Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, May 1952

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The cover art is by Sam Cherry. The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue has some historical significance in the series as it’s the first one attributed to Peter B. Germano (best remembered for his novels under the pseudonym Barry Cord). Germano would go on to be one of the primary authors of the series during the Fifties, contributing 16 Hatfield novels, behind only Walker A. Tompkins (24 Hatfields during the Fifties, 28 overall) and Roe Richmond (22 Hatfields).

In “Secret of Dry Valley”, the plot finds Hatfield traveling to the Texas Panhandle in answer to a summons for help from an old friend of his boss, Captain Bill McDowell. When he gets there, he finds that the old friend (and former Ranger) has disappeared, and there’s a war brewing between the local cattle baron and a saloon owner who carry old grudges against each other. Working undercover, Hatfield survives a couple of bushwhackings, a pair of fistfights, and showdowns against fast on the draw gunslicks. Along the way to figuring out what’s really going on, he rescues a beautiful young woman (yes, she’s the cattle baron’s daughter) from quicksand. (In the immortal words of Bill Crider, quicksand makes any story better.) Hatfield triumphs in the end, of course, after some nice action scenes.

“Secret of Dry Valley” reads in some ways like an author’s first novel in an established series. It seems to me to be influenced by the work of the series’ two primary authors before this point, Leslie Scott and Tom Curry, and it’s likely that Germano read at least a few of their entries before tackling a Hatfield novel of his own. There’s a proxy hero whose job is to help Hatfield and wind up with the girl, a character type who shows up in nearly all of Curry’s Hatfield novels. The main plot point revolves around geography and an engineering problem, as in many of Scott’s Hatfield novels. There’s no mention of Hatfield’s engineering training in college before he became a Ranger, but he demonstrates such knowledge in solving the mystery.

At the same time, indications that this yarn is by a new author show up here and there. Hatfield is often referred to the narrative as “Jim”, something the other authors hardly ever do. He’s dressed in a suit, white shirt, and string tie throughout the novel, very different from the range clothes he usually wears. I can see doing that if there’s a good reason for it in the plot, but there’s not. He’s supposed to be working undercover, and yet he gives his real name to everybody he encounters. Eventually, some of the other characters remember there’s a famous Texas Ranger known as the Lone Wolf whose name is Jim Hatfield, but it takes a long time.

Despite those quibbles, “Secret of Dry Valley” is a pretty entertaining story. It has a little of the terse yet poetic, hardboiled prose that will become more common in Germano’s later entries in the series. The action is good, the settings are rendered fairly vividly, and there are a few small but effective plot twists. Germano’s Hatfield novels got better as he went along, but “Secret of Dry Valley” is a good solid start and well worth reading.

“El Soldado” is a short story by the always reliable Gordon D. Shirreffs. It's a Civil War tale set in New Mexico, in which a lone Union soldier tries to prevent a gang of Confederate irregulars from making off with a bunch of vital supplies. Shirreffs wrote several novels about the Civil War in the West, and while the plot in this story is a little thin because of its length, the writing is excellent.

The novelette “The Unholy Grail” is a Prodigal Son story by Roe Richmond. After his older brother is gunned down, Mike Grail, a fast gun and hellraising drifter dubbed by his father The Unholy Grail, returns home to help his family survive a feud with some old enemies. This is also a Romeo and Juliet story since Mike is in love with the daughter of his father’s arch-nemesis, and one of the sons from the rival family is in love with Mike’s sister. Richmond’s work is usually hit-or-miss with me, but this one lands squarely in the middle. The characters are interesting and there are some good action scenes, but the writing often seems rushed. I think this story might have been better as a novella or even a novel. It needed more room to develop.

“William and the Contract Buck” by Jim Kjelgaard is a bit of an oddity, a short story about some city slickers trying to put one over on a dumb hillbilly—but is he? This is well-written, as Kjelgaard’s stories always are, but there’s really not much to it and it’s out of place in a Western pulp. I think it must have been aimed at the slicks, or possibly at ADVENTURE, and sold to the Thrilling Group when it was rejected elsewhere. But that’s just a guess on my part.

