Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western Magazine, June 1946

I'm not quite sure of everything that's going on, but dang, what a great cover anyway! Pure action and drama. I'm sure there's a lot of that in the stories in this issue of DIME WESTERN, too, since the authors are Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, Frank Bonham, William R. Cox, Van Cort (Wyatt Blassingame), and Ralph Perry. By this point, Coburn (supposedly) wasn't at the top of his game because of his drinking, but I still enjoy his work from all eras of his career.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Strange Detective Stories, January 1934

Clifford Benton's cover for this issue of STRANGE DETECTIVE STORIES is pretty exciting. I don't think I'd heard of Benton before. Looks like he did only a few pulp covers, all of them either for this magazine or its predecessor, NICKEL DETECTIVE. There's a strong group of writers in this issue, too: Norvell W. Page, E. Hoffmann Price, Arthur J. Burks, Frederick C. Painton, Ralph Perry, Harold Ward, Samuel Taylor, and a couple less familiar to me, Jack Smalley and Les Tillray. This is Tillray's only entry in the FMI. Might have been a pseudonym, might've just been his only sale. I don't know much about STRANGE DETECTIVE STORIES, but based on this issue, it appears to have been a pulp worth reading.

UPDATE: I've learned from Lynn Munroe that the Les Tillray story in this issue, "Terror Trail", was actually written by none other than Erle Stanley Gardner, and that its original title was "Death Trail". Many thanks to Lynn for this great bit of literary detective work!

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, June 1952

This is a pulp I own and read recently. The scan is of my copy, complete with newsstand stamp on the cover. I pulled this issue of TEXAS RANGERS off the shelf because there was a story by Clark Gray in the issue I read a few weeks ago that I enjoyed, and the Jim Hatfield novel in this issue, “Warpath”, is also by Gray, one of only two Hatfield yarns he wrote for the magazine. The other was “Lobo Colonel”, from the January 1952 issue, which I read in a paperback reprint many years ago. I don’t remember anything about that one except that I didn’t like it and didn’t think Gray had a good handle on the Hatfield character. I wanted to give him another chance, though.

Well, as it turns out, while I didn’t completely dislike “Warpath”, I didn’t much like it, either. It’s the old plot about somebody selling whiskey to the Indians (in this case, the Comanches) and stirring them up. Hatfield’s out to find the culprit and put a stop to the plan. He winds up with a sidekick of sorts, a young white man who was raised by the Comanches and now finds himself unwelcome in both worlds, red and white. There’s a beautiful blonde who plays guitar and sings in a medicine show, as well, along with an older Ranger and a Comanche chief who wants peace. Those are enough ingredients for an entertaining, if stereotypical, story.

And Gray’s writing is okay for the most part, although some of his action scenes are pretty awkward and hard to follow. The thing that bothered me is that this just didn’t really seem like a Jim Hatfield story, like Gray’s other entry in the series. The character was off in ways that are hard to explain. He could have been almost any Texas Ranger protagonist, and he brooded ’way too much. I did like the crazed Comanche warrior Bitterfoot, though. He made a good villain. But overall I wouldn’t recommend “Warpath” to anyone who hasn’t read a Hatfield novel before. It’s not a good representation of the character and the series.

That only takes up about half the issue, though. The first short story is “That Packsaddle Affair” by Jim Mayo, none other than Louis L’Amour his own self, of course. L’Amour was just starting to get established as a Western novelist in 1952 and was still selling regularly to the Western pulps in the Thrilling Group. I’ve long felt that he was a better short story writer than he was a novelist, and this tale is a good one about a Texas outlaw who stops at a New Mexico stage station and finds himself in the middle of a deadly attempt by plotters to steal a rich gold claim from a young woman. The writing is smooth as it can be and the action scenes and dialogue are top-notch, although I thought there was one really good plot twist waiting to be employed that L’Amour never sprang on the reader.

The next story, “Good Country for Prairie Dogs”, is also set at a stage station and is by an author I’m not familiar with, Robert Aldrich. (I assume this isn’t the same person as the movie director Robert Aldrich.) In this one, the station manager and his pregnant wife are waiting for the local doctor to show up on a regular visit, when a seemingly friendly stranger with a dangerous agenda of his own stops at the station. This is nothing ground-breaking but still a nice, tense story.

