch John, encounter a wagon train full of immigrants being duped by a group of villains pretending to be guides and scouts. This leads to drama, gunplay, ambushes, and attempted lynchings. It’s a good, fast-moving story, with a little bit of an off-kilter tone, as many of Cushman’s stories have. He wrote a lot of Western and adventure stories for the pulps that were firmly in those traditions yet just a little different at the same time. It took me a while to understand that and appreciate his work, but as I said above, he’s now one of my favorites. I guess I need to read the rest of the Comanche John stories and novels.

There are also two Western history articles in this issue, one about the outlaw Black Jack Ketchum by Harold Preece and one about the Bannock War by Fairfax Downey. As usual, I just skimmed these. I like Western history and have read a bunch of it, but when it comes to pulps, I’m there for the fiction. And despite my ultimate disappointment in Curtis Bishop’s novella, this is an excellent issue of FRONTIER STORIES overall, with outstanding yarns from Savage, Cushman, and Blackburn. If you have a copy, it’s well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Frontier Stories, Summer 1945

I don't own this issue of FRONTIER STORIES, so I haven't read it. But it has a dramatic cover by Richard Case and a fine group of writers inside. The lead story by Les Savage Jr., "The Lone Star Camel Corps", may have been cannibalized for Savage for his novel ONCE A FIGHTER. It was reprinted in one of the Les Savage Jr. collections packaged by Jon Tuska and I have a copy of that book on order. I'm looking forward to reading the story. Also on hand in this issue of FRONTIER STORIES are William Heuman, Tom W. Blackburn, William R. Cox, R.S. Lerch, Fairfax Downey, and the lesser-known Ben T. Young and Raymond L. Hill. Lots of good reading there, I have no doubt about that.

Review: Once a Fighter . . . -- Les Savage Jr.

Les Savage Jr. was a highly regarded Western writer during his lifetime, a career cut short when he died in 1958 at the age of 35 from a heart attack brought on by diabetes. Many of his novels and novellas are still in print, as resurrecting Savage’s work from the pulps and elsewhere was one of the most successful projects carried out by editor/agent Jon Tuska and his Golden West Literary Agency.

So I was a little surprised to discover that one of Savage’s novels, the Cavalry yarn ONCE A FIGHTER . . ., published as a paperback original by Pocket Books in 1956, was never reprinted and remains out of print today. The book first caught my attention because of its lurid but dramatic cover painted by Robert Schulz. Finding out it was something of an oddity in Savage’s career sealed the deal and made me read it. That’s my copy in the scan above.

The protagonist of ONCE A FIGHTER . . . is a Cavalry officer named Gil Tavister who is unjustly drummed out of the Army by a superior officer who hates him, partially because of political differences and partially because Tavister is romantically involved with the man’s daughter. With enemies on his trail, Tavister travels from Kansas to Texas, uncovers a conspiracy that threatens the Army, re-enlists under a false name, and winds up involved with the infamous Camel Corps, the ill-fated experiment that saw the Army import Arabian camels to Texas and Arizona to find out if they could replace horses. Tavister travels with the Cavalry to Fort Davis in West Texas and then on into New Mexico where a showdown with his old enemies takes place in the midst of an epic battle against the Apaches.

That’s the bare bones of the plot, and it’s a good one for a traditional Western. Savage’s characters are interesting and his writing is top-notch, very descriptive and action-packed. But at the same time, there’s a lot more going on in this book, including the likely reasons it was never reprinted.

Savage liked to push the envelope, as they say, especially when it came to the romance angles in his work. Given the pre-Civil War setting, the first part of this book reads more like a historical novel than a traditional Western, and there’s not just one interracial romance but two. Savage fought with his editors over this tendency in his work numerous times, according to Tuska. It’s particularly dominant in parts of this book, which may well have been responsible for editors shying away from reprints.

For another thing, ONCE A FIGHTER . . . has one of the most even-handed approaches to the causes of the brewing Civil War that I’ve encountered in a novel. There are sympathetic and unsympathetic characters on both sides, north and south, but the main villains are abolitionists, something that would have kept it from being reprinted in recent decades. At the same time, there are no apologies for slavery and it’s never presented as anything less than evil. It’s a complex book and offers no easy answers, other than a general disdain for fanatics and extremists on both sides.