Jim O’Mara was the pseudonym of Vernon Fluharty, who also wrote Westerns under the name Michael Carder. His story in this issue, “When the Sun Goes Down”, is about a looming showdown between a brutal town-taming lawman and a young former outlaw who’s trying to go straight. There’s some very nice action in this story, but it doesn’t come until after Fluharty has explored the complex personalities of several well-rounded characters. This is a superb story, extremely well-written, and it comes to a very satisfying conclusion. Fluharty is another writer who’s pretty inconsistent, in my opinion, but he really nailed this one. I loved it.

The issue wraps up with “Riddle of the Wastelands” by A. Leslie, who was really our old friend Alexander Leslie Scott, of course. This tale is about a young cowboy trying to figure out how the cattle stolen by rustlers are mysteriously disappearing. He does so, of course, and sets a trap for the wideloopers that results in a big gun battle. It’s the sort of thing Scott did countless times, but he does it very well in this one and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Overall, I’d say this is an average issue of TEXAS RANGERS, but you have to remember, “average” for this pulp is pretty darned good. The Hatfield novel is enjoyable, although Germano did better work later on in the series culminating in “Rendezvous at Quito” in the next-to-the-last issue, January 1958, which is one of my all-time favorite Hatfield yarns. The stories by Shirreffs and Scott are dependably good, the ones by Richmond and Kjelgaard somewhat disappointing. But I had a good time reading this one and look forward to reading another issue of TEXAS RANGERS in the near future.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: New Western Magazine, May 1954

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 art, but I’m not very impressed with it. I don’t guess they can all be by Norman Saunders or Robert Stanley or Sam Cherry, can they? Not that I could do any better, I hasten to add. I have no artistic ability whatsoever, so maybe I shouldn’t be complaining.

Anyway, this is the next to last issue of NEW WESTERN, a run that lasted twenty years. It’s also a pulp that was on the stands after I was born, although being less than a year old at the time, I doubt if I ever saw a copy back then. It leads off with a short story, something of a rarity since most pulps had a novella or novelette in the first position. “Blood Star for Satan” is by William Heuman, one of my favorite Western authors. The title doesn’t fit the story at all, and neither does the blurb that some editor at Popular Publications came up with. However, the story itself is a taut little tale about an inexperienced lawman having to deal with a trio of train robbers who ride into his town. Heuman has never disappointed me and he does a fine job with this suspenseful story.

Next is “Blast a Red Trail!” by Robert L. Trimnell, billed as a novelette on the Table of Contents but closer to novella length in my opinion. And it packs in enough plot that it could almost have been a novel. The story opens with the protagonist, Blaine Sandford, in jail, charged with murdering a man he hired to help him on his freight line. Sandford is innocent, of course, and the man who was killed had dropped some hints about having enemies back in the town where he came from, two hundred miles away. So when Sandford escapes, that’s where he heads, determined to dig up the secrets of the murdered man’s past and uncover the real killer.

He winds up in the middle of a war between a freight line operated by a beautiful young woman known as The Wench and some hired killers and corrupt businessmen working with the railroad that wants to extend into the area. If that’s not enough, there’s a lot of psychological drama going on behind the scenes and the sort of family secrets that often show up in the work of Ross Macdonald, Walt Coburn, and Max Brand. In fact, this offbeat story reminds me quite a bit of some of the stories by Max Brand (Frederick Faust).

“Blast a Red Trail!” took me completely by surprise. I’d read only one other story by Robert L. Trimnell in the past, as far as I recall, and it was a humorous Western I didn’t like very much. But this story is an absolutely terrific hardboiled Western yarn with fascinating characters and a terse, fast-moving style. Trimnell wrote about 120 stories in a pulp career that lasted only eight years from 1948 to 1956. After that, he wrote one historical novel published by Lion Books and a number of soft-core novels published by Beacon/Softcover Library under the pseudonym Brian Black, before turning out a Western series called The Loner in the Seventies. Those three novels were published under his real name by Manor Books and are expensive if you can find them. I don’t think I have any, but I’m going to check my shelves. And I’m certainly going to keep my eyes open for his name on Western pulp TOCs in the future. I want to read more by this guy.

“A Man Must Fight” is a short story by Roe Richmond, not one of my favorite Western authors but one who usually can depended on for a decent story. This one is very reminiscent of the movie HIGH NOON, with a lawman who is reluctant to seek help from the townspeople when a couple of outlaws show up intent on killing him. It’s set up as a moral dilemma story but is resolved pretty easily. Other than that, it’s okay but not very memorable.

