Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Short Stories, September 1938

J.W. Scott liked to use blondes on his Western pulp covers instead of redheads, but he teams them with the usual Stalwart, Red-Shirted Cowboy and Wounded Old Geezer, as on this issue of WESTERN SHORT STORIES. Ed Earl Repp is the author with the biggest name in this one, and he's on hand twice, once as himself and once as Brad Buckner. Other authors include the distinctively named Carmony Gove, Jack Sterrett, Rolland Lynch, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, Harold F. Cruickshank, Luke Tyler (who sounds like a house-name but apparently wasn't), and Ken Jason and John Cannon, who were house-names. I don't own this issue or any other issues of this pulp, as far as I remember, but it looks pretty good. For a lower-rung Western pulp, WESTERN SHORT STORIES ran a long time, from December 1936 to January 1957.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, September 1948

This is a pulp I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with an exciting and dramatic cover by Sam Cherry, who always delivered the goods. And I’ll have more to say about this cover later.

This issue leads off with another Tombstone and Speedy novelette by W.C. Tuttle, “The Hunches of Tombstone Jones”. In this one, our intrepid range detective duo aren’t on the trail of rustlers for a change. As a favor to their boss at the Cattlemen’s Association, they set out to investigate a case of high-grading at a gold mine. But when they arrive on the scene, they find the mine owner and his lawyer both dead. Is it murder? What does it have to do with the kidnapping of an inept young drummer from back east who sells ladies’ ready-to-wear goods? Why’s everybody so interested in a beautiful young woman and her son? Tombstone and Speedy will untangle all those threads, of course, with a lot of banter and gunplay along the way. After being a little disappointed in the last yarn I read in this series, “The Hunches of Tombstone Jones” really hits the mark. The dialogue is funny, the action is good, the detective work, mostly by Tombstone, is canny, and the plot hangs together nicely. This is a top-notch Tombstone and Speedy story.

“Catch Rope” is the third and final story in Chuck Martin’s short-lived series about crippled range detective Jim Bowen. It’s a good hardboiled Western yarn in which Bowen goes after a gang of rustlers who have kidnapped a rancher. Martin is nearly always worth reading, and this is an enjoyable story. I hoped it would bring some resolution to Jim Bowen’s continuing storyline, but it doesn’t, which is a shame.

Nels Leroy Jorgensen started out as a hardboiled crime and mystery writer in BLACK MASK before concentrating on Westerns later in his career, and I’ve enjoyed a number of his stories in the past. “Bullet Trail to Bexar”, his novelette in this issue, gets off to a promising start. It’s set in Texas in the spring of 1836, during the Texas revolution, and is about a young Texan on a mission to San Antonio. He gets saddled with a beautiful young woman along the way, and she has an agenda of her own. This should be a good story, but it’s riddled with anachronisms and blatant historical errors, as well as continuity glitches such as the young woman’s stepfather suddenly becoming her half-brother for the rest of the story. I wound up abandoning this one halfway through. It just has too many problems for it to be entertaining to me.

“Killer, Here I Come” is by Robert J. Hogan, best-known for the G-8 series, of course, but he wrote quite a few Westerns as well. This is the second story in this issue where the protagonist has a crippled leg. In this case, he’s not a range detective but rather a saddlemaker and veterinarian. He’s a very likable character, and you can’t help but root for him as he has to deal with an old enemy turned bank robber. I didn’t like this one whole-heartedly—there’s some cruelty to animals in it, and I have a hard time with that—but it’s a pretty good story overall.

Tom Parsons was a Thrilling Group house-name. The story under that by-line in this issue, “Born to Hang”, is the one illustrated by Cherry’s cover. Actually, I strongly suspect this is another case of a story being written to match an existing cover painting, because the scene lines up perfectly with the story. I also think there’s a very good chance the story was written by editor Charles S. Strong, who was also Western writer Chuck Stanley, author of a regular non-fiction column in EXCITING WESTERN. It’s a good yarn about a drifter framed for murder, and its only real drawback is that the ending isn’t as dramatic as it might have been. Still an enjoyable story, though.

Arizona Ranger Navajo Tom Raine has become one of my favorite Western pulp characters. In “Ride the Ghost Down, Ranger!”, he’s sent to find out who’s been attacking and burning out some homesteaders, which leads him to a mystery involving the inheritance of a valuable ranch. It’s a good story, and I’m convinced it’s the work of Lee Bond writing under the house-name Jackson Cole. Bond created the Navajo Tom Raine series and wrote more of the stories than anyone else, although C. William Harrison contributed quite a few, as well. This one ends with a big shootout between Raine and multiple bad guys, one of the trademarks of his stories.

