Showing posts with label Robert Maguire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Maguire. Show all posts

Saturday, January 06, 2018

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Six-Gun Western Magazine, December 1950


This appears to have been the final issue of SIX-GUN WESTERN MAGAZINE, but it's notable for a couple of other reasons. The cover is by Robert Maguire, who's probably better known for his paperback covers, and it's a late variation on the cowboy/girl/geezer trio that shows up so often on Western pulp covers. The other reason someone might be interested in this issue is that it contains one of Elmer Kelton's early stories, "Bullets From the Past". I haven't read this story and don't know anything about it. I wish somebody would do a complete collection of Kelton's pulp stories, though. I'm sure there are plenty of good yarns of his that have never been reprinted.

Otherwise, this issue appears to have been fairly undistinguished. The most recognizable of the other authors is Lloyd Eric Reeve, who published quite a few stories in a variety of Western pulps from the late Twenties to the early Fifties. There's also a story by Frank E. Smith, who was really Jonathan Craig, best known for his hardboiled crime and police procedural novels published by Gold Medal and others in the Fifties and Sixties. The other authors are either house-names or guys you've never heard of. I do kind of like that cover, though.