“The Rider From Hell” is another title that must have been slapped on by an editor at Popular Publications, because it doesn’t fit J.L. Bouma’s story at all. This is another lawman story as a young deputy with new-fangled ideas about keeping the peace clashes with a hard-nosed old town-taming marshal of the “shoot ’em all and sort it out later” school. It’s a low-key tale without much action, and the drama comes more from the characters than from gunplay. It’s very well-written, and although this kind of story normally isn’t really in my wheelhouse, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Bouma is one of those authors who did mostly good work, published steadily for a long time, never achieved any real fame, and is mostly forgotten these days. He’s almost always worth reading, though.

Walt Coburn’s “The Death Dealer” is a long novelette that’s a reprint. It appeared originally in the July 1938 issue of DIME WESTERN MAGAZINE as “Signed On to Die”. That title makes a little more sense than “The Death Dealer”, although quite a bit of death is dealt in this yarn. As usual with Coburn’s work, there’s a ton of back-story and a plot that’s almost too complicated to follow and difficult to describe. What we have is a stalwart young cowboy from Montana who buys a spread in Arizona known as the Haunted Cave Ranch because, well, there’s a cave on it that may well be haunted. You see, a gang of outlaws used it as a hideout and there’s a rumor that a fortune in loot is hidden in it. There’s even supposed to be a map split up in a number of pieces that, if combined, will lead to the treasure. Throw in not two but three, count ’em, three feuding owlhoot families, a beautiful girl and her spunky twin brother, a crooked range detective, some false identities, and last-minute revelations from ’way out in left field, and you have a confusing but fast-moving, action-packed, and downright compelling tale . . . which accurately describes a lot of Coburn’s work. This one is goofy as all get-out, but I still enjoyed it a lot.

I’ve probably mentioned before how I met Fred Grove at the Western Writers of America convention in San Angelo, Texas, in 1990. Let me tell you, sitting and talking with Fred Grove for a couple of hours at an outdoor barbecue, under some giant pecan trees on the banks of the Concho River as the cool of the evening settled down over West Texas, is a pretty darned good memory. His short story “Satan’s Saddlemate” wraps up this issue. (What was it with the editor of this issue? This is the second story with “Satan” in the title, plus we also have “The Rider From Hell”.) This one is about a cavalry patrol in Texas coming on a family of settlers massacred by Comanches and trailing the war party back to their village for a showdown. There’s also a white girl captive to be rescued. Although there’s some nice action late in this story, most of it is rather low-key and introspective. Grove was a really fine writer and does a good job of capturing the time and place. He’s always worth reading, and this story is no exception.

This is a very solid issue of NEW WESTERN MAGAZINE. There’s not a bad story in the bunch, and several of them are very good to excellent. If you have a copy on your shelves, it’s very much worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, October 1954

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The art is by Sam Cherry, as usual during this era of TEXAS RANGERS. What’s a little unusual is that it depicts a scene in the issue’s lead novel, which didn’t happen often on the covers of Western pulps. I don’t know if Cherry actually read this issue’s Jim Hatfield novel or the editor or art director told him about the scene, but either way, it’s quite effective.

That lead novel, “The Deepest Grave”, is a good one, too. Texas Ranger Jim Hatfield is sent to the Big Bend area of Texas to investigate the disappearance of a young Ranger assigned to uncover the thieves behind a high-grading scheme at a gold mine. The trail leads Hatfield to the mining boomtown of LaPlata, but only after he’s ambushed and suffers an arm wound, an injury that bothers him for the remainder of this novel, which is also an unusual touch. The story barrels along with almost non-stop action and features some suspenseful scenes in a mine shaft hundreds of feet under the ground. According to the Fictionmags Index, the author of this yarn is Walker A. Tompkins, and while it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the Hatfield novels by Tompkins and the ones penned by Peter Germano, I agree that this one certainly reads like Tompkins’ work. It’s a really solid, enjoyable Jim Hatfield novel.

“Half a Solid Gold Mountain” isn’t exactly a comedy, but the first-person narration has a bit of a lighthearted touch about it that works pretty well. This tale of the dangerous encounter between a prospector and a gang of Mexican bandits along the border is by Frank Scott York. I don’t know anything about the author except that he wrote about three dozen Western and detective yarns for the pulps during the mid-Fifties. This one isn’t a lost gem, but it’s enjoyable.