The issue wraps up with “Reba Rides Alone” by D.B. Newton, one of my favorite Western authors. Of course, I can’t see that title without thinking about the country singer, but in this case, Reba is Mike Reba, a veteran outlaw who’s wounded and on the run when he encounters a young man determined to take up the owlhoot trail. This story is kind of predictable, but it’s very well written, and like all of Newton’s work, it’s worth reading.

This is a good issue overall of EXCITING WESTERN with a strong Tombstone and Speedy entry, a solid Navajo Tom Raine story, and the other stories are all okay with the exception of Jorgensen’s. If you have a copy, it’s certainly worth taking down from the shelves. If you don’t, the whole issue is also available on the Internet Archive.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Pirate Stories, May 1935

PIRATE STORIES was a short-lived adventure pulp edited and published by Hugo Gernsback. This is the fourth of only six issues. The cover is by Sidney Reisenberg. Two of the authors inside are prolific and well-respected pulpsters: J. Allan Dunn and Nels Leroy Jorgensen. I hadn't heard of any of the others, who include Norman White Jr., Jack Covington, and Jaques Edouard Durand. This is Durand's only credit in the Fictionmags Index. I wonder if he was really J. Allan Dunn. Nothing to base that on, just a stray thought.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, May 1947

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat ragged copy in the scan. The cover is by Sam Cherry, as usual, and I like it, also as usual.

Ah, Tombstone and Speedy! A ghost story seems perfect for this pair of bumbling but surprisingly astute range detectives, and the novella “Ghost of the Tumbling K” brings them to the title ranch on their latest assignment for the Cattlemen’s Protective Association. However, they don’t know why they’re there, because the rancher who sent for them lies seriously wounded and unconscious. Tombstone and Speedy fetch help for the injured man and, in the process, discover that the ranch is supposed to be haunted. Since they don’t know why they were summoned, they decide to stay there and keep an eye on the place, which, of course, leads to a ghostly encounter.

Author W.C. Tuttle packs a lot of plot into his yarn, as he always does with the Tombstone and Speedy stories. Most of it revolves around the hidden loot of a mysterious outlaw known as the Yellow Mask, who is believed to have died several years earlier. But is he really dead? If he is, could it be his spirit haunting the Tumbling K? Tombstone and Speedy untangle the whole thing, of course, with plenty of action and humorous banter along the way. These stories are pretty formulaic, but they sure are entertaining.

“Indian Slap” is by Barry Scobee, the only pulp Western author with a mountain named after him. Scobee’s work is hit-or-miss for me but mostly good, and I enjoyed this tale about a white boy who was a captive of the Comanches trying to fit back in among a community of settlers. Scobee does a good job with the Central Texas setting, too.

“West of Windigo” is a novelette by Norrell Gregory. I don’t recall if I’ve read anything by Gregory before, but I liked this story of a railroad detective trying to find out who’s been stealing construction supplies, smuggling whiskey to the Indians, and generally trying to stir up trouble on a spur line that’s being built. Gregory moves things along nicely. This would have made a good B-Western movie in the Forties or Fifties.

“Badmen Are Plumb Foolish” is by Donald Bayne Hobart, a very prolific pulpster whose work I’ve come to enjoy. This story is about a gambler framed for a murder he didn’t commit, and despite its short length, maybe 2500 words, Hobart manages to work in a train robbery and a plot twist, too. This is a nice, enjoyable yarn by a real pro.

“Sheriff” by William O’Sullivan uses the “old lawman whose time has passed” plot, and not surprisingly, the old badge-toter has some life left in him after all, as an election campaign against his young whippersnapper deputy proves. This isn’t a memorable story at all, but it’s well-written and pleasant enough.

I’m convinced that Donald Bayne Hobart is also the author of “Bait for a Range-War Gallows”, even though it was published under the house-name Jackson Cole. The style reads very much like Hobart’s work. This is a range war story, as you probably guessed from the title, but it starts with a very nice twist: the range war is already over when the story begins. And everybody who supported the losing side is now considered an outlaw, including young cowboy Dake Latimer, who is holed up in an old adobe hut trying to fight off a horde of gunmen led by his mortal enemy who hates him because Latimer once stopped the lowdown hombre from raping a young woman. Hobart drops the reader down right in the middle of the action, which is something I always enjoy. Latimer gets out of that scrape but almost immediately finds himself in another one with a wounded youngster’s life on the line. Hobart packs a lot into this story and the action never slows down for more than a few paragraphs. This is just a superb Western yarn, one of the best I’ve read recently.

