This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That's my copy in the scan. I don’t know who did the cover artwork, but I like it. You don’t see too many dogs on Western pulp covers. I’m always glad when one shows up. Most of the issues of RANCH ROMANCES I’ve read have been from later in the run when it was part of the Thrilling Group. I’ve read only a few from the era when it was published by Warner Publications, but they were good issues. The editor on this one was the legendary Fanny Ellsworth.
After all these decades as an avid reader, it’s still nice to discover authors who are new to me that I enjoy. The lead novella in this issue (and it’s almost long enough to be an actual novel) is “Kirby of the Flying K” by Amos Moore. You’d expect that Kirby would be the owner of the Flying K Ranch, wouldn’t you? I did. But I was wrong. The Flying K Ranch was owned by Peter Kilgour, who died recently under somewhat mysterious circumstances and left the spread to his niece, Peg Hampden. Lane Kirby, who the story hints has spent the past few years as a town-taming lawman, has some equally vague connection to the ranch. As far as I could tell, he was friends with the late Peter Kilgour. When he drifts back into the area, the first thing he comes across is an attempted lynching, with Kilgour’s former foreman as the intended victim. Well, Kirby puts a halt to that, of course, befriends the beautiful and plucky Peg Hampden, clashes with some old enemies, and generally stirs things up in a Save The Ranch yarn with plenty of action. This is a fairly standard plot, but the characters are excellent and it doesn’t end exactly how I thought it would, which is always a bonus.
“Amos Moore” contributed a lot of stories to RANCH ROMANCES, but I didn’t know until I read this one and looked “him” up that the name is a pseudonym for the writing team of Lillian Bennet-Thompson and George Hubbard, whose careers go all the way back to the early 1900s. Several silent movies were based on novels they wrote. They did mostly romance and mystery stories until they started publishing Westerns as Amos Moore in 1928. They turned out more than 50 Westerns including a dozen or so novels between then and 1942, when Bennet-Thompson died. Hubbard lived until 1958 but didn’t publish anything after Bennet-Thompson’s death. I don’t know a thing in the world about their personal lives. Were they a couple or just collaborators? Did Bennet-Thompson do most of the writing and Hubbard was the primary plotter? That would explain why he didn’t publish anything else. But I just don’t know. What I’m sure of is that “Kirby of the Flying K” is a really good story, well-written and fast-moving, and I’m going to be keeping my eyes open for the Amos Moore byline. I may even order some of their Western novels, most of which were serialized in RANCH ROMANCES before being published as books.
Elsa Barker was a prolific contributor to RANCH ROMANCES, and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read by her. Her story “Kitchen Courage” in this issue starts out as a fairly standard romance with the heroine in love with a young rancher. She decides to make him some jams and jellies and can some fruit for him while he’s away at the roundup, but while she’s at his ranch, somebody else rides up and the story takes an unexpected turn. This is another very good yarn.
“The Man From Nowhere” is by Paul Evan Lehman, who wrote a lot for the Western pulps but was even more popular as a Western novelist. It’s about a young cowboy who stumbles on a plot by a crooked lawyer to swindle a beautiful young woman out of her ranch. Of course, he has to take a hand and help her, even though he does so in a way that’s bound to cause him trouble. There’s definitely a romance angle in this one, but it's more of a hardboiled crime story and a good one, too.
Marie de Nervaud is another prolific author who published almost exclusively in RANCH ROMANCES. I don’t recall reading anything by her until I came to the novelette “Ransom Range” in this issue. It’s okay, another Save the Ranch story about a cowboy who steps in to help a girl he knew when she was just a kid. Of course, she’s grown up into a beautiful woman. There’s nothing wrong with this story, but with a plot this well-worn, I need good writing to elevate it (as in the Amos Moore story discussed above), and de Nervaud’s prose just never gripped me much. I didn’t dislike it and I would read more by her, but I won’t be especially looking for her stories.
I can’t find much on-line about Lucretia Whitehead Payne, just enough to think that she may have been married to Western author Stephen Payne, but that’s mostly speculation on my part and if anyone can confirm or deny it, I’d be most appreciative. She published about two dozen stories, mostly in RANCH ROMANCES but a few in other Western romance pulps. Her story “There’s Always a Crowd” is pure rom-com at first, with a young cattleman trying to court the pretty young cook even though the colorful ranch crew is always around, but then there’s a nice burst of action and a little crime element at the end. I would have said this isn’t really my kind of story, but I surprised myself by liking it a lot.
Kingsley Moses wrote several hundred stories for the pulps. Traditional Westerns, Western romances, sports, detective, aviation, adventure, he hit most of the genres at one time or another and was also one of the crew of house-name writers at WILD WEST WEEKLY. With a resumé like that, it’s hard to say whether I’ve read anything by him or not. His story in this issue, “Aunt Azalea Gentles ’Em” is also something of a romantic comedy as the gun-toting Aunt Azalea has to help a young lawman deal with some horse thieves and keep the ex-convict father of the girl he loves from being sent back to prison. Not a great story, but it’s reasonably entertaining and had a pretty satisfying ending.
There’s also a serial installment (5th of 6) of “Rangeland Rebels” by Robert Dale Denver, who was really Ray Nafziger. I’m not sure why more of Nafziger’s RANCH ROMANCES serials weren’t published as novels. He did at least a dozen of them that could have been done as books, and some of his novellas probably could have been, too. As far as I know, though, only one of them, “Guns of Salvation Valley” (serialized in RANCH ROMANCES as by Robert Dale Denver in 1934) was published as a book of the same name, also in 1934, as by Grant Taylor. Anyway, I didn’t read this installment of “Rangeland Rebels”—I might have if it had been the concluding episode—but it looks good, as usual with Nafziger’s work. Like Harry Olmsted, he ought to be better remembered than he is.
The usual assortment of columns and features round out this issue. I hope some of the people who wrote in to “Our Air Mail” got good pen pals out of the deal. When I was about halfway through reading this one, I thought it might turn out to be one of the best Western pulps I’ve read, based on the stories by Moore, Barker, and Lehman. The others didn’t come up to that standard, but they’re all okay to good. Overall, this issue of RANCH ROMANCES is worth reading, and I’m glad I did.
