Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Far East Adventure Stories, January 1931

I don't know who painted the cover on this issue of FAR EAST ADVENTURE STORIES, but it's pretty eye-catching. That's a tough-looking Cossack. I assume he's the protagonist of Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's serial "The Red Cossack". This issue has a sterling lineup of authors that also includes H. Bedford-Jones, Hugh B. Cave, Lawrence G. Blochman, Chart Pitt, and Jack D'Arcy (D.L. Champion). Also on hand are W.C. Harding, better known under his pseudonym Anson Hard, along with H.C. Langer, real name Hedwig Langer (never heard of her), and newcomer H. DeWitt Thomason, who has no other credits in the Fictionmags Index, so his story here may well be the extent of his career. FAR EAST ADVENTURE STORIES didn't last long, only a dozen issues, but it published some good stuff.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Adventures, December 1932

Pith helmet alert! Seeing bullets whizzing through Stetsons was common on Western pulp covers, but I don't recall ever seeing any Injury to a Hat covers involving pith helmets. Surely, there must have been some. Allan K. Echols, author of the cover story in this issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES, was best known for his Westerns, but obviously he wrote some jungle yarns, too. Something about this one seems to me like the cover painting might have existed first and Echols wrote the story to fit it, but that's pure speculation on my part and could be entirely wrong. The other authors in this issue make it a pretty strong lineup: Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Arthur J. Burks, Anthony M. Rud, Wayne Rogers, Perley Poore Sheehan (with a Captain Trouble story--I have a collection of those and need to get around to reading them!), and Thomson Burtis. Those guys were all popular, prolific pulpsters who knew how to spin a yarn.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, July 1936

I'm not that familiar with the work of Charles De Feo, but he did a pretty good job on this cover. ADVENTURE always featured good authors and this issue is no exception. Inside are stories by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Donald Barr Chidsey, William E. Barrett, Henry Herbert Knibbs, Commander Edward Ellsberg, Andrew A. Caffrey, and William S. Wells. Chidsey is one of my favorites, Wheeler-Nicholson and Barrett were always top-notch, and Knibbs is well-regarded although I don't recall ever reading any of his stories. The others I'm not familiar with but I'm sure they're well worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, April 10, 1929

SHORT STORIES must have been the most instantly recognizable pulp with its Red Sun covers, and this issue sports a particularly good one by Edgar F. Wittmack. And a Pith Helmet Alert, to boot! The best-known authors inside are W.C. Tuttle and Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson. Henry Herbert Knibbs was pretty well-known in those days, I believe, but mostly forgotten now. Also in this issue are stories by Weed Dickinson (great name!), Homer King Gordon, Willard K. Smith, E.S. Pladwell, Russell Hays, Melvin Lostutter, and Larry Barreto, and if you're familiar with any of those guys and their work, you're ahead of me. But dang, that's a nice cover, and I'll bet most of the stories are pretty good, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Green God of Terror - Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson

Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was an interesting character in his own right: Military officer, prolific pulp author, and an important player in the creation of the whole danged comic book industry. I’m most interested in him as a pulpster who turned out scores of adventure and Western yarns. Given his background, it’s not surprising that his stories often had a military angle to them. For example, “The Green God of Terror”, his novella that’s one of the featured stories in the November 1933 issue of ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE.

The protagonist of “The Green God of Terror” is army intelligence officer Barry O’Neil, who is stationed in the Philippines. His investigation into the disappearance of a mining engineer leads him to the missing man’s beautiful sister, a fabulous emerald, a sinister Russian, and an isolated island where the Green God of Terror of the title supposedly lurks.

I’ve read several of Wheeler-Nicholson’s stories, but this one may be my favorite so far. He never takes his foot off the gas pedal, racing along from action scene to action scene, from the dark alleys of Manila to several shipboard battles to a final showdown in a hidden island temple.

No matter how over-the-top Wheeler-Nicholson’s plots get, his stories always have an air of authenticity about them. Again, not a surprise considering his background. This one is a very good example of that. His work reminds me a little of H. Bedford-Jones, although his prose isn’t quite as smooth and polished as HB-J’s.

If you’re a fan of pure, breakneck pulp adventure yarns, I give “The Green God of Terror” a very high recommendation. It’s been reprinted in HIGH ADVENTURE#194, a special issue of that long-running publication that also includes several more Wheeler-Nicholson stories. I have a copy and plan to read those stories soon. I’m looking forward to it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, March 1951

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The cover art is probably by Sam Cherry, although I’m not a hundred percent convinced of that. It’s a nice cover, no matter who painted it. That’s my copy in the scan.

