Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double Action Western, September 1945

This is a pulp that I own and read recently (sort of—more on that below). That’s my copy in the scan. The cover art is by A. Leslie Ross. I would have known that even if Ross hadn’t been credited on the Table of Contents. That’s a Ross hat! I always like his covers on pulps and paperbacks, and this one is no exception. I think it’s fine.

The lead novella, “Lone-Wolf Foreman”, is bylined Mat Rand, and it really is almost long enough to be considered an actual novel. Mat Rand was a house-name used frequently in Columbia Publications pulps, and the author of this one hasn’t been identified. It has some decent plot elements: a big ranch owned by a beautiful young woman, a villainous foreman who can’t be trusted, a stalwart mining engineer, a fabulously valuable mine that’s actually a swindle (or is it?), and a colorful old codger. Unfortunately, the writing is just terrible. We get page after page of repetitive dialogue that serves no real purpose except to fill up pages, a few clunky action scenes, and narrative that has to be reread to try to figure out what’s going on. I stuck with this one for the first half of the story hoping it would get better, but it never did and I skimmed the rest, reading the last four or five pages to get some sense of closure. But all that got me was one of the limpest, least dramatic endings I’ve ever read. I worry sometimes that I’m too easy on the pulps I read and like them just because they’re old, but then I run across a yarn like this and realize that bad is bad, no matter when it was published, and I can still recognize that. This is maybe the worst Western pulp story I’ve ever read.

“Lone-Wolf Foreman” is long enough that there are only two short stories backing it up, and they had nowhere to go but up. “Satan’s Bullet Trio” by Charles D. Richardson Jr. is about three outlaws who pretend to be lawmen in order to rob a money shipment from a bank. Not surprisingly, the scheme doesn’t work out exactly how they expect it to. This is a pretty well-written story, but a couple of plot twists stretch credibility a little too far.

“Candidate for Boothill” by T.W. Ford wraps up the issue, and it’s by far the best of the three. In this story, an easy-going young cowboy gets on the bad side of an arrogant rancher and winds up being framed for a stagecoach holdup and shooting a marshal. The action takes place in one frantic, breakneck night as the protagonist tries to escape the posse that’s after him and clear his name. Ford was a pretty consistent writer and a good storyteller, and while this yarn is really nothing special, I found it pretty entertaining.

So, is this the worst Western pulp I’ve ever read? Given the length of the Mat Rand story and how bad it is, I’d have to say that’s right. If you happen to have a copy, I’d advise admiring the A. Leslie Ross cover, reading the T.W. Ford story, and then putting it back on the shelf. They can’t all be winners.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Famous Western, April 1940

I don't know who painted the cover on this issue of FAMOUS WESTERN, but some old friends show up on it: a stalwart cowboy in a red shirt, a good-looking redhead who's getting in on the action, and if you look closely, you can see an old codger peering out the jailhouse door. Is he wounded? I'm betting he is, although we can't tell for sure. There are only four stories in this issue. Two of them are by Anthony Rud (better known for mystery, adventure, and weird fiction, but he turned out some Westerns, too) and W.D. Hoffman, a prolific Western pulpster. The other two are credited to Mat Rand and James Rourke, two Columbia Publications house-names. I don't own this issue, but it looks like a pretty good one. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western Romances, September 1950

I don't know who painted the cover on this issue of REAL WESTERN ROMANCES, but it's eye-catching, to say the least. The same artist did several other covers for REAL WESTERN ROMANCES during this time period. The style is pretty distinctive. As always with the Columbia pulps, it was edited by Robert W. Lowndes. Inside this issue, the best-known author is Lee Floren. House-names Mat Rand and Cliff Campbell are on hand, too, as well as Roger Dee (Roger D. Aycock, probably best remembered for his science fiction stories), Burt Thomas, and a few other authors I hadn't heard of: W.P. Brothers, Ennen Reeves Hall, and Val Gendron. It wouldn't surprise me if some of those are pseudonyms, but it's entirely possible they're not. I don't own this issue and it doesn't seem to be on-line anywhere. I'm not sure I would have bought it if I'd seen it on the newsstand in 1950 . . . but with that cover, I would have thought about it. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Smashing Detective Stories, May 1955

This is an issue from late in the pulp era that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I think the cover art is okay, not great but effective enough. I don’t know who the artist is.