I don’t know anything about H.G. Ashburn, either, except that he published about a dozen stories in various Western pulps during a short career in the mid-Fifties. His story “The Last Attack” in this issue is the first of those yarns. It’s a good story about a fast gun with a bad ticker and an unusual resolution to a gunfight. I liked it.

I’ve mentioned many times that I don’t care for the Jim Hatfield novels that Roe Richmond wrote under the Jackson Cole house-name. But in recent years, I’ve come to enjoy his stand-alone Western stories under his own name. His novelette in this issue, “Pretty Devil”, is really good. Two former Confederate officers, Sid Conister and Rip Razee, left homeless and broke by the war and Reconstruction, head west to Arizona Territory so Conister can claim part-ownership in a ranch, an interest he inherited from his late wife. When they get there, they find themselves immersed in troubles right out of a Southern Gothic: lurid secrets, hidden crimes, rampaging emotions. Richmond packs enough back-story and plot into this one that it could have been a full-length novel. And actually, it might have been better at that length with more room to develop the complicated story. As is, it’s still great fun to read, and I’ll definitely be on the lookout for more stories by Richmond.

“Fight or Drift” by Giles A. Lutz is a short story about a fiddle-playing drifter with a secret. Lutz was a consistently good writer and this excellent yarn manages to be both gritty and heartwarming.

I’ve also made a number of negative comments about the work of Ben Frank. I generally find his humorous Westerns, including his long-running Doc Swap series, rather unfunny. Even so, I always give his stories a try, and in “Not the Marrying Kind”, his contribution to this issue, he proves that he can write a lightweight but fairly straightforward Western yarn. It's the tale of a young rancher who has to contend not only with a pretty blonde who has her sights set on marrying him but also an escaped outlaw who blames our protagonist for him being captured and sent to prison in the first place. It’s cleverly plotted with Frank planting some stuff early in the story that pays off later and may well be the best thing I’ve read by Ben Frank.

Overall, this is an outstanding issue of TEXAS RANGERS with not a bad story in the bunch and a good Sam Cherry cover, to boot. If you have a copy on your shelves, it’s well worth reading.

Wyoming Way - Roe Richmond

Young Dan Ruylander is the son of a wealthy rancher in Wyoming and is given the job of going to Oregon, buying a herd of cattle there, and driving them back to Wyoming. Several members of his father’s crew accompany him on this journey.

All is not as straightforward as it seems, however. The ranch in Oregon where Dan is going to get the cattle belongs to the son and daughter of Dan’s father’s old partner, who double-crossed him and stole the woman he loved thirty years earlier. Dan’s father has hatched an elaborate scheme to get revenge, even though his former partner is dead and the plot targets the man’s grown children. Dan doesn’t like the idea, and he likes it even less when he gets to Oregon and falls in love with the daughter of his father’s old enemy, but he feels like he has to go through with it out of loyalty to his father. Throw in a romantic triangle involving a beautiful redheaded saloon girl, a gambler/gunman with a grudge against Dan, and two crews of cowboys that hate each other, and the long drive back to Wyoming seems likely to be filled with danger.

That’s the plot, and a semi-complicated one it is, of WYOMING WAY, a 1958 novel by Roe Richmond published by Avalon Books and reprinted a couple of times in large print later on. I read the original Avalon edition.

I’ll be honest: I’ve never been much of a Roe Richmond fan, even though in a convoluted way he unknowingly helped my career (you can find that story here). But I haven’t read much by him, either, mostly some of the Jim Hatfield novels he wrote for the pulp TEXAS RANGERS under the house-name Jackson Cole. My complaint about his Hatfield novels is that he just didn’t “get” the character. You don’t take a stalwart protagonist known as the Lone Wolf and surround him with a gaggle of lame sidekicks, but that’s exactly what Richmond did in his Hatfields. The novels worked somewhat better when Richmond rewrote them into a series of paperback original novels, with Hatfield replaced by Lash Lashtrow, but I still didn’t care much for the two or three of those I read.