The protagonist of Nels Leroy Jorgensen’s novelette “Longrider Gun-Law” is also a good-guy owlhoot, the son of an Arizona lawman. He’s been below the border in Mexico rustling cattle and horses as part of a gang of American outlaws, but when the group disbands, he heads home to find the area being plagued by a series of stagecoach robberies. The plot developments in this one are pretty predictable, but Jorgensen’s tough prose makes it entertaining reading. Jorgensen’s career started in the early Twenties with detective and adventure yarns. He was a regular contributor to BLACK MASK during that pulp’s early glory days and eventually became a prolific Western pulpster, as well. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by him.

There’s also an animal story by Harold F. Cruickshank in this issue, but I didn’t even try to read it. I loved wildlife yarns when I was a kid, but they just don’t work for me anymore.

Other than that, every story in this issue is good and I think it’s a fine issue overall. Although, as usual when there’s not a Navajo Tom Raine story, I missed that series.

To end on a more serious note that usual, I’ve realized that on several occasions recently, I’ve read and reviewed books and pulps that I previously read and reviewed several years ago, with absolutely no memory of reading and reviewing them before. At my age, this is a mite worrisome. If I have any doubts about a book or a pulp, I try to remember to search the blog and see if I’ve already covered it. But the key phrase there is “try to remember” because that’s where the problem lies, isn’t it? If any rate, if you see such duplication, it’s not intentional, and don’t hesitate to bring it to my attention. It’s helpful for me to know about such things.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Adventures, August 1941

WESTERN ADVENTURES was Street & Smith's third-string Western pulp after WESTERN STORY and WILD WEST WEEKLY, but it had plenty of good authors and stories in it. This issue features yarns from Brad Buckner (really Ed Earl Repp) and Rolland C. Lynch (rumored to have ghosted for Ed Earl Repp), plus William R. Cox, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, Jim Kjelgaard, M. Howard Lane, and Kenneth L. Sinclair, none of whom have anything to do with Ed Earl Repp, as far as I know.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, September 1948

Ah, the old "shooting behind your back while your hands are tied and you're burning the ropes on a candle" trick! The bad guys never see that one coming. This is probably a Sam Cherry cover, but that's not confirmed. What I can confirm is that there are some good authors in this issue, leading off with one of W.C. Tuttle's Tombstone and Speedy yarns, which ran for a long time in EXCITING WESTERN, and followed up by stories by D.B. Newton, Chuck Martin, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, Robert J. Hogan, and a Navajo Raine story under the Jackson Cole house-name.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Short Stories, December 1938

We have an Angry, Gun-Totin' Blonde on the cover of this issue of WESTERN SHORT STORIES, but the Stalwart, Red-Shirted Cowboy and the Wounded Old Geezer are right there with her. Inside is a very solid line-up of Western pulpsters including Harry Sinclair Drago, W.T. Ballard, Ed Earl Repp, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, and Rolland Lynch. This isn't really a well-known Western pulp, but it looks pretty good to me.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Ranch Stories, November 1949

Sam Cherry certainly painted some pretty girls on his pulp covers, and this issue of THRILLING RANCH STORIES is a good example. This blonde looks plenty tough, too. There are some good tough writers with stories in this issue, including Nels Leroy Jorgensen, who was a regular in BLACK MASK early in his career, and Walt Sheldon, who turned out a number of hardboiled paperbacks during the Fifties and Sixties. Also on hand are Harold Preece, Cliff Walters, house-name Sam Brant, and an author who contributed only a few stories to the Western pulps but made the cover on this one, Melvin Gable.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, September 1950

This is a pulp I own and read recently. The scan is from my copy. I don’t know who the artist is, but if you check the lower right corner, you’ll see that this is an Injury to a Hat cover. I’ve been reading issues of THRILLING WESTERN for years now and always enjoy them, although there are usually one or two stories in each issue I don’t care for.

This issue leads off (as most issues from 1940 to 1950 did) with a Walt Slade, Texas Ranger story by Bradford Scott, who was really the highly prolific and distinctive A. Leslie Scott. “The Sky Riders” is one of the last stories in the pulp series. There would be only two more after it. But a few years later Scott began writing paperback novels for Pyramid Books featuring the Walt Slade character, mostly originals but some expansions from pulp yarns. That paperback series ran even longer, all the way into the early Seventies. There’s a Walt Slade novel from 1968 called THE SKY RIDERS, and while I haven’t read it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s an expansion of this pulp novella.