For more than a decade, the stories about Texas Ranger Walt Slade were one of the regular series in THRILLING WESTERN. A. Leslie Scott, under the pseudonym Bradford Scott, wrote more than 70 yarns about Slade, who was also known as El Halcon (The Hawk) and was reputed to be an outlaw, although he was actually an undercover Texas Ranger. “Trail From Yesterday”, the Slade novelette in this issue, is the final pulp story in the series, although as most if not all of you know, a few years later Scott began a series of paperback original novels featuring the character that ran for even longer.

This is an excellent tale for Slade to go out on, as far as his pulp run. Most of the time, these stories find Slade chasing outlaws in the rangelands of West Texas or the brush country of South Texas. “Trail From Yesterday” begins in Dallas (a far different place in the 1880s from what it is today) and the trail of a famous Texas owlhoot was believed to be dead leads Slade to the treacherous swamplands of East Texas, with its dangers of snakes, gators, and quicksand. The plot involves smuggling, gun-running, and a fortune in black opals. Scott packs almost enough material for a novel into this novelette, and he keeps the pace racing along with his usual vivid descriptions and several terrific shootouts. Slade also has a great sidekick in this one, Little Mose Wagner, a black former cowboy who’s too stove up to ride the range anymore, but he functions as Slade’s guide and assistant during this adventure in the swamp. This is great stuff, one of the best Walt Slade pulp yarns I’ve read. Scott was at the top of his game here.

The name Dabney Otis Collins is familiar to me from many Western pulp TOCs, but I don’t recall if I’ve ever read anything by him until now. His short story in this issue, “The Third Outlaw”, is about a fateful encounter between a lone cowboy and a gang of bank robbers on the run from the law as a blizzard is closing in. It’s a very suspenseful, surprisingly hardboiled tale, and I liked it a lot. I’m going to have to keep my eyes open for more by Collins.

The last time I read a Swap and Whopper story by Syl McDowell, I surprised myself by kind of liking it. The S&W story in this issue, “The Roaming Riders”, is pretty entertaining, too. It’s the usual goofy mix of wild circumstances, this time including a runaway pair of pants with all the duo’s money in it, a housing development in the desert of Southern California (this series is a modern-day Western), and an escaped elephant that’s supposed to be in a jungle movie. McDowell pulls it all together and makes it work fairly well. I got a few smiles out of this one. No outright chuckles that I can remember, but the series is growing on me.

Jim O’Mara was a pseudonym of Vernon Fluharty, who also wrote Westerns under the name Michael Carder. He was never all that prolific but he had a steady career producing well-written Westerns. His short story in this issue, “Collateral”, is a cattlemen vs. sodbusters yarn, written from the point of view of a former cowboy turned farmer. It’s a rather bleak yarn, but it has some nice action and a dark but still somewhat hopeful ending. I liked it quite a bit.

The same can’t be said of “Crop o’ Calamity” by Roger Dee (pseudonym of Roger D. Aycock), an author probably best remembered for his science fiction. This is another humorous Western about a couple of characters named Nosy Nolan and Doc Durgin, and it has something to do with escapees from a wild animal show. I don’t know for sure because it’s written in present tense (a style I don’t care for) and is dialect-heavy, and I just didn’t care for it at all, leading me to give up after a few pages. I may be warming up to Swap and Whopper after all these years, but not this one.

Much, much better is “Who’ll Ride With Me”, from the always dependable Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson. This novelette is a reprint from the August 1947 issue of THE RIO KID WESTERN. It’s a cavalry vs. the Apaches yarn set in Arizona Territory, and as usual when Wheeler-Nicholson is writing about the military, there’s a real ring of authenticity to it. Some great action, although the ending isn’t quite as dramatic as it could have been. This story is also a good example of how the late Jon Tuska was wrong when he claimed that pulp editors wouldn’t allow romances between white and Hispanic characters. There’s a nicely handled romantic angle between the white cavalry lieutenant who’s the protagonist and the beautiful daughter of a Mexican rancher, and it’s written the same as any other romance in a Western pulp.

