Review: Montana Bad Man - Roe Richmond

A friend of mine recommended this book to me recently, citing an unusual degree of sexual obsession and angst for a paperback Western published in 1957. Well, I found that intriguing enough to scout out a copy, and that’s it in the scan. I’ve read it now, and my friend was right. MONTANA BAD MAN isn’t as graphic as the Adult Westerns that began appearing a decade or so later, but it’s certainly got a lot more sex in it than you’d expect from a book of its vintage.

The protagonist of this novel (it’s hard to call him the hero) is Faris Dodrill, one of many characters who have somewhat odd names. I don’t know if author Roe Richmond was trying to be more realistic in naming his characters, but if he was, he went a little overboard. That said, I got used to it and it didn’t really bother me. As the book opens, Dodrill is working as the driver of a freight wagon. He and his brother were raised on a ranch in Montana, but after their father was killed by outlaws, they set off on an unsuccessful vengeance quest after the owlhoots. Eventually, they wind up marrying half-sisters whose father owns the freight company. Faris goes to work for his father-in-law while his brother Tucker returns to the family ran to try to keep it going. Faris hates the job, he and his wife have come to despise each other, and she regularly cheats on him with the local deputy sheriff.

Then, in the first of many tragic twists, Faris finds himself on the run from a murder charge with a big bounty on his head. He’s not really guilty, but circumstances keep pushing him farther and farther over the line into becoming an actual rustler and outlaw.

Even though it’s a relatively short book, maybe 60,000 words, MONTANA BAD MAN takes on an epic scale as it covers a year in the life of Faris Dodrill. Faris covers a lot of ground during that time, too, around Montana and Wyoming, visiting Devil’s Tower, the Hole in the Wall, and Cheyenne. He makes friends and enemies, buries murdered friends and loved ones, engages in numerous shootouts, cavorts with several women, and even winds up back on the other side of the law for a time, working for the cattleman’s association as a range detective. It’s all building up a final showdown with the mortal enemies who have harmed him the worst.

Although it’s not quite as much of a kitchen sink book, MONTANA BAD MAN reminds me a little of my favorite Louis L’Amour novel, TO TAKE A LAND, which has that same epic feel and numerous plotlines. Roe Richmond’s work is hit or miss with me, but most of his stand-alone novels and stories are excellent. This novel certainly falls into this category. Only an ending I found somewhat dissatisfying keeps it from being one of the top two or three books I’ve read this year. Richmond’s hardboiled prose is relentless, and his characters, although mostly unlikable, are compelling. Like the T.V. Olsen novel I read a few weeks ago, MONTANA BAD MAN is a thoroughly bleak and grim yarn, but that’s all right some of the time. If you’re a reader of Western noir, this is one of the best I’ve come across, and I give it a high recommendation. It's never been reprinted as far as I know, and I appear to have gotten the last reasonably priced copy on-line, but it's worth keeping your eyes open for one.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Giant Western, June 1952

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat ragged copy in the scan. The covers aren’t in great shape, but the pages inside are really nice, just lightly tanned and very supple. I think the cover art is by Sam Cherry, but I’m not absolutely sure about that.

For a change, a story in a pulp billed as a novel actually is long enough to be considered one. “Nobody’s Neutral in Kansas” by Roe Richmond is about 40,000 words, I’m guessing, maybe even a little longer. It’s only sort of a Western, though, more of a historical yarn taking place in Kansas in the late 1850s and early 1860s and dealing with the violence there between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the lead-up to the Civil War. Rupe Maitland and his father and brother have come from the east and settled on a farm in Kansas, and they just want to be left alone instead of taking sides in the conflict. But then tragedy occurs, hostilities increase, and inevitably Rupe and his family and friends are drawn into the bloody clashes. Roe Richmond knew how to keep a story moving along briskly and his action scenes are excellent. The biggest problem I have with this story is how unrelentingly bleak and grim it is. Of course, given the subject matter, it couldn’t exactly be a light-hearted romp. Still, it makes for heavy reading. But worthwhile, I’d say. (As a bibliographic aside, there’s a story of the same title by Richmond in the December 1951 issue of REAL WESTERN STORIES, but it’s much shorter. I haven’t read it, so I have no idea if Richmond expanded it for this version in GIANT WESTERN or if he just liked the title and they’re completely different stories.)