However, Richmond wrote quite a few other stories for the Western pulps and a number of Western novels, including a tie-in novel based on the TV show THE DEPUTY, starring Henry Fonda, that was later republished under the title THE SAGA OF SIMON FRY. His work seems to be fairly well-regarded by those who remember him, so I figured it might be worthwhile to give one of those stand-alone novels a try.

WYOMING WAY is pretty good, well-written in a nice hardboiled style, with good descriptions of the settings, some emotional depth to the characters, and a number of excellent action scenes. The big gun battle at the end is top-notch. The book didn’t turn me into a Roe Richmond fan, but it’s certainly entertaining enough that I would read more by him.

Also, the saga of the Beemer Public Library continues. Like Curtis Bishop’s RIO GRANDE, which I reviewed a few weeks ago, my copy’s original owner was the library in Beemer, Nebraska, where it entered the collection as book #2974 on November 1, 1958. It was a little more popular than RIO GRANDE, having been checked out 27 times. RIO GRANDE had 19 check-outs. Comparing the book cards, I see that many of the same people read both books. Unfortunately, I think these are the only two Beemer Public Library books that I have.

Also as with RIO GRANDE, my copy of WYOMING WAY has no dust jacket and there’s no image of one on-line, so I’ve used a stock photo of one of the large print editions instead.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Big-Book Western Magazine, April 1947

Injury to a hat alert! And considering where that bullet is headed, it might just put a hole in the BIG-BOOK WESTERN MAGAZINE logo, too. This issue has the usual sterling line-up of authors often found in a Popular Publications Western pulp: Harry F. Olmsted, Stone Cody (Thomas Mount), D.B. Newton, Tom Roan, Roe Richmond, James P. Olsen, W.F. Bragg, and Lee E. Wells. Prolific and well-regarded pulpsters, all. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Pioneer Western, December 1950

This is the first and apparently only issue of this Western pulp published by Avon and edited by Donald A. Wollheim. There was an earlier PIONEER WESTERN, a few issues of which were published by Popular Publications in the Thirties, but the two magazines aren't connected other than by title. I don't know why this version of PIONEER WESTERN lasted only one issue, but it couldn't have been because of the authors: William Hopson, Dean Owen, Will C. Brown (C.S. Boyles, the other author from Cross Plains, Texas), Roe Richmond, C. William Harrison, Walt Sheldon, and Robert Moore Williams. That's a really solid line-up of pulpsters. I like the cover, too. I thought at first the art might be by Norman Saunders, but this issue isn't listed on his website. Whoever painted it, I like it. There's also a comic strip story inside with art by the great Joe Maneely.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Short Stories, June 1949

I like the cover on this issue of WESTERN SHORT STORIES, but what's really amazing is the group of authors inside: Walker A. Tompkins, Giles A. Lutz, D.B. Newton, Roe Richmond, Stephen Payne, Joseph Wayne (either Wayne D. Overholser or Overholser in collaboration with Lewis B. Patten), Joseph Payne Brennan, Frank P. Castle, John Callahan, John H. Latham, Clark Gray, house-name Ken Jason, and somebody named Costa Carousso, the only author in the bunch I haven't heard of. There are several of my favorites in there, and several more who were consistently good Western pulpsters.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, May 1953

This is a pulp I own and read recently. That’s supposed to be a Sam Cherry cover, but it’s not one of his better ones, in my opinion. The scan is of my copy.

Roe Richmond is an author whose work I’ve sort of avoided over the years, because I really don’t care for the Jim Hatfield novels he wrote for TEXAS RANGERS under the Jackson Cole house-name. Those stories are well-written, but Richmond made (to me) a fatal mistake in the way he approached the character, giving a character known as the Lone Wolf a whole crew of annoying sidekicks. However, I may have been too quick to brush aside the rest of his output. He wrote the lead novella in this issue of EXCITING WESTERN, and I thought it was excellent. “Six Guns—Six Graves” is the story of an outlaw gang seeking to hide out in a desolate section of northern Arizona between the Grand Canyon and the Utah border. I’ve been in this area, and desolate doesn’t even begin to describe it. The gang consists of six owlhoots and the beautiful woman who’s with one of them. Well, you know with a setup like that, a lot of tension is going to develop. Richmond adds a nice twist, making the protagonist of the story a man who has struggled with alcohol and wound up on the outlaw trail only because of his fondness for booze. This is a dark, hardboiled yarn that succeeds in making several of the characters sympathetic despite their deep flaws, and it has a very effective ending after a number of brutal action scenes. “Six Guns—Six Graves” is a top-notch tale that has me wanting to read more of Roe Richmond’s work. By the way, the same thing happened with Joseph Chadwick. I didn’t like his Jim Hatfield novels, but the stand-alones by him that I’ve read have been consistently good. I guess some authors just aren’t at their best with series work.

