Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Star Western, December 1940

Ah reckon thar's about tuh be trouble betwixt these two rannies. Best hunt cover, hombres! I don't know the artist on this STAR WESTERN cover, but it's a good one. The usual great collection of authors can be found inside, too, including Harry F. Olmsted, Cliff Farrell, Philip Ketchum, Stone Cody (Thomas Mount) with a Silver Trent story, Dee Linford, Norrell Gregory, and M. Howard Lane. Looks like another fine Popular Publications Western pulp.

The Wrap Up

This was a rough year personally in a lot of ways, and I’m sure hoping that 2018 will be an improvement, but the reading and the writing rolled on, as they have for decades now. That’s what I’m here to talk about today.

READING

I read 117 books this year, a slight increase from last year. Here are my Top Ten favorites, in the order in which I read them.

RIDERS OF THE NIGHT, Eugene Cunningham

FLASH CASEY—DETECTIVE, George Harmon Cose

LEO MARGULIES: GIANT OF THE PULPS, Philip Sherman

NEVER SAY NO TO A KILLER, Clifton Adams

THE LOST END OF NOWHERE, Gordon MacCreagh

SAY IT WAS MURDER, Stephen Mertz

KISS AND KILL, Richard Deming

AVALANCHE!, E.S. Dellinger

PLAY A COLD HAND, Terence Faherty

THE ART OF THE PULPS, Douglas Ellis, Ed Hulse, Robert Weinberg, eds.

If you’re keeping score at home, you’ll note that my blog posts for a couple of these haven’t shown up yet, but they will soon. Also, one of them, SAY IT WAS MURDER by Stephen Mertz, hasn’t been published yet, but it’ll be out next spring from Rough Edges Press. Remember the title (like I’d let you forget!) because it’s a great private eye novel.

The older I get, the more I seem to retreat into the pulp era. Four of the books listed above first appeared in the pulps, and two more are about the pulps, at least partially in the case of the Margulies bio. But four of them are also new books, appearing for the first time in 2017, so I’m not a complete fossil yet. Still, more than a fourth of the books I read this year were either pulps, pulp reprints, or pulp-related. Another fourth were what I would consider vintage paperbacks or hardbacks. So I’m definitely beating ceaselessly into the past, boats against the current.

WRITING

I wrote a million words again this year, for the 13^th straight year. I have a tentative plan to try to hit a million two more times, then semi-retire and write about half a million words a year from then on. (I know, I know, we’ve all heard this before . . .) I spent enough years as a semi-starving freelancer that it’s difficult to turn down work, but I’ve begun to do that now and then. The million words this year included eight solo novels, six collaborations, and sizable chunks of two more novels. No short fiction at all in 2017, and only one of the novels, which probably won’t be out for a while, will have my name on it. But I haven’t worried about that in forty years and don’t intend to start now, as long as I can continue fooling everybody into believing I know what I’m doing and don’t have to take an honest job. I’m ’way too old for that. Many thanks to everyone involved in saving me from that terrible fate, from the editors and agents to the readers to Livia, Shayna, and Joanna, who make it all possible to start with.

I don’t make resolutions, but I have the vague hope that I’ll have more time to read, watch TV and movies, and just generally enjoy life. I plan to attend Robert E. Howard Days in June, I may make it to a science fiction convention or two, and I’ll definitely continue going to hockey games when I can. (I’ve become a big hockey fan and have been known to pontificate about games that I’m watching, based on my vast experience of two whole years as a spectator and never having been on ice skates in my life . . .) The blog will continue, the WesternPulps group will continue (until Yahoo pulls the plug on all the groups, which I remain convinced they will, sooner or later), and I’m sure I’ll still spend too much time on Facebook. To all of you out there who make this stuff fun, my very best wishes and the hope that 2018 is kind to you.

Leo Margulies: Giant of the Pulps - Philip Sherman

Philip Sherman emailed me several years ago when he was researching a biography of his uncle, the legendary editor and publisher Leo Margulies. I wasn’t able to help him much, but because of that contact I knew this book was in the works.

Now LEO MARGULIES: GIANT OF THE PULPS is out from Altus Press, and it’s a wonderful volume for fans of the pulps, digest magazines, vintage paperbacks, and basically anybody who has an interest in popular fiction of the Twentieth Century. Leo Margulies had a hand in just about all of those areas.

There’s plenty of information in this book about the various publishing enterprises Margulies was involved in, and while I already knew some of it, there’s a lot of background I wasn’t aware of. The sections about Margulies’ early days in the business were mostly new to me, as well.

But since Margulies was Sherman’s uncle, this volume provides an excellent portrait of Margulies the man without glossing over his flaws, although to be honest there don’t seem to have been very many of those, most notably a temper that could be explosive at times. But in addition to his skills as an editor and publisher, Margulies seems to have genuinely liked writers and been close friends with many of them. Sherman also devotes some space to Cylvia Kleinman, Margulies’ wife, who worked in various editorial capacities on many of his publications.

Now, as for my personal connection with all this (because what writer can resist talking about himself and his work), I broke in at MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, the longest running and most successful of Margulies’ digest magazines, about a year after he passed away, so I never had any dealings with him. But several years before that, while I was still in college, I submitted a story to MSMM, the first time I’d ever sent a story to a magazine. It came right back with a rejection slip, of course, but Cylvia, who was the editorial director of the magazine at that time, wrote a personal note on it thanking me for the submission and asking me to send them something else. It was quite a while before I did, and by that time Sam Merwin Jr. had become the editor, so I got my rejections from him. And finally acceptances, too, for which Cylvia signed the checks. I’ve always been glad that my first story was accepted by a genuine pulp editor and paid for by another pulp editor. I can’t help but wish that I had gotten to know Leo Margulies as well.

But I’ve digressed. LEO MARGULIES: GIANT OF THE PULPS is one of the best books on the pulp and digest era that I’ve read, and I give it my highest recommendation. I really enjoyed reading it.