Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Giant Western, February 1951

This issue of GIANT WESTERN sports a slightly cartoonish cover by Ed DeLavy, but it's yet another example of just how dangerous it was to go to the barber shop in the Old West. I kept telling my mother I didn't want to get my hair cut when I was a kid. I guess I sensed somehow that some ranny might start burnin' powder. Anyway, this issue (which I don't own) features stories by some fine writers including William MacLeod Raine, A. Leslie Scott, Leslie Ernenwein, Louis L'Amour (as Jim Mayo), T.C. McClary, and B.M. Bower (probably a reprint since Bower died in 1940 although it's not listed as such). 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, October 1951

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover is by Sam Cherry, who did nearly all of them for TEXAS RANGERS during this era.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue, “Riders of the Storm”, is attributed to Tom Curry in the Fictionmags Index, the final Curry novel in the series. However, having read it, there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that it’s actually by A. Leslie Scott. It’s Scott’s work, through and through. I was tipped off to this by my friend Anders Nilsson, who told me that the story was rewritten into a Walt Slade paperback called TRIGGER TALK that was published by Pyramid Books five years later under the Bradford Scott pseudonym.

I was baffled as to how a Hatfield novel by Tom Curry wound up being rewritten into a Walt Slade paperback, so I went to my shelves to see if I had a copy of the pulp version. Sure enough, I did, so I pulled it down and read it. I knew within a few pages that Scott was the actual author, not Curry, which explained why he felt free to cannibalize it for that paperback.

The story itself is an excellent entry in the Hatfield series. It opens with Hatfield and a fellow Ranger discovering a ship perched atop a bluff about twenty miles inland from Galveston. Hatfield theorizes that it was carried there by a tidal wave generated by a gigantic hurricane. That seems pretty far-fetched, but hey, it’s a pulp yarn so as I always say, sure, why not. Unfortunately for the new recruit riding with Hatfield, a gang of outlaws are unloading something from the ship and open fire on the two Rangers. The new fellow is killed, and Hatfield is wounded and knocked unconscious. When he comes to and finds his friend dead, he sets out on the owlhoots’ trail, which leads him to Galveston, which has indeed suffered tremendous damage from a hurricane. (The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900? It’s possible. The Hatfield novels weren’t very consistent with their time period, taking place anywhere from the mid-1870s to the late 1890s, depending on the author.)

The plot involves smuggling guns to Mexican revolutionaries and takes Hatfield from Galveston to the Big Thicket in East Texas and finally to Brownsville, down at the tip of Texas on the Rio Grande. It’s a little unusual in that it involves several action scenes on ships. Scott seems to have been trying to break away from his usual formula in the early Fifties, but it didn’t do him any good. His final Walt Slade novella in THRILLING WESTERN appeared earlier in 1951, and the next Hatfield novel in TEXAS RANGERS after this one, “Trail of Hunted Men”, was Scott’s last. But as I’ve mentioned before, he moved right on to paperbacks and probably made more money in the long run. “Riders of the Storm” is a very good story and I’m glad I was prompted to read it. There are also some good interior illustrations by H.L. Parkhurst in this novel.

Next up in this issue is Ralph Yergen’s short story “Vengeance on the Hoof”. It’s written mostly from the point of a view of a horse, a technique I don’t usually care for, and it’s a little hard to read because there’s quite a bit of animal abuse in it. However, Yergen won me over with this story about an outlaw’s horse, and it comes to a satisfying conclusion. Definitely better than I expected it to be.

“The Horsehair Noose” by Leslie Ernenwein is a reprint from the November 1945 issue of THE RIO KID WESTERN. It’s something of a rarity for a Western pulp because it’s a dying message mystery story. In order to prevent a range war, a sheriff has to figure out who murdered a local cattleman, based on a name scrawled in the dirt by the dying man and a few other clues. It’s not a particularly good dying message story, mind you, but I like Ernenwein’s style and I enjoyed this yarn.