George H. Roulston is a name I don’t recall encountering, which isn’t a surprise since he only published half a dozen stories in the mid-Fifties. His short story in this issue, “Mission for a Stranger”, is an okay yarn about a stranger who shows up on a ranch where something mysterious and possibly sinister is going on. Not bad, but it kind of limps to an ending.

I’ve always thought Cy Kees had to be a pseudonym, but if it is, I’ve never seen that confirmed. He was fairly prolific all through the Fifties, publishing 70 or 80 stories in various Western pulps during that decade. His story “Trouble Range” is a mildly humorous tale about a grub line rider who ties a knot in a cow’s tail and the resulting ruckus with the cow’s owner. This is a very slight story, entertaining but forgettable.

Tom Roan was a prolific Western pulp author from the mid-Twenties on through the Thirties and Forties, with his stories often featured on the cover of various pulp magazines, most of them from Popular Publications. By the Fifties, his sales were dwindling and most of his work was appearing in Thrilling Group pulps. His novelette in this issue, “The Man From Calico Creek”, reflects that, as it seems like a bit of a throwback to Western pulp yarns of an earlier day with its characters such as the good-guy outlaw, the Durango Kid; hard-fighting sheriff Trigger Dan Ringo; and despicable villain Two-Gun Doc Dalton. It’s the story of an outlaw gang on the run (similar to Roe Richmond’s novella that leads off the issue), but is told in a much more old-fashioned style. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since I love the Western pulps from the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties, too. I’ve never been a big fan of Roan’s work but I generally enjoy it. That’s true here, as “The Man From Calico Creek” is fun to read, but like the Cy Kees story that immediately precedes it, quite forgettable.

“The Holy Freeze” is a short-short by Bob and Jan Young, a husband-and-wife writing team (I assume) who contributed fairly often to the Western pulps from the late Forties on through the Fifties, although I don’t recall encountering their work before now. This story is a Northern, a tale about the clash between a surly miner and a preacher in the Klondike. I don’t know if the gimmick around which the plot resolution centers is actually feasible, but it makes for a nice little story anyway.

Floyd Day is another author I hadn’t encountered before, not surprising since there are only three stories listed under that name in the Fictionmags Index. “Sodbuster’s Gold” in this issue is a novelette about a prospector with dreams of gold finding another sort of treasure instead. It’s a gentle, poignant story that wouldn’t have been out of place in RANCH ROMANCES. No action to speak of, but it’s very well-written and I enjoyed it.

Seth Ranger was the most common pseudonym of Frank Richardson Pierce, who usually wrote under his own name. I’ve found his work under both names to be consistently good, but “Red Trail”, published as by Ranger in this issue, is an animal story, this time about a bull moose. I didn’t mind animal stories when I was a kid—I read a lot of dog books by Jim Kjelgaard and horse books by Walter Farley—but I have a hard time with them now. The writing is fine in this one, as you’d expect from Pierce, but I couldn’t work up much interest in it and didn’t finish it.

This issue of EXCITING WESTERN wraps up with the novelette “Renegades’ Rendezvous” by Al Storm, who was really Alvin N. Scism. He wrote mostly Westerns but did a few detective and jungle yarns as well, his work appearing in a number of different pulps during the Forties and Fifties. This one is a pretty good yarn about an amoral hired gun who shows up in the town of Broken Spur thinking that he’s going to sign on as a gun-wolf for the guy who’s trying to take over the town. When he gets there, though, he discovers that he has a good reason to oppose the man he thought would be his boss, instead. As it turns out, the protagonist’s brother is the local lawman, and there’s a good-looking girl involved, too. This is a smooth, competent story, pretty hardboiled in places, and while it’s predictable I definitely found it entertaining.