All that said, ONCE A FIGHTER . . . is, at the same time, a rousing adventure yarn, and the final battle against the Apaches is spectacular, mixing camels and sword-fighting with the more traditional soldiers vs. Indians action. I also liked the fact that some of the book takes place at Camp Verde, the Camel Corps headquarters northwest of San Antonio, and Fort Davis in far West Texas, both places I’ve been. I really enjoyed this novel and think it’s worthy of being reprinted, but since that’s unlikely, if you want to read it you’ll have to hunt up a used copy like I did.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp Revisited - Frontier Stories, Summer 1950

I’ve featured this pulp before, but now I’ve had a chance to read it, thanks to a good friend who loaned me his copy. That’s it in the scan. The cover is by Allan Anderson, I think. His horses are pretty distinctive.

The issue leads off with the novelette “Tombstones For Gringos” by Les Savage Jr. Brothers Colin and Farris Shane are traveling with their ill and dying mother, looking for a new homestead. They find a good place, but it lies in the shadow of a mountain known as El Renegado because of some tragic events a couple of hundred years earlier. It seems that a Spanish captain (Spain ruled the region then) betrayed his men for the love of a woman, fled to the mountain with her, and the rest of the company was wiped out. Now the basin that lies in the shadow of the peak is cursed. And boy, everything that happens after that seems to bear out the curse. You’ve got family members killing family members (at least three cases of it), gruesome torture, and doomed love.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because Savage’s original version of the tale was published many years later as “The Shadow of Renegade Basin” in the Leisure paperback of the same name, which is still available from Amazon Encore. Fiction House editor Malcolm Reiss bought the manuscript in 1948, probably because Savage was one of Fiction House’s star writers by that time and he bought everything Savage sent him. Reiss must have deemed Savage’s original version unpublishable, because he sat on it for a couple of years, then did some rewrites himself and finally published it in this issue of FRONTIER STORIES.

Since I have the book with Savage’s version in it, I skimmed through it after I’d read the pulp novelette, looking for the changes Reiss made. They’re really not extensive at all. He removed one plot element that he must have felt was too offensive (given the time period, he was right) and rewrote the ending to give it at least a tiny shred of hope, rather than the bleak nihilism of Savage’s version. I hate to side with an editor over an author, but Reiss was right to do what he did. The pulp version is better. I get that Savage was trying to push the boundaries of the genre, and he successfully did so in other novels and stories, but I think this one is a misfire.

Next up is another novelette, “Wheels of Empire” by Alexander Wallace. This one is set during the 1840s, the days of the great immigrant wagon trains, and is about a clerk from Boston who goes west seeking adventure, becomes a frontiersman, and clashes with a crooked trading post owner who swindles the immigrants who visit his fort. It’s a pretty good yarn with some nice action and a thoroughly despicable villain. Wallace was a Canadian author who published several dozen Western and adventure stories in various pulps from the mid-Forties to the mid-Fifties. I’ve read a few stories by him and enjoyed all of them.

Charles Dickson wrote only a few detective and Western stories for the pulps, and I don’t know anything about him. I don’t recall ever reading anything by him until I read his short story in this issue, “Ride the River”. Like most of the stories in this pulp, it’s as much a historical yarn as a traditional Western and is set during the mountain man era. The protagonist is a young fur trapper who sets out to stop a rival from stirring up an Indian war. This is a pretty well-written story, and I enjoyed it.

“Retreat to Glory” by Norman B. Wiltsey is billed as a short story, but it’s actually an article based on history like the dozens of others Wiltsey wrote for various pulps. It’s about a group of Northern Cheyenne jumping the reservation in Indian Territory and heading north toward their homeland. The army pursues them, of course. Wiltsey does an okay job recounting a fairly sad chapter in history.

“Dance of the Grizzly” is Theodore Cutting’s only credit in the Fictionmags Index. The protagonist is a young Indian who has to face a grizzly bear in an ordeal of courage in order to win the girl he loves. Cutting throws in a few decent twists, but overall this story never really engaged my interest.

“Apache Flame” is bylined John Starr, a well-known Fiction House house-name. But there’s more to the background than that. A line on the Table of Contents page states that this novelette and the following one, “The Mountains Said No”, are copyright 1938 by Fiction House. The twist is that no stories by those titles were published in any Fiction House pulp in 1938. I even checked the issues from December 1937 and January 1939 just for the sake of thoroughness. Which leads me to believe that these two stories were published originally under other titles and with other bylines on them. There’s a story called “Apache!” by Ray Nafziger in an issue of FRONTIER STORIES from 1938, which seemed a likely suspect, but the writing in “Apache Flame” doesn’t really strike me as being Nafziger’s work. Of course, I could be wrong about that. Chances are, we’ll never know which “John Starr” actually wrote this story, but it’s a really good one featuring another mountain man protagonist, this one teaming up with some Spanish settlers who hate him in order to rescue some young women kidnapped by vengeful Apaches. It takes place in what will one day be New Mexico, another thing that made me think of Nafziger, who lived there while he was writing for the pulps. No matter who wrote it, “Apache Flame” really races along with good characters and plenty of action. This is a top-notch yarn.