“Buffalo Men” is by another veteran, dependable pulpster, J. Allan Dunn. It's a novelette reprinted from the September 1940 issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES. Set in the buffalo hunting era, it’s about the founding of Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle and the epic battle there between a few dozen buffalo hunters and a force of a thousand Indians led by the legendary Comanche chief Quanah Parker. In the first half of the story, Dunn sticks pretty close to the historical facts other than inventing a couple of fictional protagonists to be on hand for the battle, along with a renegade hunter to serve as a minor villain. He even has Bat Masterson on hand, which he was in one of his early exploits. In the battle itself, Dunn strays pretty far from history, having one of his fictional characters make the famous long-distance shot that was actually made by Billy Dixon, and changing the outcome of that shot, as well. Despite that, it’s a very well-written story and captures the feeling of the time and place quite well.

The short story “Payoff in Lead” is another reprint, this time from the October 1946 issue of THE RIO KID WESTERN. The author is Joseph Chadwick, one of the most dependable authors of hardboiled Western tales, and it’s a good one. An embittered ex-Confederate heads west on the trail of the carpetbagger who stole his land and his fiancée after the war. The protagonist finds the man he’s looking for, but things turn out much differently than he expected. A gritty, very satisfying story.

This issue wraps up with a new short story, “A Man’s Job” by Caddo Cameron, whose real name was Charles Richard Beeler. It’s about a young cowboy holding down a line camp by himself for the first time and his encounter with some outlaws. Another good one, with some nice action and a very likable protagonist.

Overall, this is a very solid issue of TEXAS RANGERS with stories ranging from good to excellent and not a really weak one in the bunch. I’m glad the question of who actually wrote the Hatfield novel caused me to pull it off the shelves and read it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, August 1951

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover is by Sam Cherry, of course.

The Jim Hatfield story in this issue, “Rustlers Ride”, has been attributed to A. Leslie Scott, but when I started reading it, I said, “Wait a minute. This has to be a Tom Curry story.” The first two chapters have all the hallmarks of a Hatfield yarn by Curry, including several scenes setting up the plot before Hatfield is ever introduced and a proxy hero in the person of stalwart young rancher Arch Haley. The prose is the straightforward storytelling of Curry, as well, lacking any of the descriptions and catch phrases you always find in Scott’s work.

Then, in Chapter 3, everything changes. The writing is definitely Scott’s, and that continues to the end of the novel. There are a number of plot twists that don’t turn out the way they seem to be set up in the first two chapters. If I had to guess, I’d say Tom Curry started this novel, and then for some unknown reason Scott took over with the third chapter. I could be ’way off on that theory, of course. This is pure speculation on my part. But it comes from reading a bunch of both authors’ work over the past 60 years.

Anyway, regardless of who wrote what, is “Rustlers Ride” a good Jim Hatfield novel? Yes, it is. Despite the title, rustling plays almost no part in this story. Instead, it’s about a gold strike in West Texas and the gang of outlaws preying on the mines and the nearby town. Hatfield foils numerous of the gang’s plans before finally figuring out who the mastermind is, and even though the big boss’s identity is pretty obvious, it still involves one of those nice twists mentioned above. The breakneck pace and the action scenes are good, as always. There’s nothing here Hatfield fans haven’t read many times before, but it’s done well and I had a really good time reading this story.

Moving on, Leslie Ernenwein’s short story “Outlaw Hunch” is about a former owlhoot gone straight and turned livery stable owner who has to consider a return to outlawry, but for noble reasons. This is a fairly lightweight, almost humorous story until it turns deadly serious near the end. I really like the way Ernenwein writes, and this is a very good story, reprinted from the March 1946 issue of THE RIO KID WESTERN. I need to read more of Ernenwein’s novels.

Wayne D. Overholser’s novelette “Traitors’ Blood is Red” originally appeared in the April 1947 issue of THRILLING WESTERN. Like much of Overholser’s work, it’s set in the Pacific Northwest. This story involves espionage and a conspiracy during the Civil War which, if it succeeds, will not only alter the course of the war but change the entire country as well. It’s an odd plot—you don’t often think of the Pacific Northwest in terms of being important to the Civil War, or at least I don’t—but Overholser makes it work. The writing is a little bland, but I find that to be true of most of Overholser’s stories.

Tom Curry appears under his own name with a short story original to this issue, “Stranger in Town”. A drifting gambler is blamed for a murder he didn’t commit and has to uncover the truth. It’s a fairly common plot, but Curry, always a dependable writer, does a good job with it.