Harold F. Cruickshank wrote a lot of air war stories early in his pulp career and then became a prolific Western pulpster. I’ve never cared for his Pioneer Folk series that ran in RANGE RIDERS WESTERN. He has a stand-alone short story, “Prodigal Gun Thunder”, in this issue. It’s about a young man framed for being a horse thief who returns home from a stretch in prison to get to the bottom of things and settle the score. It’s a definite improvement over the other Western stories by Cruickshank that I’ve read, but there’s still something about his writing that just doesn’t resonate with me.

Harvey Ivison is a brand-new name to me. He wrote only a few stories for the pulps. His story “Thataway” is about a fugitive from the law who isn’t exactly what he appears to be. On the run from a posse, he shows up at a ranch where there’s a badly injured man, and unexpected things happen. This story is written with a very nice hardboiled tone that includes a few traces of dry humor. I really liked it and will have to be on the lookout for more stories by Harvey Ivison.

This issue concludes with a condensed novel, SCORPION by Will James. Is there a difference between a condensed novel and an abridged novel? I don’t know, but I feel like there should be. In a condensed novel, you take out words here and lines there, right? Whereas in an abridged novel, you take out entire scenes or sections. I have no idea which approach was taken in producing the version of SCORPION printed here. I remember reading James’s horse novel SMOKY when I was a kid, but that’s all I could tell you about it. SCORPION is a horse novel, too, and while I wanted to like it, page after page of horse-breaking narrative with no dialogue or actual plot did me in. I didn’t read this one, either. I just don’t have the time or patience I once did.

So the March 1951 issue of THRILLING WESTERN turns out to be a really mixed bag. The Walt Slade story by Scott is superb. The stories by Collins, O’Mara, Wheeler-Nicholson, and Ivison are all very good to excellent. The Swap and Whopper yarn by McDowell is okay, the Cruickshank story is readable but forgettable, and I didn’t finish the other two. As always, some of you might enjoy the stories I didn’t, so if you have this issue on your shelves, it’s worth taking down and sampling its contents.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Adventures, December 1940

This is a pretty violent cover to find on a pulp, and especially striking because it was published more than a year before the United States' entry into World War II. But it's also pretty effective and has the yellow and red color scheme that was so popular, especially on the Western pulps. I don't know who the artist is. Inside are stories by some top pulpsters, including Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and Louis L'Amour (with one of his great Ponga Jim Mayo yarns). Also on hand are William R. Cox, Denver Bardwell, and Harold F. Cruickshank. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Popular Western, August 1948

I think that's the first time I've seen anybody use a shovel for cover during a gunfight. Doesn't seem to be like it would be all that effective, although it seems to be doing the job in this cover by Sam Cherry. This issue of POPULAR WESTERN has a strong group of authors inside, including William Hopson, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Louis L'Amour, Tom Gunn (probably Syl MacDowell), Ben Frank, Harold F. Cruickshank, Alfred L. Garry, and house-name Jackson Cole. I'm not that fond of some of those writers, but their work was popular and they sold plenty of it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Adventures, July 1943

When I was a kid, I would have loved to have a flying helmet, a pair of jodhpurs, and a .45. The good-looking girl, I wouldn't have cared about so much. It's safe to say that my priorities have changed since then . . . but the outfit the guy on this cover of THRILLING ADVENTURES is wearing is still pretty cool. Inside are stories by Louis L'Amour ("Night Over the Solomons", the title story of one of his collections many, many years later), Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, house-name Charles Stoddard, and several little known authors. THRILLING ADVENTURES published some pretty good stories. There's been one big collection of yarns from it already, and there could easily be more.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, November 1, 1928

Gangway! I'm not sure why I like this cover by L.J. Cronin, an artist I'm not familiar with, but I really do. It just seems dynamic to me. And of course, ADVENTURE had some pretty dynamic authors in its pages, too, including in this issue Talbot Mundy, with a story featuring a character named Ben Quorn (also unfamiliar to me), Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Allan Vaughan Elston, Thomson Burtis, Bill Adams, and Warren Hastings Miller, among others.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: All Fiction Stories, July 1931

You don't hear as much about the Dell pulps as you do about some from other publishers, but from what I can tell, they were consistently high quality productions. This issue of ALL FICTION STORIES, Dell's general adventure fiction pulp, sports a good cover by H.W. Reusswig, and inside you'll find a great group of authors: H. Bedford-Jones, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Tom Curry, and Seven Anderton, among others. Looks thoroughly enjoyable to me. 