This one opens with a very evocation scene involving a killing on a high natural bridge running between two sides of a canyon. Scott always wrote good action scenes and good descriptions of the settings, and both of those elements are on display here. Walt Slade, an undercover Texas Ranger who most folks believe to be the notorious outlaw El Halcon (The Hawk), witnesses that shooting, and his investigation plunges him into the hunt for a gang of owlhoots known as the Sky Riders because they’re usually spotted riding along some rimrock, silhouetted against the sky.

Anybody who’s read more than one or two Walt Slade yarns will know exactly what’s going on in this story and will pick out the hidden mastermind of the outlaws with no trouble. The geography of the region plays a big part in the plot, as it often does in Scott’s stories, and he handles it very well, resulting in some vivid scenes. Sure, the whole thing is formulaic, but I always enjoy Scott’s work anyway. It’s pure comfort reading for me.

I have the opposite reaction to the Swap and Whopper series by Syl MacDowell, which ran even longer than the Walt Slade series, starting in 1939 and continuing until 1952. Slapstick Westerns are a hard sell for me to start with. The Swap and Whopper stories feature a couple of saddle tramps, one tall and skinny, the other short and fat, who always wind up in bizarre situations. Part Mutt and Jeff, part Abbott and Costello, and well written enough by old pro Syl MacDowell, but dang, this series just doesn’t work for me. I’ve started dozens of them and finished only a few. The one in this issue, “The Talking Bear”, is not one that I finished.

Nels Leroy Jorgensen wrote scores of stories during a pulp career that lasted approximately thirty years, from the early Twenties to the early Fifties. He turned out detective, aviation, adventure, and war stories in addition to Westerns. I first became aware of him as a Western writer but later discovered that his work appeared frequently in BLACK MASK during the Twenties and Thirties, most notably with a series about a gambler named Black Burton (a series that wound up in BLACK BOOK DETECTIVE during the Forties). Jorgensen’s novelette in this issue, “Gunstorm on the Wagon Trail”, has a good title and the plot, about a couple of guys who own a freight company trying to get a wagon train full of badly needed supplies (including medicine) through a gauntlet of Mexican bandidos and Apache renegades, is interesting as well. I thought the actual writing was pretty bland, though, with lots of long paragraphs of the protagonist thinking about what’s going on. I finished the story, but it never really caught my interest much.

I’ve never read a story by Johnston McCulley that I didn’t like, and “Agency Injun” continues that streak. It’s a minor yarn about a cavalryman trying to prove that a friendly Indian didn’t commit a murder at an army post, but McCulley tells it well. This one has an illustration by the great Nick Eggenhoffer, too, which certainly doesn’t hurt anything.

I read a story by L. Kenneth Brent in an issue of THRILLING WESTERN last year and enjoyed it. His tale in this issue, “Gunsmoke Freeze-Out”, is even better. It’s a “small rancher vs. cattle baron” story, with the added complication that a rustler the small rancher testified against in court has gotten out of prison and is coming back to try to kill him. It’s a standard plot, but Brent’s writing is good and he creates some genuine suspense along the way. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more of his stories.

Like Nels Leroy Jorgensen, Harold F. Cruickshank had a pulp career that lasted from the Twenties to the Fifties. During that time he wrote several hundred stories, specializing during the first part of his career in war and air war stories before branching out into Westerns and sports yarns. He was a highly regarded air war writer, but I haven’t read any of those stories. In Westerns, he had a long-running back-up series in RANGE RIDERS WESTERNS about the settlers in Sun Bear Valley. I’ve read some of these (also known as the Pioneer Folk series) but never cared much for them. His novelette in this issue, “Branch Line to Hell”, is a stand-alone about a railroad surveyor who’s trying to survey a spur line over the opposition of a ruthless local cattle baron. It’s a good title, but unfortunately that’s the best thing about this story. Cruickshank’s writing just doesn’t appeal to me, and all the technical details of surveying and railroad construction are just confusing, so I wasn’t quite sure what was going on some of the time. I think maybe I’ve read enough of Cruickshank’s work, although I am still curious about his air war stories.

So far this issue of THRILLING WESTERN is batting .500. I’ve liked three of the stories and disliked the other three. But there are four short stories left.