Another Fiction House house-name, Wilton Hazzard, is the byline on the novelette “The Mountains Said No”, which wraps up this issue. The mountain man protagonist of this one comes across a wagon train under attack by a Pawnee war party and helps the immigrants run off the Indians, only to find that the wagons are being guided by an old enemy of his. Our hero and his crusty old sidekick wind up joining the wagon train, of course, to try to get them through safely to the gold fields in California. This is an excellent story, really well-written and with plenty of action. There’s a theory that a well-known science fiction author is behind the house-name on this one, but I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that “The Mountains Said No” is a fine yarn and I really enjoyed it.

Overall, this is a good issue of FRONTIER STORIES with a few disappointments mixed in, but I like that the emphasis is on buckskin-era stories rather than traditional Westerns. I haven’t read many issues of FRONTIER STORIES, but I think I’m going to have to hunt up more of them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: North*West Romances, Fall 1945

I like posting snowy covers of Northern pulps during the summer when the weather is hot. This one is by the always-excellent George Gross. This issue of NORTH*WEST ROMANCES also has some fine authors in its pages, most notably Dan Cushman, Les Savage Jr., and William Heuman. Those three are enough to make any pulp issue worthwhile by themselves. Also on hand are R.S. Lerch, Kenneth P. Wood, Larry McLane, R.A. Emberg, Paul Selonke, and Michael Oblinger. I like listing the authors' names, even the ones I've never heard of, because every so often somebody will be searching on-line for mentions of a relative, and then they email that So-and-So was their grandfather or great-uncle or something, and they're excited to see the name in a post. That always makes me feel good.  

The Brushpopper and the Lady - Les Savage, Jr.

RANCH LOVE STORIES lasted only one issue in 1950. A pretty blatant attempt by Interstate Publishing to compete with the long-running RANCH ROMANCES, it seems to have been a spectacular failure. It’s hard to understand why, though, since the lone issue had a cover by Norman Saunders and some fine writers who contributed stories.

One of those authors is Les Savage, Jr., whose novella “The Brushpopper and the Lady” is the featured story in this issue and is almost long enough to have been reprinted as an Ace Double. Maybe it would have been, if not for Savage’s early and untimely death. Thanks to the good folks at the PulpGen Archive, though, this story is available again as a downloadable PDF, and being a long-time fan of Les Savage, Jr.’s work, I was quick to grab a copy and read it.

As you might guess from the title, “The Brushpopper and the Lady” is set in the South Texas chaparral country, as are several of Savage’s novels. Hugh Mitchell is the foreman of the vast Broken Shield ranch, which was owned by an English expatriate who was like a father to Mitchell. The man has passed away, leaving the ranch to his niece, who comes from England to claim her inheritance. But something about the whole situation seems wrong to Mitchell, and things are complicated by the heiress’s wastrel cousin and a greedy gambler in the nearby town who has his eyes on taking over the ranch himself. It doesn’t help that Mitchell seems to be falling in love with Lady Agatha. And then the specter of murder rears its ugly head.

This is a fast-paced yarn with plenty of action, including a couple of the brutal fistfights for which Savage’s stories are known. The plot has several effective twists and turns, and while I had a pretty good idea what would happen, I wasn’t sure how things would play out until the end. The overall tone is hardboiled, and while the romance element is fairly strong, as you’d expect from RANCH LOVE STORIES, it never overpowers the action.

“The Brushpopper and the Lady” is a really good story. If you’re a Les Savage, Jr. fan or just a reader of traditional Westerns, I think there’s a good chance you’d enjoy it. I certainly did. Check it out on the PulpGen Archive.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Star Western, October 1943

I feel like I should know who painted this cover, but I don't. Maybe one of you can help me out. STAR WESTERN was always one of the top pulps in the genre. This issue features six novelettes by Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, Les Savage Jr., Tom Roan, William R. Cox, and Fred Gipson. That's right, Mr. Old Yeller his own self, who wrote a bunch of stories for the Western pulps. At one point, I was talking to an academic press about editing a collection of them, but nothing ever came of it. That's a great bunch of writers in this issue of STAR WESTERN, which was nothing unusual back in those days.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Frontier Stories, Winter 1944

I'm not crazy about this Sidney Riesenberg cover, but inside this issue of FRONTIER STORIES are yarns by Dan Cushman, Les Savage Jr., Tom W. Blackburn, Curtis Bishop, and Harold Preece. That's an excellent bunch of writers, so I'll bet this is an entertaining issue.