I don’t recall reading much by Cliff Walter in the past. He was a prolific contributor to the Western pulps. His story “Montana Man” in this issue is about a colorful old mountain man and his encounter with some settlers. It’s written in a folksy, supposedly humorous style that fell completely flat with me. Didn’t like it at all and wound up skimming through it.

I’ve found Robert L. Trimnell’s work to be a little inconsistent, but when he’s on his game, his stories are really, really good. His novelette in this issue has a pretty generic title, “Gun For Hire”, so I was a tad bit leery of it, but it didn’t take me long to realize that this is a terrific yarn. Tough Texas cowboy Mike Morrow trail bosses a herd to Montana, and once it’s been delivered, the crew blows off some well-earned steam in a night of drinking and debauchery. Unfortunately for Mike, when he wakes up the next morning, he has more than a hangover to contend with. He’s been framed for murder, and he winds up in the middle of a war between two rustlers, one of whom happens to be a beautiful young woman with a fondness for wearing red silk shirts with nothing under them. (Yeah, it’s a little risqué for a Western pulp story in 1952.) Mike is blackmailed into working for the young woman, but mostly he wants to sort things out and keep her from getting into too much trouble. Trimnell tells the story in hardboiled prose that reminded me of 1950s Gold Medal crime novels even more than the Western Gold Medals. He even provides a small but effective twist in the big showdown at the end. This is one of the best Western pulp stories I’ve read in a while.

Giff Cheshire is yet another author who’s hit-or-miss with me. “Drivers’ Pass” in this issue centers around the conflict between a railroad spur line being built into a mining town and the freight outfit that hauls goods with mules and wagons. It’s an interesting, well-written story that suffers from a really rushed ending, but other than that, I liked it.

Inconsistency seems to be an unofficial theme of this issue. I’ve read plenty of very good novels and stories by William Hopson, but I’ve read some that were pretty bad, too. His story “The Blue Mule” wraps up the fiction in this issue. Which was it going to be? This story is narrated by the eight-year-old son of a horse trader and starts out like it’s going to be a humorous, Doc Swap sort of story. Then it gets more serious with the introduction of a bully and a new county attorney from the east. The plot meanders around as if Hopson couldn’t decide what he wanted to write about and comes to an inconclusive ending. I hate to say it because I like Hopson’s work more often than not, but despite the narrator’s engaging voice, this just isn’t much of a story and isn’t very good.

I believe this is the first issue of GIANT WESTERN I’ve ever read, and it’s very much a mixed bag. The Trimnell story is fantastic, the Richmond novel is very good if depressing, the Cheshire story is okay, and the other two stories I didn’t like at all. Don’t go running to your shelves to look for this one, but if you do have a copy, I highly suggest you check out Trimnell’s yarn.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ace-High Western Stories, January 1949

I don't own this pulp, but like most of the Western pulps from Popular Publications, this issue of ACE-HIGH WESTERN STORIES has a good bunch of authors inside and an eye-catching cover. My hunch is that Robert Stanley painted it, but I'm not sure about that. Walt Coburn leads things off, as he so often does, and also on hand are Roe Richmond, Tom Roan, William R. Cox, Eli Colter, James Shaffer, Harold F. Cruickshank, Spencer Frost (whose name isn't familiar to me), and Richard L. Nelson, who's interesting because that's a pseudonym of William L. Hamling, much more famous as an author and editor and the publisher of the science fiction digests IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES, as well the founder of the soft-core empire that included Nightstand Books, Midnight Reader, etc., books written by Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, Evan Hunter, Ben Haas, Harry Whittington, and many other legendary authors under assorted pseudonyms and house-names.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double Action Western, May 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. A hat that big has to have been painted by A. Leslie Ross. I don’t have any confirmation that he’s the cover artist, but I’m pretty confident in that opinion.