I don’t know anything about Cibolo Ford except that he published several dozen stories in various Western pulps in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties. The name has always sounded like a pseudonym to me, but I don’t know that it is. His story story “Widelooper Luck”, also original to this issue, features cowpokes Stony Lonesome and Stingaree Stanton helping their friend Gooble Nutter save his ranch from the evil scheming of lawyer J. Tubelo Zero. Those names were almost enough to make me skip this one, but I stuck with it and it’s actually okay. Mildly humorous, and I found myself liking the characters, which I didn’t expect to.

Barry Scobee is the only pulp writer to have a mountain named after him. It’s in the Davis Mountains in West Texas, near the town of Fort Davis. In addition to writing for the pulps, Scobee was a journalist and newspaper publisher and was instrumental in getting old Fort Davis, an abandoned military outpost from frontier days, restored and turned into a tourist attraction. His story in this issue, “Always Wanting Something”, is a reprint from the January 1946 issue of THE RIO KID WESTERN. It’s about a young cowboy at a turning point in his life, trying to figure out which direction to go, and is well written enough but never really very involving.

Best remembered for his Western poetry, S. Omar Barker turned out quite a bit of fiction as well. His story “Rowdy Romance”, as you’d expect from that title, is a humorous tale about a cowboy who sets aside his wild, devil-may-care ways in order to try to win a girl, only to have things turn out differently than he expects. Barker had an appealing way with words and the story is entertaining without ever really amounting to much. It’s a reprint from the December 1936 issue of THRILLING WESTERN.

There are also interior illustrations by H.L. Parkhurst and Nick Eggenhoffer, among other, unsigned illustrations.

I enjoyed this issue because “Rustlers Ride” is a slightly above-average Jim Hatfield novel and the short story by Leslie Ernenwein is pretty good. The other stories are highly forgettable. But I’m glad I read the Hatfield yarn.

Gunfighter's Return - Leslie Ernenwein

Leslie Ernenwein was a prolific contributor to the Western pulps from the late Thirties to the end of the pulp era. He also wrote several dozen Western novels and had a successful career as a journalist. I read a couple of his novels many years ago and remember enjoying them, and recently I’ve read a few of his pulp stories and liked them as well. So I figured it was time to read another novel by him and picked up GUNFIGHTER’S RETURN, published originally by Gold Medal in 1950. That’s my copy in the scan. I feel like I should know the artist who did the cover, but I don’t, and there’s no signature that I can see.

This book has a terrific opening paragraph:

Durango died at noon. He didn’t say a word. Didn’t even grunt. He just lay down and died.

I don’t know about you, but something that terse and hardboiled sure makes me want to keep reading. The Durango referred to is the leader of a revolutionary movement in Mexico who was betrayed to the federales by a cantina dancer. He and American gunfighter/soldier of fortune Jim Rimbaud are the only ones who escape an ambush by federal troops, and when Durango dies, Rimbaud is left on his own to make it back across the border to Arizona if he can.

It's no spoiler to say that he does so. The book’s title is GUNFIGHTER’S RETURN, after all. He finds himself back in the cowtown where he recuperated from a gunshot wound a couple of years earlier. There’s a girl there he’s interested in, a pretty redhead who runs a café. After his narrow escape, Rimbaud thinks maybe it’s time for him to give up helling around and settle down.

Yeah, we all know how well that always works out in Western novels, don’t we?

A range war is brewing, and in a nice twist, it’s connected to that failed revolution in Mexico. The man who saved Rimbaud’s life two years earlier is now on the run from the law, framed as a rustler. Rimbaud owes him and is the type who always pays his debts . . . and it doesn’t matter that the hombre he’s indebted to is also engaged to the girl Rimbaud wants for himself.

From this setup, Ernenwein spins an excellent hardboiled Western yarn with plenty of gritty action and a frankness about sexual matters that’s unusual for the era. There’s a large, well-developed cast of characters, a nice sense of time and place, and a pace that never lets up for very long. Jim Rimbaud is a tough but hardly superhuman protagonist. He suffers a lot of punishment in this book but manages to keep slugging away at his enemies.