This is also a momentous issue, although you wouldn’t necessarily think that an issue of SMASHING DETECTIVE STORIES, a low-budget, last gasp pulp from Columbia Publications, would ever fall into that category. But it contains the final Race Williams story by Carroll John Daly. That’s right, 32 years after the character made his debut in “Knights of the Open Palm” in the June 1, 1923 issue of BLACK MASK, the series comes to an end with “Head Over Homicide” in this issue.

I’d never read any of the later Race Williams stories, even though I have the Black Dog Books collection RACE WILLIAMS’ DOUBLE DATE and the massive complete stories collections from Altus Press. The only ones I’ve read come from the Twenties and Thirties. So I found “Head Over Homicide” pretty interesting. The story opens with Race rescuing the beautiful, kidnapped daughter of an oil tycoon. But when he returns her to her family, he quickly realizes that not everything is as it seems, and it’s not long until murder rears its ugly head. Or does it?

The writing is a little smoother and more polished than in the early stories but still unmistakably Daly. Nobody else’s writing ever sounded like his. And honestly, it seemed a little out of place to me in a story obviously set in the Fifties with several references to television. But I still enjoy Daly’s voice. This is a cleverly plotted yarn, too, going back and forth on what’s true and what’s not, and Daly keeps a nice final twist on reserve for very late in the story. It could have used more action—there’s hardly any—but all in all, for a final story in the series it’s hardly an embarrassment. I rather enjoyed it.

I was familiar with Arnold Drake as a comic book writer—how can you be a comics fan and not know the guy who co-created The Doom Patrol, Deadman, and the Guardians of the Galaxy?—but didn’t realize he turned out a few pulp stories as well, including “The Lady and the Lawyer” in this one. It’s a private eye yarn, with the detective narrator hired by a lawyer to shadow a beautiful young socialite who he insists is homicidal. The story moves along well, has just enough twists in the plot to be intriguing, but then the ending is completely limp and lacking in drama, a surprise from somebody with Drake’s talent.

Betty Brooks turned out only a handful of stories, all for Columbia detective pulps. Her story in this issue, “The Cocky Robbins Kill”, is about a murder in a small-town hotel during a blizzard. There are a lot of characters, but the plot is well-handled and she did a good job with the hotel setting. This one’s nothing special but well-written enough that I enjoyed it.

I read a science fiction story by Basil Wells a while back that I didn’t care for. His story in this issue, “Red is the Tower”, is about murder on a farm (the tower in the title is a silo), and while it was better than the SF yarn, I still didn’t like it much and found it overly literary and pretentious. Wells may be one of those writers whose work just doesn’t resonate with me. That’s not really his fault.

“He Had To Be Tough” is about a young, scientific-minded police detective trying to convince the grizzled veterans he works with that they ought to give up their strongarm tactics. Then something happens that makes him rethink that, and it’s furious action the rest of the way in this yarn. This is a good, entertaining story despite a late twist that may come from a little too far out in left field. The author is J.J. Matthews, who wrote approximately 120 Western, detective, and sports stories during the Fifties, all of them appearing in various Columbia pulps. Even though this isn’t an acknowledged house name, I have a strong hunch that it is.

If not for a few sales to Fiction House’s JUNGLE STORIES, I would think that Francis C. Battle was a Columbia house name, too. Nearly all of his several dozen detective and Western stories appeared in Columbia pulps. “Ju-Ju for the White Man” is a jungle story, too, as well as an “Off-Trail Crime Story”, as the blurb says. A big game hunter schemes to use witchcraft to get rid of a rival. The ending, while predictable, is effective, and it’s not a bad little yarn.

Mat Rand is a well-known and widely used house name, so there’s no telling who actually wrote “Jailbreak”. It’s about a convicted murderer trying to come up with an escape plan before he’s executed. Like the previous story, the ending is pretty obvious, but again, it’s well-written and reasonably entertaining.