Gun-Witch From Wyoming - Les Savage Jr.

Texan Bob Hogarth arrives in Wyoming with a herd of cattle in the spring of 1887, following the Big Die-Up, the devastating winter that wiped out the herds of most cattlemen in the Great Plains. Hogarth intends to make a fresh start in Wyoming, along with his sidekick Waco Williams, and his herd gives him the leverage he needs to force his way into the local cattleman’s co-op, one of the members of which is a beautiful, redheaded young woman.

There’s a lot of hostility and intrigue among this organization, however, and Hogarth’s ruthless cunning soon makes him some deadly enemies. A mysterious rustler is also preying on the ranches in the area, adding a new threat that Hogarth has to deal with, all while trying to outsmart the other ranchers, court the beautiful redhead, and survive numerous ambushes, fistfights, and shootouts.

GUN-WITCH FROM WYOMING is a short novel by Les Savage Jr. that appeared originally in the November 1947 issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE. There’s an ebook version available from Wildside Press, and that’s the one I read. Although Les Savage Jr. sold to a variety of Western pulps, including WESTERN STORY, DIME WESTERN, and STAR WESTERN, during a career that lasted only a dozen years before diabetes claimed his life at the early age of 35, he was really a star at Fiction House. His stories appeared regularly, usually featured on the covers, in LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE, ACTION STORIES, FRONTIER STORIES, and NORTH-WEST ROMANCES. He was just about the perfect Fiction House author, since his stories featured plenty of fast-moving, hardboiled action and usually more than one sexy female character. There are two beautiful women in GUN-WITCH FROM WYOMING, and I won’t give away which one winds up being the title character.

Savage packs a lot of plot into this one, which I estimate runs about 25,000 words. Almost too much plot, as there are numerous characters, all with their own shadowy motivations. Also, for much of the story, Bob Hogarth isn’t a very likable protagonist. Despite all that, Savage makes it work and had me flipping the digital pages to find out what was going to happen. I wound up enjoying this book quite a bit. If you’re a traditional Western fan, it’s well worth reading, and if you haven’t read Les Savage Jr. before, it’s pretty representative of his work. Give it a try, and if you like it, there are plenty more of his books still in print.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Mammoth Western, August 1950

That's a dramatic cover on this issue of MAMMOTH WESTERN, painted by Arnold Kohn, an artist I'm not familiar with. I'm very familiar with some of the authors inside this issue, though, which include Harry Whittington, Les Savage Jr., and (here's a name you don't normally associate with Westerns) Robert Bloch. Also on hand are Ziff-Davis regular Berkeley Livingston and house-name Mallory Storm. This issue doesn't seem to be on-line anywhere I can find.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fifteen Western Tales, January 1944

We have a tough-looking hombre, courtesy of Sam Cherry, gracing the cover on this issue of FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES. The collection of authors inside is pretty good, too: William Heuman, Philip Ketchum, Les Savage Jr., Tom W. Blackburn, Chuck Martin, Rod Patterson, M. Howard Lane, James C. Lynch, James Shaffer, house-names Ray P. Shotwell and Lance Kermit, and lesser known authors Frederick Bales and Joe Payne. They always counted the features in FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES, so actually there are only thirteen stories in this one.

Forgotten Books: Rails West - Logan Stewart (Les Savage Jr.)

Les Savage Jr. was one of the stars of the Western pulp field for more than a decade, from the time he broke in in the early Forties to his early death in 1958 at the age of 35, from complications of diabetes. He was one of the stalwarts of the Fiction House line, with many of his stories appearing in LARIAT STORY, FRONTIER STORIES, and ACTION STORIES, but he also sold to WESTERN STORY and various Popular Publications Western pulps. His work has maintained a solid reputation over the decades, and much of it is still available.

During the Fifties, when the pulp markets were drying up, Savage sold several novels to Gold Medal that were published under the pseudonym Logan Stewart. RAILS WEST is the first one of those I’ve read (that’s my copy in the scan) and it’s a good one. The protagonist is Scott Walker, who comes back from the Civil War to find that his father and two brothers in Kansas have been burned out by Conferate guerrillas and moved on west somewhere. With them is a young woman they’ve taken in who Scott intends to marry, if he can just find out where they’ve settled.