This is one of the better Westerns I’ve read recently and really makes me want to read more by Ernenwein. Luckily, I have several of his books on my shelves and e-books of several more on my Kindle. If you’re a fan of traditional Westerns, I give GUNFIGHTER’S RETURN a high recommendation.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Story Magazine, August 1953

Once again, an Old West poker game is about to end badly. This is from the usually forgotten Popular Publications incarnation of WESTERN STORY, after it was cancelled at Street & Smith four years earlier. The magazine lasted only about a year and a half at Popular, but its lack of success didn't have anything to do with its quality, in my opinion. It generally had good covers, such as this one by Charles Dye, and excellent authors. This issue contains stories by Will Cook (twice, as himself and as Frank Peace), George C. Appell, William Heuman (a reprint from FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES), Fred Grove, Leslie Ernenwein, Bruce Cassiday, lesser-known pulpster Frank Scott York, and Richard H. Nelson, who was really William L. Hamling, science fiction fan, editor, and publisher of the SF digests IMAGINATION AND IMAGINATIVE TALES, as well as the publisher of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of soft-core novels in the late Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 10 Story Western Magazine, March 1942

The cover on this issue of 10 STORY WESTERN MAGAZINE is more proof, as if we needed it, that the barber shop was one of the most dangerous places in the Old West. I don't know who painted this one, but I like it quite a bit. There's the usual fine bunch of writers inside the magazine, too: Tom W. Blackburn, Frank C. Robertson, Tom Roan, Leslie Ernenwein, Art Lawson, Glenn Wichman, Dabney Otis Collins, and James C. Lynch. No Olmsted or Coburn, surprisingly. But solid pulpsters, for sure.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, July 1951

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The scan is from my copy, and the cover art is by Sam Cherry.

W.C. Tuttle’s series about range detectives Hashknife Hartley and Sleepy Stevens is justifiably more famous and successful than his series about another Mutt-and-Jeff pair of range detectives, Tombstone Jones and Speedy Smith, which ran for more than three dozen novelettes and novellas during the Forties and early Fifties, mostly in EXCITING WESTERN. I’ve always found the Tombstone and Speedy yarns reliably entertaining, though. Unlike Hashknife and Sleepy, Tombstone and Speedy are not, shall we say, the sharpest rowels on the spur. But while they may not be smart, they’re top-notch when it comes to fighting with gun or fist, and they solve plenty of complicated cases with a combination of luck, instinct, and cow country savvy. In “Six-Gun Cyclone”, the novelette in this issue, they’ve been fired by the Cattleman’s Association that usually employs them, but despite that they wind up in the middle of a case involving rustling, brand blotting, and a bank robbery, and of course they win their jobs back by bringing the bad guys to justice after a fast-paced blend of action and broad humor. Some of Tuttle’s stories are better than others, but I don’t think he’s ever let me down and this one is great fun.

Noel Loomis is best remembered these days as a science fiction author, but he wrote a considerable number of Westerns, too. His story in this issue, “Pitchfork Country”, is about a young couple trying to establish a farm in Colorado and clashing with their brutal cattleman neighbor. The history is a little shaky in this one, but it’s well-written and there’s an unusually violent fight at the end.

The novelette “No Peace for a Prodigal” is by Leslie Ernenwein, one of the old pros in the Western genre, and is a reprint from the First July Number, 1945 issue of RANCH ROMANCES. Like a lot of stories from RANCH ROMANCES, there’s not much actual romance in this one but plenty of action. A small rancher gets caught between the two sides in a range war, is framed for a murder, and has to fight his way out of trouble and expose the actual bad guys. This is a good, hardboiled Western action yarn by an author who knew how to keep a story moving along.

The next story, “Belled Cunning”, is by an author I don’t really care for, Harold F. Cruickshank, and is an animal story, with no human characters, and I’m not fond of those, either. So . . . I passed on this one.

“Jerk Line” by Willard Luce is a railroad yarn, and I do like those, so I enjoyed this tale of bank robbers trying to use a train for their getaway. This is a reprint and originally appeared in the January 1946 issue of RIO KID WESTERN.

Samuel Mines is best remembered, if at all, for being the editor of STARTLING STORIES and THRILLING WONDER STORIES for a while, but he also wrote a good number of Western stories, including a few of the Jim Hatfield novels in TEXAS RANGERS. His novelette in this issue, “Run, Sheep, Run”, is also a reprint, originally appearing in the May, 1944 issue of POPULAR WESTERN. It’s a very traditional cattlemen vs. sheepherders yarn, with the protagonist being the government man caught between the two factions, trying to resolve their differences without an all-out range war. The elements may be familiar, but Mines handles them well and the action scenes are very good.

