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: Real Western Stories, October 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know why the front cover is missing that strip at the bottom. That’s the way I got it. Luckily, the loss doesn’t detract too much from the cover by A. Leslie Ross. Not in the top rank of Ross’s work, to my mind, but his covers are always worthwhile. I’ll put a scan of the whole cover from the Fictionmags Index at the end of this post.

This issue opens with a novelette (probably closer to a novella, really) by Seven Anderton, a distinctly named author who’s mostly forgotten but who produced consistently good work for the Western and detective pulps. “Cactus Basin Showdown” features a pair of protagonists who fit the mold of many other Western pulp yarns: Brick Gordon is a handsome, two-fisted, fast-shooting cowboy, while his sidekick Galena Jones is a much older and grizzled old codger. If you’re thinking Buster Crabbe and Al “Fuzzy” St. John, well, so was I while reading this story. Anderton adds a nice variation to the story, though. Brick handles most of the action, but Galena is really the thinking half of the duo as they pitch in to help some homesteaders who are being run out of Cactus Basin by the local cattle baron/range hog. Yes, it’s a cattleman vs. sodbusters yarn, a very standard plot, but Anderton makes it fresh with his solid writing and characterizations. Even the main villain has a little depth to him. I enjoyed this story quite a bit.

The line at the top of the cover says “15 Action-Packed Stories”, but what it doesn’t tell you is that six of them are historical articles and features. I have nothing against such things and when I come across them in pulps, I usually skim them and read the more interesting ones, but really, I’m there for the fiction, so I’m not going to delve into the non-fiction. The next actual story in this issue is “The Haunted Town” by Lon Williams, an entry in his series of Weird Westerns about Deputy Sheriff Lee Winters. In this one, Winters encounters a werewolf—or does he? I’ve been aware of this series for years and always figured it would be right in my wheelhouse, but I’ve read several of them now, including this one, and for some reason I just don’t really like them very much. Something about the writing in them doesn’t resonate with me, and I don’t find Winters to be a very likable protagonist. Maybe I’m wrong about them. I’d be willing to try a few more before giving up on the series, but at this point, I’m not optimistic.

I’ve read several stories by Richard Brister and enjoyed them. “The Ioway Upstart” in this issue is about a tenderfoot from Des Moines who’s stranded in a rough, lawless mining camp. Either picked on or looked down upon by nearly everybody in the camp, he comes up with a clever way to win their respect, and also the heart of the best-looking girl in town. This is an entertaining, well-written story and makes me think I need to try one of Brister’s novels.

I read another story in the Able Cain series by A.A. Baker not long ago and enjoyed it, but his entry in this issue, “Able Cain’s Arena”, left me kind of cold. The title character is a judge in a mining boomtown and comes up with the idea of building a boxing arena so the miners can settle their disputes without shooting each other. It’s not a bad idea, but the story never generated much excitement or interest in me. My fault, maybe. Too soon to pass judgment on this series, but I’ve definitely had mixed reactions to it so far.

Gene Austin wrote a lot of stories for the Western pulps, but he seems to have been on autopilot in “Whistling in Boothill”. This story about the clash between two ranchers has some nice action at the end that almost redeems it, but the plot is really thin.

“The Hombre That Hell Wouldn’t Have” is a good title. The story is by Humphrey Jones, who wrote several dozen stories for assorted Western, detective, and sports pulps. It’s a decent yarn about a prospector who’s robbed and left to die in the desert. The resolution is pretty far-fetched, but overall, not a bad story.

Ralph Berard was the pseudonym of the very prolific pulpster Victor H. White. His story in this issue, “Gold Country Boothill”, is a very suspenseful tale about a young prospector framed for murder and the trial-by-vigilante that results. This is well-written, well-plotted, and has a very nice final twist that I didn’t see coming. I liked this one.

J.J. Mathews was another very prolific pulpster who turned out scores of Western, detective, and sports stories. His story in this issue is “Devil’s Homemaker”, which isn’t a very good title for this yarn about a young man’s quest for vengeance on the man who gunned down his father. But it’s got a decent plot and some emotional complexity, and the writing has a nice hardboiled tone to it. This is another good one from a forgotten but reliable pro.

Rex Whitechurch was a pseudonym that appeared on dozens of Western, detective, and sports stories, all of them published in various Columbia pulps edited by Robert Lowndes. Was it a house-name? That’s possible, I suppose, but I honestly have no idea. The Whitechurch story in this issue, “The Bronc Riders”, is a modern-day rodeo story and more of a romance than an action story. In fact, much of it reads more like mainstream fiction than genre Western. And it’s really, really good, too—until it runs smack into an ending that left me staring at the page in disbelief. Talk about a story falling apart at the last minute! This one is promising but very disappointing.

So what we have here is an issue of REAL WESTERN STORIES that’s a very mixed bag. Several of the stories are very good to excellent, and others I didn’t like at all. I’m glad I read it and will be on the lookout for more stories by Seven Anderton and Richard Brister. Heck, I’d even give Rex Whitechurch another try, and he made me want to throw the pulp across the room! But don’t race to your shelves to look for this one.