“Trail Without End” is a novelette by Wayne D. Overholser writing as Joseph Wayne. The protagonist is the sheriff of a dying former boomtown who wants to move on to the gold fields of Colorado, but he’s held there by his love for the daughter of the local storekeeper, whose other daughter is married to a ne’er-do-well young gambler whose father is a horse thief and whose brother is a hired gunman. Got all that? Overholser provides plenty of domestic drama in this one, but there’s some action, too, along with some minor plot twists. I enjoyed it quite a bit because it’s very well written and Overholser does a good job with the characters.

Ralph Perry wrote one of the best Western novels I’ve read in recent years, NIGHTRIDER DEPUTY, and he has a story in this issue, “One Killing Deserves Another”. I like that title, and the story is a fine one about a shooting in a tiny crossroads settlement and the violent aftermath that follows it. Perry has a slightly off-kilter style, but it’s very effective and I thought this was an excellent story, my favorite in the issue.

This one wraps up with “Inside Straight” by Jim O’Mara, whose real name was Vernon Fluharty. It’s the old plot of the outlaw who has gone straight but whose lawless past comes back to haunt him. That familiarity hurts it a little, but O’Mara was a pretty good hardboiled Western writer and does a fine job with it.

This is an odd issue of TEXAS RANGERS. It’s the only one I ever recall reading where the Jim Hatfield novel is actually the weakest story in the bunch. All the others are very good to excellent. So it’s well worth reading, but I’d recommend the lead novel only to Hatfield completists.

Forgotten Books: Nightrider Deputy - Ralph R. Perry

Sometimes a book takes you completely by surprise. That’s the case with NIGHTRIDER DEPUTY. Ralph R. Perry was a fairly successful pulp author for three decades, from the mid-Twenties to the mid-Fifties, turning out scores of Western, mystery, aviation, and sea stories. As far as I know, NIGHTRIDER DEPUTY is his only novel. It was published in 1954 as half of Ace Double D-72 along with Norman A. Fox’s THE DEVIL’S SADDLE and has never been reprinted. If I’ve ever read any of Perry’s pulp stories, they didn’t impress me enough for me to remember them, so when I started this book I was hoping for nothing more than a competently written Western.

Turns out it’s a lot more than that.

Oh, the plot is traditional enough. Young Mat Karney returns to the Toltec Valley, where he’s inherited his father’s ranch. He finds that homesteaders are moving in, along with small ranchers who threaten the big spreads belonging to Mat and his chief competitor, Big Tom Parks. There’s some rustling going on, too, and Mat suspects Parks may be behind it. What really sets everything in motion, though, is when the train Mat is taking back to the valley is stopped and robbed, and a homesteader on the train is killed during the holdup.

“The man was already dead, yet the girl pressed the compress on the wound as though by sheer will she could push life back into the body.”

I read that and thought, “That’s a pretty good line.” Not Hemingway, maybe, but not bad. It’s on the third page of the book, and as I continued reading I enjoyed Perry’s distinctive, hardboiled style. Then the plot twists kicked in. Yeah, this is a range war book, but instead of the usual two factions, there are half a dozen, and the alliances between them are constantly shifting until you can’t be sure who’s really on whose side. Several overlapping romantic triangles complicate things even more, and this is one case where I wasn’t sure which girl the hero was going to wind up with, or even which one he should wind up with. Characters you don’t expect to die don’t make it to the end of the book. There are some really suspenseful scenes and some epic shootouts, climaxing with a very satisfying battle.

The title NIGHTRIDER DEPUTY doesn’t really fit the book, which makes me suspect some editor slapped it on the manuscript. The generic title and the rather bland cover (the scan is from the copy I read, as usual, beat up though it may be) lead the reader to expect a very run-of-the-mill Western. Instead, while it doesn’t quite rise to classic level, NIGHTRIDER DEPUTY is a really fine Western novel. It’s also the best book I’ve read so far this year, and I’ll definitely be looking to read more of Ralph R. Perry’s work.

(Note: Since this is Perry's only novel that I know of, I suppose technically it's his first novel, too, which fits today's Forgotten Books theme, but I wasn't thinking of that when I wrote and scheduled this post.)