When I started attending the Western Writers of America conventions on the mid-Eighties, Francis L. Fugate was one of the elder statesmen of the organization. He and his wife also wrote a well-regarded book about Erle Stanley Gardner. Unfortunately, his story that wraps up this issue, “Son of a Gun Stew”, about a chuck wagon cook’s encounter with an old enemy, never really caught my interest and I didn’t finish it.

Overall, I’d say this is an average, or maybe even slightly below average, issue of EXCITING WESTERN. The stories by Tuttle, Loomis, Ernenwein, and Mines are good but not outstanding, and the others range from just okay to didn’t-finish level. As always, though, I’m glad I read it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Novel and Short Stories, November 1941

This issue of WESTERN NOVEL AND SHORT STORIES sports a cover by Allen Anderson, an artist I usually associate with Fiction House pulps. No Old Geezer this time, but we get the Stalwart Cowboy and the Gun-Totin' Redhead. (I really should have written a book called LONGARM AND THE GUN-TOTIN' REDHEAD. If the series still existed and I was writing them, I would.) Anyway, this looks like a fine issue of this pulp, with stories by Peter Dawson, Leslie Ernenwein, Clem Colt (who was really Nelson C. Nye), and Jim Kjelgaard, one of the favorite authors of my youth because of all the juvenile novels he wrote about dogs.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fifteen Western Tales, October 1947

What a great cover. I don't know the artist, but I love the expression on this guy's face. I may have to add an Injury to a Quirley category. And the line-up of authors inside this issue of FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES is top-notch, too: William Heuman, D.B. Newton, Joseph Chadwick, Leslie Ernenwein, Rolland Lynch, T.C. McClarey, Kenneth Fowler, and some lesser-known names and house-names. I love the title "Hell Fans These Guns!".

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 10 Story Western Magazine, November 1939

Great cover on this issue of 10 STORY WESTERN (I don't know the artist) and a great bunch of writers inside: Harry F. Olmsted, Norman A. Fox, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Ed Earl Repp, Leslie Ernenwein, John G. Pearsol, Richard Tooker (better known for his science fiction), George Michener, Jack Bloodhart, and Ted Fox. I'm not familiar with the last two, but the others range from great to dependably good.

UPDATE: The cover art on this issue is by Albin Henning. Thanks to Sheila Ann Vanderbeek for the information!

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Triple Western, April 1953

This is a pulp I own and read recently. The scan is from the copy I read. Novellas have become just about my favorite length of fiction over the past few years as my time (and my attention span) have decreased, so I really enjoy pulps like this.

I remember reading at least one novel by Leslie Ernenwein and enjoying it, but that didn’t prepare me for just how good his novella “Rampage Range” is. There’s nothing special about the set-up: Jim Maiben is released from Yuma Prison after serving three years for arson (a crime he didn’t commit, of course) and returns to his home range to find that his ranch has been sold out from under him by the bank, everybody believes he’s a criminal and doesn’t want anything to do with him, and naturally there’s a bunch of rustling going on, too. Oh, and the guy who took over Jim’s ranch has a beautiful daughter. Well, with a plot like that, you’d think that you knew everything that was going to happen in this story . . . but you’d be wrong. Some of the characters turn out to be different than what you’d expect, and if in the long run things are resolved in typical fashion, getting there takes some unusual twists and turns. Ernenwein’s style is very effective, too, hardboiled in places, poetic in others, and there’s a surprising amount of sensuality as well. This story reminded me very much of the work of L.P. Holmes and made me eager to read something else by Ernenwein in the near future.

Seems like I've read stories by Bryce Walton before, but I couldn't tell you anything about them. He's best known for science fiction and hardboiled crime yarns, but he wrote quite a few Westerns for the pulps as well. His novella in this issue, "High Road to Hell", also has a standard plot: a drifting outlaw becomes involved in a range war between cattlemen and nesters. It's very reminiscent of SHANE, although this story had to have been written before the movie came out. Walton could have been influenced by Jack Schaefer's novel, though. More likely it's a case of there being only so many plots in the world. Walton's novella is pretty good, written in a hardboiled style that suits it well, and the action in it hardly ever lets up. There's one major coincidence in the plot that's a little hard to swallow, but other than that I enjoyed "High Road to Hell".

