I don't have any idea who painted this cover, but I like it fairly well. I've still never read an issue of THRILLING RANCH STORIES. I'm going to have to, one of these days. This issue features one of my favorite Western writers, Joseph Chadwick, as well as Clee Woods, Joe Archibald (best remembered, I suspect, as an aviation pulpster, but he wrote everything), Harold F. Cruickshank (definitely best remembered as an aviation pulpster), Bruce Douglas, and Marian O'Hearn, as well as lesser-known pulpster Monica Morton. Oh, wait! Monica Morton was really Johnston McCulley, so never mind. Not lesser-known at all. Chadwick and McCulley make this a worthwhile issue.
A very nice Christmas-themed cover on this issue of RANGELAND ROMANCES, Popular Publications' answer to RANCH ROMANCES. By the Fifties, this pulp leaned more toward actual romances rather than traditional Westerns and featured more female authors. One of those in this issue, Helen Meinzer, who wrote the lead novella under the pseudonym A.C. Abbott, was just about as hardboiled in her writing as her male counterparts, though. Her novels WILD BLOOD and BRANDED are excellent. Other notable names in this issue are Marian O'Hearn, Kenneth Fowler, and Theodore J. Roemer. None of the story titles sound Christmas-like, but the cover's enough to generate some holiday spirit.
I feel like I ought to know who painted the cover on this issue of NEW WESTERN. The hat on the cowboy with the red bandanna looks awfully familiar. I kind of want to say Walter Baumhofer, but I don't really think that's right. Anyway . . . There are some popular, prolific writers in this issue: Barry Cord (Peter Germano), James P. Olsen, John G. Pearsol, Rolland Lynch, Lee Floren, and Glenn H. Wichman, along with Marian O'Hearn, who appeared most often in RANCH ROMANCES and the other Western romance pulps.