Despite the presence of Race Williams, nobody is ever going to mistake SMASHING DETECTIVE STORIES for BLACK MASK or DIME DETECTIVE (where Race also appeared), but I had a pretty good time reading this issue. The Arnold Drake story is disappointing because of the ending and I didn’t like the Basil Wells story, but all the others kept me turning the pages and entertained me. If I come across any more issues, I wouldn’t hesitate to give them a try.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Action Novels Magazine, November 1938

This is a nice dynamic cover, although the smoke coming from their guns looks a little odd to me. I don't know the artist. WESTERN ACTION NOVELS MAGAZINE was one of what came to be known as the Columbia pulps, as you can tell from the presence of house-names Cliff Campbell and Mat Rand in the Table of Contents. Also on hand in this issue (the first in the magazine's run) are E.B. Mann (twice, with a reprint from RANCH ROMANCES under his own name and a new yarn under his Zachary Strong pseudonym), Oscar Schisgall, and William Patterson White. Looks like a pretty good issue to me, with those authors.

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. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Double-Action Gang Magazine, June 1938

I've read very little from the gang pulps. Like Weird Menace, they were a sub-genre that flourished for a while and then was gone. But they had some good covers while they lasted, and some decent writers, too, such as in this issue of DOUBLE-ACTION GANG MAGAZINE which featured stories by E. Hoffmann Price and G.T. Fleming-Roberts, as well as Anson Hard, a prolific contributor to a variety of pulps, Margie Harris, who wrote mainly for the gang and prison pulps, and house names Cliff Campbell, Mat Rand, and "Undercover" Dix (really?), plus some little-known authors who may or may not have been house-names, too. I don't know who painted this cover, but I would have had a difficult time resisting it if I'd seen it on the newsstand in 1938, and the Price story would have tempted me to buy it, as well.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Action-Packed Western, December 1938

Based on the cover by A. Leslie Ross, this probably is an action-packed issue of ACTION-PACKED WESTERN. As usual with this publisher, Chesterfield Publications (later Columbia), we get some stories by house-name authors Cliff Campbell and Mat Rand, but the prolific Ed Earl Repp (or one of his ghosts) and S. Omar Barker are on hand, too, so I'll bet there's some good reading to be had here. Heck, I've liked most of the stuff I've read by "Campbell" and "Rand".

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Famous Western, October 1949

That's a bright, eye-catching cover on this issue of FAMOUS WESTERN. Inside there's an interesting mix of authors, too, and a story title I really like, "The Buzzard Cheaters", by Allan K. Echols. Other authors with stories in this issue include A.A. Baker and Rex Whitechurch, house-names Mat Rand and Cliff Campbell, John Van Praag (who was really Scott Meredith, later famous as a literary agent), and John Lackland (who was really editor Robert W. Lowndes). Not exactly the first string when it comes to Western pulpsters, but I'll bet there are some entertaining stories in there.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Yarns, June 1938

This is the first issue of the detective pulp that changed to BLACK HOOD DETECTIVE a few years later. I like that cover, and the line-up of authors inside is pretty darned good, too: Arthur J. Burks with the third and final story in his Harlan Dyce series (the first two ran in CLUES DETECTIVE MAGAZINE in '36 and '37; for what it's worth, I never heard of Harlan Dyce), Norvell Page twice (once as himself, once as N. Wooten Poge), L. Ron Hubbard, Carmony Gove, Cyril Plunkett, and a couple of house-names, Mat Rand and Cliff Campbell. Also, I just like the name DETECTIVE YARNS. Sounds like my kind of pulp.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Famous Detective Stories, February 1951

Man, do I love that cover! Not only do we have a sexy redheaded nurse, we've got a gun hidden in a cast (a dang cannon, from the looks of that muzzle blast), and stories with titles like "Trigger-Happy Honey" and "The Chortling Corpse". As the old saying goes, this stuff is right up my alley! Inside are stories by old pros T.W. Ford, Dale Clark, and Richard Brister, prolific house-names Mat Rand and Cliff Campbell, and a story by none other than science fiction great Cyril Kornbluth. I would have bought this one for the cover, but I'll bet I would have enjoyed the stories, too.