Overall, “exciting” may be stretching it as a description of this pulp. The Roe Richmond novella is excellent and will prompt me to seek out more stories by Richmond. The novelettes by Floyd Day and Al Storm are good, most of the other stories okay but utterly unmemorable. Still, as with every Western pulp, I’m glad I read it, because there’s always a gem or two.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Smashing Detective Stories, December 1951

What a great cover on this issue of SMASHING DETECTIVE STORIES. A mummy-bandaged guy with a Luger and a sexy nurse . . . I'd be buying that as fast as I could slap down a quarter on the newsstand counter, assuming I had a quarter, of course. Inside are stories by a couple of guys better known for their Westerns, Roe Richmond and T.W. Ford, plus Robert Turner, E. Hoffmann Price, and Thomas Thursday.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Famous Western, April 1958

This digest issue of FAMOUS WESTERN has a Norman Saunders cover, although that doesn't really jump out at me as Saunders' work. The biggest names among the contributors, at least as far as Western pulpsters are concerned, are Roe Richmond and Wade Hamilton, who was really Lee Floren. The lead novel is by E.E. Clement, a pseudonym for editor Robert A.W. Lowndes. The other novel is by Jim Mac Collister, his only credit in the Fictionmags Index. I have to wonder if he was Lowndes, too. And then there's a story by an author who probably wasn't well-known at all to Western readers of the day: Harlan Ellison. I don't know if "The End of the Time of Leinard" is his only Western, but it's a pretty good one, as I recall. It was reprinted in the anthology WESTERYEAR, edited by Ed Gorman.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: F.B.I. Detective Stories, June 1949

Another great Norman Saunders cover graces this issue of F.B.I. DETECTIVE STORIES, a very late G-Man pulp. Inside are stories by some well-known authors: John D. MacDonald, Bruce Cassiday, Paul W. Fairman, Roe Richmond, Hank Searls, and Tedd Thomey. Richmond was best known for Westerns, of course. I don't think I've read anything by him in any other genre. Hank Searls was a bestseller for a while with mainstream novels like THE CROWDED SKY and THE PILGRIM PROJECT. Tedd Thomey wrote some celebrity biographies as well as a few hardboiled crime novels for Gold Medal, Signet, and Ace. I think it's safe to say Paul Fairman is best known for editing and writing science fiction, but probably his most successful novels in terms of sales were the historical romances he wrote late in life as Paula Fairman. (He died after doing a couple of these, but the pseudonym lived on in a bunch of books ghostwritten by a friend of mine.) Cassidy wrote for the mystery digests and did some paperbacks. Then there's John D. MacDonald, and I think we all know what he went on to do after the pulp market dried up. That's a pretty impressive line-up all the way around.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, 2nd May Number, 1954

I was sort of in a RANCH ROMANCES mood because I just read a short novel by Livia that could have appeared in that pulp during the Fifties. I'll have more to say about that later when it comes out, but for now I was looking at cover scans on the Fictionmags Index when this one, uh, jumped out at me, I guess you could say. Sam Cherry could paint some beautiful women, and he certainly did on this cover.

But what's inside the magazine, you ask? Stories by Walker A. Tompkins, Roe Richmond, Chandler Whipple, Ben Frank, house-name Sam Brant, a couple of authors I haven't heard of, and two female Western authors, Jeanne Williams and Teddy Keller. I met Jeanne Williams at some of the WWA conventions twenty or more years ago and have read some of her novels. Excellent writer. Don't know that I've read anything by Teddy Keller, but I should. Of the others, Tompkins is always good and Richmond sometimes is. From what I've read, the Fifties is my favorite era for RANCH ROMANCES.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Novels and Short Stories, June 1951

A great Norman Saunders cover and stories by H.A. DeRosso, Giles A. Lutz, Frank Castle, and Roe Richmond. It may have been late in the pulp era, and WESTERN NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES may have been considered a salvage market, but this looks like a knockout issue anyway.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Complete Cowboy Novel Magazine, August 1949

That looks like an H.W. Scott cover to me, and I know he did some work for Columbia around this time. There are only four stories in this issue of COMPLETE COWBOY NOVEL MAGAZINE: the lead novel by Roe Richmond and short stories by Harold Preece, Richard Brister, and Chuck Martin, all decent writers. I don't care for Richmond's Jim Hatfield novels, but his stand-alone work is okay.