Forgotten Books: The Scarlet Killer and Other Stories - Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson

I've seen Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's name on many pulp covers over the years, but as far as I recall, I've read little if anything by him. So I decided to remedy that and started off with THE SCARLET KILLER AND OTHER STORIES, a collection of half a dozen yarns that all appeared in the pulp THRILLING ADVENTURES in 1932.

The book starts off with "Guarded by Fire" (March), which finds American engineer Jack Nelson in Paris, where he meets a beautiful young Russian woman who holds the key to a fabulous treasure that's hidden somewhere in her homeland. There seems to be a bit of a Dashiell Hammett influence in this story. There's a sinister fat man, a weaselly little Soviet agent who could easily be played by Peter Lorre, and of course the treasure that everyone is after. Even with all that going for it, the story is still a bit on the bland side. Not bad, but it seemed lacking in action and drama to me.

The scene shifts to the Texas/Mexico border country for "Fire and Sword" (September), a fairly short, simple action yarn about a clash between the U.S. cavalry and a gang of bandidos from south of the border. I think this one is set in the early 20^th Century, the Pancho Villa era, if you will, but Wheeler-Nicholson isn't very specific about that. It's an entertaining story, although there's not much to it.

It's back to Russia for the title novella (April), during the revolution when U.S. army troops were sent to Siberia to protect American interests there. The protagonist is a two-fisted American mining engineer who tries to rescue a beautiful young woman from a bloodthirsty Bolshevik warlord known as the Scarlet Killer. This one has a lot of action, with Cossacks charging around and battling Bolsheviks, not to mention a really gruesome murder method employed by the Scarlet Killer. The biggest drawback in this one is that the hero is dumb as a rock. But to be fair, he hadn't read hundreds of pulp stories and so was less likely to recognize all the bad guys' tricks.

As you’d guess from the title, “The Scourge of Islam” (October) is a Middle Eastern adventure, as French crusader Hugh de Galliard, the only survivor from a group of crusaders on their way to meet Genghis Khan, falls in love with a beautiful girl, gets mixed up in Persian politics, is captured, escapes, teams up with ol’ Genghis, and generally does a bunch of hacking and slashing. The epic battle scenes are well-done and reminiscent of Robert E. Howard’s crusader yarns. There’s a grisly execution method on this one, too. The ending is a bit of a letdown, but overall this is a good story and my favorite in this collection.

“The Fame of Albert Muggins” (November) is a comedy about a meek, weaselly British soldier in Hong Kong, just before World War I, who finally explodes under the mistreatment by his sergeant and wallops the non-com, then strikes an officer as well and deserts his unit, escaping Hong Kong by stowing away on a Spanish ship. This leads to a series of mildly amusing adventures. As a comedy, this isn’t much, but Wheeler-Nicholson does an excellent job with the setting.

This collection wraps up with “The Dumb Bunny” (December), another story about U.S. troops in Russia at the time of the revolution. In this one, a Bolshevik plot to massacre a bunch of Americans is foiled by an unlikely hero. The closing twist is a nice one, although it probably worked better and came as more of a surprise in 1932.

Overall, my introduction to the work of Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was entertaining but not outstanding. He clearly knew his stuff when it comes to military matters and was knowledgable about a wide swath of history. He came up with some great concepts as well, but in these stories at least, the execution is on the ordinary side for the most part. More colorful protagonists and a little more blood and thunder would have helped. I have two more Wheeler-Nicholson collections, and I enjoyed THE SCARLET KILLER AND OTHER STORIES enough that I’ll certainly read them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Blue Book, March 1942

During the war years, BLUE BOOK got away from using historical covers as much and added some contemporary ones to the mix. This one by Herbert Morton Stoops features British tanks in the North African campaign and is excellent. BLUE BOOK always had a great blend of fiction as well, and this issue is no different with stories by H. Bedford-Jones (a BLUE BOOK regular, and this issue is a little unusual in that it has only one story by him, with nothing by his pseudonyms Gordon Keyne or Michael Gallister), Georges Surdez, Peter B. Kyne, Arch Whitehouse, Irvin S. Cobb, Jacland Marmur, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, and Samuel Taylor.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Soldiers of Fortune, October 1931

The first issue of a short-lived pulp devoted to adventure fiction. It appears there were only four issues of SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE before it went down for the count with the rest of the Clayton magazine line. But the four stories in these pages were from top-notch authors of pulp adventure fare: F.V.W. Mason, Victor Rousseau, S.B.H. Hurst, and Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson. The cover art is by Jerry Delano, who did the covers for all four issues.