I don’t know anything about Dupree Poe except that I’ve seen his name in various Western pulps. He sold several dozen stories to the Thrilling Group in the late Forties and early Fifties, along with a few to MAMMOTH WESTERN and the Ace Western pulps, WESTERN ACES and WESTERN TRAILS. His story “Hangman’s Tree” in this issue is a little unusual for the era in that the plot revolves around a rancher’s suspicion that his wife is having an affair with an outlaw who’s hiding out on the ranch and pretending to be a cowhand. This sets off a string of events that include a lynching, a visit by another outlaw, and the rancher’s near death in quicksand. (Quicksand, of course, is one of the things that improve any story, and if the greatly missed Bill Crider was still with us, I have a hunch he would agree.) Anyway, there’s also a good dog in this story, and that helps, too. “Hangman’s Tree” is almost too grim, but I wound up thinking that it’s a decent story.

Ben Frank is the pseudonym of Frank Bennett, an author who wrote under his real name for both the pulps and the slicks in the Forties and Fifties. He was more prolific as Ben Frank and is best remembered for a back-up series that appeared in many issues of TEXAS RANGERS featuring a cagey old-timer known as Doc Swap. He also wrote a comical Western about a deputy named Boo-Boo Bounce. As I mentioned above, with a few exceptions (Robert E. Howard and W.C. Tuttle come to mind), I’m not much of a fan of comedy Westerns. I don’t care for the Boo-Boo Bounce stories at all. The Doc Swap yarns are at least readable because they’re usually well-plotted. Frank’s stand-alone story in this issue of THRILLING WESTERN, “One Man Justice” features another old-timer and his attempt to bring to justice the man who tried to murder his son-in-law. This isn’t a comedy; Frank plays it completely straight and gives the tale a nice hardboiled, suspenseful tone, as well as a twist or two. This one took me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting to like it, but I did, quite a bit.

Robert J. Hogan was the author of G-8 AND HIS BATTLE ACES, of course, along with a lot of other air war stories, but he also wrote a considerable number of Westerns. His story in this issue, “Badge for a Bandit”, uses the old plot of an outlaw trying to go straight. In this case, the young man has even become a deputy, but then his old gang shows up intending to rob the bank. I generally enjoy Hogan’s stories, but I never could work up much interest in this one.

The final story is “Heading Into Trouble”, a short, simple yarn about a bank messenger, a stagecoach driver, and a shotgun guard trying to get a stagecoach carrying a lot of money through a gauntlet of outlaws. It’s almost non-stop action, which is good, and the writing is okay. The by-line is the house-name Jackson Cole, which was often used when an author had more than one story in an issue. In this case, though, the style doesn’t strike me as being similar to any of the other authors in this issue. In fact, it reminded me of the work of Charles S. Strong, an editor at the Thrilling Group who wrote Western fiction under the name Chuck Stanley as well as detective and adventure yarns under his own name. That’s just a guess on my part, however. It could have been someone else who wrote “Heading Into Trouble”. Whoever did, I thought it was an okay story.

Overall, I’d say this is a below average issue of THRILLING WESTERN. The two best stories are the Walt Slade novella and Ben Frank’s story, and there are several I don’t think are very good at all. But considering the sheer number of Western pulps published, they can’t all be great. I’m confident that I’ll have better luck the next time I take one off the shelf.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Black Mask, October 1934

Another classic issue of BLACK MASK, with a fairly provocative cover by Fred Craft and stories inside by Raymond Chandler, Horace McCoy, W.T. Ballard, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, and Thomas Walsh, who was still writing new stories for EQMM and AHMM as late as 1983. I remember reading them, but at the time I didn't realize his career stretched back as far as it did. Quite an accomplishment.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Ranch Stories, July 1947

This issue of THRILLING RANCH STORIES sports the usual good cover by the apparently tireless Sam Cherry (honestly, when did the man sleep and eat?), and inside there are stories by some top names in Western fiction: L.P. Holmes, Allan R. Bosworth, Joseph Chadwick, Louis L'Amour, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, Hascal Giles, and Joe Archibald. Okay, maybe not all of them are that well-known today, but they were all good solid pulpsters.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Top-Notch Magazine, October 1, 1925

I don't know about you, but I don't remember the last time I read a gripping polo story. Or any kind of polo story, for that matter. But C.S. Montanye provides one in this issue of the long-running pulp TOP-NOTCH. Montanye is best remembered, if at all, as one of the authors of the Phantom Detective novels under the house-name Robert Wallace. In fact, I think I recall reading that Montanye died in the middle of writing a Phantom novel and someone else had to finish it. He had a long, prolific career in a variety of pulps, though. Other authors of note in this issue are Burt L. Standish, S. Omar Barker, Hapsburg Liebe, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, and William Merriam Rouse. Actually, I kind of like that cover and the title "When the Mallet Flashed". If I was going to read a polo story, it might be that one.