This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. A hat that big has to have been painted by A. Leslie Ross. I don’t have any confirmation that he’s the cover artist, but I’m pretty confident in that opinion.
In “Winchester Express to Boothill”, the lead novella by Lee Floren, his pair of drifting heroes, Buck McKee and Tortilla Joe, are on their way to help an old friend who has run into trouble and summoned them. That’s a common set-up in Floren’s novels and stories. Blackbeard Smith has a horse ranch in Montana, and he’s been bushwhacked and confined to a wheelchair by his injury. Not surprisingly, he has a beautiful daughter. A range war is brewing with a neighboring spread that’s owned by another beautiful young woman. Not far away is a mining boomtown, and that’s connected somehow, too. Our intrepid pair hasn’t been on hand long when somebody takes a shot at Buck and tries to kill him.
Floren was a regular contributor to DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN. My opinion of his work has improved slightly in recent years, but this particular yarn is maddening in its inconsistency. I actually like Buck and Tortilla Joe quite a bit. As a cowboy detective, Buck is a very low-rent version of Hashknife Hartley, and Tortilla Joe, despite the stereotypical way in which Floren writes him, is a pretty smart, tough, capable hombre. The plot is interesting and so are the characters. There are some nice action scenes. But man, the whole thing is really muddled, as if Floren forgot what he was doing from scene to scene. Some bits are vivid and well-written, and some are so clunky and repetitive that they’re wince-inducing. And those two opposites can be on the same page! By the time I got to the end of this one—and I did finish it, no problem—I still wasn’t sure exactly what had happened. Call it an interesting misfire, which, unfortunately, describes all too much of Floren’s work.
Fortunately, next up in this issue is a long novelette by Roe Richmond, usually a dependable author when he’s not doing series characters. “War on the Chippewa” is a timber Western, a sub-genre where I haven’t encountered Richmond so far. It’s about two brothers, prodigal sons who return to help out their father in a rivalry with another timber baron. This is an excellent yarn with a lot of colorful background, emotional heft, and gritty action. At times it reminded me of Dan Cushman’s timber Westerns, and that’s a good thing. My only complaint is that the ending is maybe a little less dramatic than it could have been. But still a very good story.
Noel Loomis is a well-regarded author in both Westerns and science fiction. I haven’t really read that much by him in either genre, but he seems pretty consistent. “There Are No Trees in Kansas” is kind of an odd title, but it works in this story of a crusading newspaper editor’s clash with a crooked saloon owner who has a distinctive feature: his right hand is missing, cut off by Indians when he was a young man, and instead of a fake hand or a hook, like you usually find with characters like this, he has a short length of chain with a two-pound iron ball attached to it. That’s a pretty vicious weapon in a hand-to-hand fight! That colorful bit of business is probably the best thing about this story, but it’s an okay tale with some nice action and I enjoyed it.
I’ve always figured Harrison Colt had to be a pseudonym, but if that’s the case, no one has ever identified the author who wrote under that name, as far as I know. His story in this issue, “Gunsmoke Samaritan”, is about a rancher who’s framed for murder when, against his better judgment, he gets involved in a clash between two of his neighbors. This story moves along very nicely, is well-written, and has a likable protagonist.
Lauran Paine was an extremely prolific author of Westerns, especially novels. Although he published around a hundred stories in the Western pulps during the Fifties, he wrote more than a thousand novels, most of them published only in England under many different pseudonyms. Late in his life, quite a few of his novels were published in the United States by Walker Books under the name Richard Clarke and reprinted in paperback by Ballantine. I’ve read very little of his work. But his story in this issue, “The Challenge”, is excellent. It’s about a rancher who goes to work as an undercover deputy to infiltrate a gang of train robbers. The prose is straightforward and effective, the action is hardboiled. Just a good yarn.
W. Edmunds Claussen is a hit-or-miss author, for sure. Stories by him that I’ve read have ranged from okay to not very good. “Guns at La Paz” in this issue falls into the okay group. Set during the Civil War in Arizona, it's about a cavalry officer who’s being sent back to Washington, but before he goes, he and a friend of his who’s a civilian scout try to get to the bottom of an Apache ambush that wiped out a patrol. There’s some nice action in this one and a plot twist that’s predictable but still effective because it’s unusual for a Western pulp. It could have been a lot more unusual, but if it had, it probably would have rendered this story unpublishable. I don’t think Claussen will ever be one of my preferred authors, but so far he’s at least worth trying when I come across one of his stories.
Overall, this is a pretty decent issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN. While several of the stories have flaws, they’re all entertaining and held my interest just fine. I’ve read quite a few issues of this pulp over the past couple of years, and the reason for that is simple: most of my pulps are either in storage or hard to get to for other reasons, and I had a big stack of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN issues handy. I think there are four or five more unread issues in this batch, so I’ll continue spacing them out.