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 1952

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The hat brim and the sketchiness of the background have me convinced that this cover is the work of A. Leslie Ross. He must have been knocking out these pulp covers pretty quickly, but I don’t care, I still like them. I think this one is quite effective.

The first story in this issue is “No White Sheep”, a novella by Burt Thomas. That title is a little odd, but it refers to a family of outlaws—a grizzled old owlhoot and his four or five sons (I lost track). The youngest son decides to give up the life of crime after a deputy is killed right in front of him during a robbery, so he runs away and establishes a new identity and a respectable life for himself in a small town. There’s even a girl he falls for . . . But then his past comes back to haunt him, as you knew all along it would. This is a fairly standard plot, but Thomas does an excellent job with it. The story is well-written, has some good action, and a few nice poignant moments as well. Burt Thomas wrote about three dozen stories published in various Western pulps from the late Forties to the mid-Fifties, but that seems to be the extent of his work. I couldn’t find any record that he ever published a novel. I suspected at first that the name might be a pseudonym for Lee Floren, who also wrote at Lee Thomas, but this story doesn’t read like Floren’s work to me. It could be that Burt Thomas was just a reasonably talented writer who never published much and is now forgotten.

The short story “Black Shemwell” is about a man who takes up the mantle of a gunfighter even though he’s not suited to it in order to avenge the death of his brother. Like the other story by Ben Smith that I read recently, this one is well-written and engaging, with a fairly traditional plot that still manages to be a little offbeat. I don’t know if Smith will ever be a favorite of mine, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read by him so far.

J.J. Mathews published more than 100 Western, detective, and sports stories from 1950 to 1960, all of them in Columbia pulps edited by Robert W. Lowndes. That makes me suspect very strongly that the name is a house pseudonym, and so does another fact I’ll get to momentarily. The long novella under the Mathews name in this issue is a real oddity. The protagonist of this story is Ace Champion, “wandering town-tamer”, as the author puts it. The tale opens with action, as Ace comes across a rancher’s daughter (a beautiful blonde, of course) being pursued by three gunmen. He steps in and rescues the girl, of course, and we’re off on another save-the-ranch-from-rustlers yarn. The villain of the piece is the notorious Mexican bandit leader Don Pesco . . . or is it? There’s some sort of connection between our hero Ace and the mysterious bandido. A love/hate relationship quickly develops between Ace and the blonde as he sticks around to help her and her father out of their dilemma, but a neighboring rancher is the third side of that romantic triangle.

This is a very schizophrenic story and leads me to wonder if there were two authors involved. The action is fast and furious and for the most part pretty well done. Ace and Judy nearly get caught in a stampede. Ace is captured by the bad guy, buried up to his neck, and left for the sun and the buzzards to finish off. Ace is ambushed numerous times and wounded more than once (said wounds being forgotten almost right away). But despite the very traditional plot and the hero’s eyeroll-inducing name, the writing is actually pretty good for the most part and the story moves along at a nice pace.

But then there are the scenes that are just terrible, and those are because everybody suddenly lapses into almost incomprehensible pseudo-cowboy dialect. I’m used to what I call “yuh mangy varmint” dialect, I’ve been guilty of it myself, but whoever wrote this story takes it to another level. The word “ter” substitutes for both “the” and “to”. “Yer” is both “you” and “your”. Then there are the things that make me think the author must have been British, like when the hero tells his horse “Away with you now, old fellow.” But it’s not always like that. Some of the dialogue reads normally.

I was curious enough to hunt up a couple of on-line scans of other Western pulps that have J.J. Mathews stories in them, and there’s no sign of such odd stuff in them. That’s the other thing I mentioned that makes me think it’s a house-name. I’m sure the truth is buried in the mists of time, but it’s the sort of thing I like to ponder. At any rate, for all its weirdness, “Through Ticket to Boothill” is kind of an enjoyable story. Whoever wrote it, there was some talent involved. Unpolished, maybe, but still there.

Lon Williams is best remembered for his long series of Weird Western pulp stories starring Deputy Lee Winters, but he wrote quite a few stand-alone yarns, too, such as “Stranger at the Gates”, which wraps up this issue. It’s about a couple of corrupt deputies whose crooked schemes run afoul of an unexpected visitor in town. It’s a short, unmemorable story.

So this is a very mixed issue, with one really good story by Burt Thomas, one good story by Ben Smith, one weird but somehow entertaining story by J.J. Mathews, and one weak story by Lon Williams. If you have this issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN on your shelves, the first three stories are worth reading.