He catches up to his family in Laramie, where he’s reunited with them just in time for trouble to break out because of a land swindle scheme in which they’re ensnared. Violence ensues and all the Walker family is forced to go on the run. Scott is separated from the others yet again, falls in with a Union Pacific construction crew working on the transcontinental railroad, and winds up doing something he never would have expected, pinning on a star as the town marshal in a hell-on-wheels settlement at end of track. Then old enemies show up, and all the trouble that engulfed Scott before threatens to erupt again.

This novel is a combination of the railroad and town tamer plots, and while there’s nothing really new in it, Savage makes these traditional elements seem fresh by peopling his yarn with complex, realistic characters, fine hardboiled writing, and gritty action scenes. Much like the work of L.P. Holmes, the appeal isn’t so much in what he’s doing but rather in the way he does it. RAILS WEST is a very solid, entertaining Western novel.

On a bibliographic note, this novel is an expansion of a novella entitled “Six-Gun Sinner”, published in the May 1950 issue of the pulp WESTERN NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES. It was reprinted by Leisure under the title WEST OF LARAMIE, under Savage’s real name, and an e-book version is still available on Amazon. It’s well worth reading, although I’ll admit, I’m glad I was able to read the original Gold Medal paperback.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Novels and Short Stories, May 1950

This is another Norman Saunders cover packed with detail. This scene might have seemed too busy if it was painted by many other artists, but Saunders had a way of always making it work. As usual, there are some good writers in this issue of WESTERN NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES, too: Les Savage Jr., Frank Castle, John Callahan, and J.L. Bouma. I hope no stray bullets hit that box full of dynamite!

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Action Stories, Fall 1946

ACTION STORIES didn't start out, strictly speaking, as a Western pulp, since it featured adventure yarns set in many different times and locales, but by this time in its existence it might as well have been a Western pulp since all the covers were Western-themed and nearly all of the stories were. Indeed, in this issue, all the story titles sound like Westerns (with maybe one Northern, a close cousin), and the authors are thought of primarily as Western writers: Les Savage Jr., Giff Cheshire, Joseph Chadwick, William Heuman, and Ben Frank, plus Tom O'Neill (sports stories and Northerns) and house-name John Starr. The cover features another example of a female character dressed anachronistically, which was common on the Fiction House pulps. I hope she didn't have to run on those high heels.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Frontier Stories, Summer 1950

I'm not really sure what's happening on this cover, but I like it quite a bit anyway. As with many other Fiction House covers, it makes me want to write a story based on it. Les Savage Jr. is the only well-known author in this issue, although there's no telling who's behind the house-names John Starr and Wilton Hazzard. Others contributing stories are Norman B. Wiltsey, Alexander Wallace, Charles Dickson, and Theodore Cutting. I think I've seen Wiltsey's name before on other pulp TOCs, but the rest are new to me. Even so, I probably would have bought this issue for the cover alone.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, July 1947

I keep posting about issues of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE because I love the covers, the authors, and the story titles. This cover scan, like most featured here, comes from the Fictionmags Index. The lead story in this issue is by one of the most prominent authors in the Fiction House Western pulps of this era, Les Savage Jr., and the title, "Six-Gun Bride of the Teton Bunch" is pure greatness as far as I'm concerned. It was also the title story in the Barricade Books collection of stories by Savage that was published in the Nineties. Other top authors featured in this issue include L.P. Holmes, D.B. Newton, Dan Cushman (also a Fiction House top-liner), and Ray Gaulden. That's a pretty impressive line-up.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story, November 1947

Good ol' LARIAT STORY. For two thin dimes, you got covers like this one by Norman Saunders, stories by authors such as Les Savage Jr., H.A. DeRosso, John Jo Carpenter (John Reese), Will C. Brown (really C.S. Boyles, the other author from Cross Plains), Rollin Brown, W.F. Bragg, and Ben Frank. (Well, I'm not much of a Ben Frank fan, but I like everything else I've read by those other guys.) Plus story titles like "Gun-Witch From Wyoming". I think the readers got their money's worth.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story, January 1950

I probably post too many covers from LARIAT STORY, but dang, I like the covers by Allen Anderson, including this one with another of his odd-looking horses, and the story titles. I really want to read "Blood-Guns of the Crazy Moon!", especially since it's by Les Savage Jr., one of the better pulp Western authors. Heck, I wouldn't mind writing a story called "Blood-Guns of the Crazy Moon!" Savage and Richard Wormser (a reprint under the John Starr house-name) are the only recognizable authors in this issue.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story, May 1945

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