Next up is a short-short by Jonathan Craig, better known for his police procedural novels published by Gold Medal and assorted other hardboiled crime novels. "Slow Poison" is a psycological suspense tale about a man searching for his wife and the man she ran away with. (As I was reading it, I kept hearing Moe Howard in the back of my mind, saying, "Niiiiiagara Falls!") There's nothing particularly Western about this one—it could have played out almost exactly the same in a modern setting—but Craig is a good writer and makes a readable three pages out of not much.

The novella "Spawn of the Gun Pack" is by one of my favorite Western writers, T.T. Flynn. This is a reprint from the April 19, 1941 issue of WESTERN STORY, where it was the featured story on the cover. The set-up is familiar here, too: a teenager who is the son of a notorious outlaw and smuggler sees his father gunned down in an ambush because he was double-crossed. The protagonist takes to the owlhoot trail himself and vows to track down and kill the man responsible for his father's death. Enough time passes to give this yarn a bit of an epic feel, and then the hero finally gets a lead that takes him to a New Mexico mining boomtown. What he finds there isn't what he expected, as Flynn gives us some back-story worthy of Walt Coburn and then puts a nice twist on it. A lot more action ensues, told in Flynn's straightforward but highly effective prose. A pursuit scene across a lava bed is very suspenseful and reminded me of Louis L'Amour's FLINT. I've never read a bad story by Flynn, and this is a very good one.

There's also a "fact story" about the notorious outlaw Jack Slade by Gladwell Richardson, who's best known for his fiction. This is a pretty good article, and I'm not a fan of such historical features in pulps.

Overall, this is a really good issue of TRIPLE WESTERN with a decent triple-decker cover by Clarence Doore and three novellas well worth reading. I have more issues of this pulp and will be reading my way through them in the months to come.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Star Western, January 1950

The last few years of its existence, STAR WESTERN rather blatantly went after the RANCH ROMANCES readers. Not only do all the covers prominently feature female characters, most of the story titles do, too, such as this issue from January 1950. You've got "The Strip's Too Hot for Blondes!" by Leslie Ernenwein, "Girl Strike in Jubilee" by Joseph Chadwick, "Bride of the Killer Legion" by Talmage Powell, "The Queen, the Wench, and the Devil" by Ray Townsend, "Two Roses for Dead Man's Range" by Dean Owen (Dudley Dean McGaughey), "Girl for a Fighting Man" by Everett M. Webber, and "Brand Her Señorita Killer!" by John Jo Carpenter (John Reese). With those authors, I'll bet most of those stories are pretty good!

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Adventures, April 1941

WESTERN ADVENTURES was a second-string Street & Smith Western pulp (if you consider both WESTERN STORY and WILD WEST WEEKLY to be first-string), but from what I've seen it was a pretty solid publication. The covers aren't great, but there were plenty of good authors published in its pages. In this particular issue, for example, are stories by Walker A. Tompkins, Leslie Ernenwein, Ed Earl Repp (writing as Brad Buckner), and Rolland Lynch. I certainly wouldn't hesitate to pick up an issue of WESTERN ADVENTURES for some good reading. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Top Western Fiction Annual, 1954

You have to look close to see it, but there's a bullet going through this cowboy's hat, so this qualifies as an Injury to a Hat cover. Who's the artist? I don't know. The art reminds me a little of both H.W. Scott and A. Leslie Ross and might easily be neither of them. TOP WESTERN FICTION ANNUAL was a reprint pulp, as you might guess, and the 1954 edition has some fine authors in it: Allan R. Bosworth, William Hopson, J. Edward Leithead, Leslie Ernenwein, Larry A. Harris, W.F. Bragg, and the ubiquitous house-name Sam Brant. The stories come from a variety of Thrilling Group Western pulps published in the Thirties and Forties. Maybe not the very top Western fiction . . . but PRETTY DARNED GOOD WESTERN FICTION ANNUAL probably wouldn't have sold as well.