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 1954

I've always sort of felt that a magazine called REAL WESTERN should have been non-fiction, like TRUE WEST or FRONTIER TIMES. But no, although it published a few articles and features like most Western pulps, REAL WESTERN was almost entirely fictional. And despite coming from bottom-rung publisher Columbia, it had some good covers, like this one, and plenty of good authors in its pages. For example, in this issue, Gordon D. Shirreffs, Lauren Paine, Lon Williams (with one of his supernatural-themed Deputy Lee Winters yarns), Zachary Strong (probably E.B. Mann), and house-name Mat Rand. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Action, March 1957

For some reason, I've always liked the scene in Western movies where the hero goes diving across the screen with a gun in each fist, blasting away. Here we have the pulp cover equivalent of that scene, and not surprisingly, I like it, too. Gordon D. Shirreffs is the top author in this issue of WESTERN ACTION, but there are also stories by Lon Willliams, A.A. Baker (never read his work, that I recall, but he was prolific), E.E. Clement (who was actually editor Robert W. Lowndes), and someone named Warner Austin, who I never heard of. By 1957, WESTERN ACTION was one of the few Western pulps left. I would have read it. (I was around then, but I hadn't learned to read yet.)

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

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. I don't know who did the cover art, but it goes pretty well with "The Californy Kid", the lead novel by Seven Anderton. Anderton was a prolific pulpster who is almost completely forgotten today. My friend Richard Moore is a fan of his work, but he's the only one I know. As far as I recall, I hadn't read anything by Anderton until now, but I thought "The Californy Kid" was a very good yarn. It's set in 1849, during the Gold Rush, and the title protagonist is a young, falsely accused outlaw who finds himself involved in a would-be uprising by the Californios, Mexican settlers who lived in California for generations before it was taken over by the United States. There's plenty of action and Anderton's writing is smooth and very effective. I definitely need to read more by him.

R.S. Lerch is even more forgotten than Seven Anderton. Between the mid-Twenties and 1953, he wrote a couple of hundred stories for the Western and detective pulps under his own name and the pseudonym L.R. Sherman (his real name was Roger Sherman Lerch), but only one novel that I can find any mention of, a Western called THE GUN-DEVILS that appears to have been published only as an Australian paperback. Whether that means Lerch was actually Australian, I have no idea. But I've read several of his stories now and enjoyed all of them. His novelette in this issue of DOUBLE-ACTION WESTERN, "Return to Hell", is about a town-taming marshal who just wants to settle down, marry his sweetheart, and become a rancher. But the girl won't marry him while he's still wearing a badge, and a range hog is moving into the area with a bunch of cattle and some hired guns. To support the cattle, he's going to have to take over some of the smaller ranches, and he'll do it with fire and lead if he has to. There's nothing original about this plot, but Lerch spins his yarn with enough skill to make it enjoyable reading. He was a solid second-tier, or maybe third-tier, writer who might have moved on to a good career as a paperbacker during the Fifties had he not passed away in 1953.

Lauran Paine was a prolific writer for the Western pulps but even more prolific as a novelist, authoring more than a thousand novels, many of them for British publisher Robert Hale under a multitude of pen-names. But even though I have maybe a dozen of his books on my shelves and numerous pulps with his stories in them, I'd never read anything by him until now. His short story in this issue, "Thunder River", is a standard range war yarn, with the small ranchers clashing with the range hog from back east over water rights, and while it's fairly well-written, I kept waiting for a twist that never came and didn't find the characters particularly engaging. I still need to read one of Paine's novels—I have friends who are fans of his work—but this story didn't impress me.

Nor did "Cattleman's Courage" by J.J. Mathews, an author I'm unfamiliar with. This is a cattlemen vs. sheepherders yarn, and while I'm more tolerant of stereotypical plots than just about anybody, they need something to engage my attention. I didn't find that here and wound up skimming this one.

Then there's "Emancipation of Crow Dog" by Lon Williams, a stand-alone by the author better known for his long-running series of supernatural Westerns featuring Deputy Lee Winters. This one has the unusual setting (for a Western pulp) of a Sioux Indian reservation in more modern times, late 19^th or early 20^th Century, I'd say. The reaction of a lot of modern readers would be to find it appallingly politically incorrect, and most of the phony "redskin" dialect is sort of cringe-inducing. However, the protagonist Crow Dog, who's doing his best to assimilate to the reservation way of life, is a pretty interesting character, and Williams sets up an intriguing conflict between the old ways and the new. Then, unfortunately, he does almost nothing with it, as the story limps to a very undramatic ending. A shame, because this could have been an excellent story.

There are also some assorted features and Old West history articles, but to be honest, I just skimmed through them, too. I read pulps for the fiction, that's all.

So to sum up, this issue of DOUBLE-ACTION WESTERN is definitely a mixed bag. The Seven Anderton story is excellent, and the one by R.S. Lerch is well worth reading. The stories by Lauran Paine and Lon Williams are readable but could have been better. The rest of the issue is forgettable. (The image is a photo of the actual copy I read. I wasn't able to scan the cover this time.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western Stories, December 1954

The Columbia Western pulps, including REAL WESTERN, are regarded as bottom-rung publications, but hey, this issue has a pretty nice cover and there's a Gordon D. Shirreffs novella in it, as well as a Lee Winters story by Lon Williams. Admittedly, I don't recognize the names of any of the other authors except Mat Rand, which was a house-name and could have been anybody. But this still looks like an issue worth reading.