In “Winchester Express to Boothill”, the lead novella by Lee Floren, his pair of drifting heroes, Buck McKee and Tortilla Joe, are on their way to help an old friend who has run into trouble and summoned them. That’s a common set-up in Floren’s novels and stories. Blackbeard Smith has a horse ranch in Montana, and he’s been bushwhacked and confined to a wheelchair by his injury. Not surprisingly, he has a beautiful daughter. A range war is brewing with a neighboring spread that’s owned by another beautiful young woman. Not far away is a mining boomtown, and that’s connected somehow, too. Our intrepid pair hasn’t been on hand long when somebody takes a shot at Buck and tries to kill him.

Floren was a regular contributor to DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN. My opinion of his work has improved slightly in recent years, but this particular yarn is maddening in its inconsistency. I actually like Buck and Tortilla Joe quite a bit. As a cowboy detective, Buck is a very low-rent version of Hashknife Hartley, and Tortilla Joe, despite the stereotypical way in which Floren writes him, is a pretty smart, tough, capable hombre. The plot is interesting and so are the characters. There are some nice action scenes. But man, the whole thing is really muddled, as if Floren forgot what he was doing from scene to scene. Some bits are vivid and well-written, and some are so clunky and repetitive that they’re wince-inducing. And those two opposites can be on the same page! By the time I got to the end of this one—and I did finish it, no problem—I still wasn’t sure exactly what had happened. Call it an interesting misfire, which, unfortunately, describes all too much of Floren’s work.

Fortunately, next up in this issue is a long novelette by Roe Richmond, usually a dependable author when he’s not doing series characters. “War on the Chippewa” is a timber Western, a sub-genre where I haven’t encountered Richmond so far. It’s about two brothers, prodigal sons who return to help out their father in a rivalry with another timber baron. This is an excellent yarn with a lot of colorful background, emotional heft, and gritty action. At times it reminded me of Dan Cushman’s timber Westerns, and that’s a good thing. My only complaint is that the ending is maybe a little less dramatic than it could have been. But still a very good story.

Noel Loomis is a well-regarded author in both Westerns and science fiction. I haven’t really read that much by him in either genre, but he seems pretty consistent. “There Are No Trees in Kansas” is kind of an odd title, but it works in this story of a crusading newspaper editor’s clash with a crooked saloon owner who has a distinctive feature: his right hand is missing, cut off by Indians when he was a young man, and instead of a fake hand or a hook, like you usually find with characters like this, he has a short length of chain with a two-pound iron ball attached to it. That’s a pretty vicious weapon in a hand-to-hand fight! That colorful bit of business is probably the best thing about this story, but it’s an okay tale with some nice action and I enjoyed it.

I’ve always figured Harrison Colt had to be a pseudonym, but if that’s the case, no one has ever identified the author who wrote under that name, as far as I know. His story in this issue, “Gunsmoke Samaritan”, is about a rancher who’s framed for murder when, against his better judgment, he gets involved in a clash between two of his neighbors. This story moves along very nicely, is well-written, and has a likable protagonist.

Lauran Paine was an extremely prolific author of Westerns, especially novels. Although he published around a hundred stories in the Western pulps during the Fifties, he wrote more than a thousand novels, most of them published only in England under many different pseudonyms. Late in his life, quite a few of his novels were published in the United States by Walker Books under the name Richard Clarke and reprinted in paperback by Ballantine. I’ve read very little of his work. But his story in this issue, “The Challenge”, is excellent. It’s about a rancher who goes to work as an undercover deputy to infiltrate a gang of train robbers. The prose is straightforward and effective, the action is hardboiled. Just a good yarn.

W. Edmunds Claussen is a hit-or-miss author, for sure. Stories by him that I’ve read have ranged from okay to not very good. “Guns at La Paz” in this issue falls into the okay group. Set during the Civil War in Arizona, it's about a cavalry officer who’s being sent back to Washington, but before he goes, he and a friend of his who’s a civilian scout try to get to the bottom of an Apache ambush that wiped out a patrol. There’s some nice action in this one and a plot twist that’s predictable but still effective because it’s unusual for a Western pulp. It could have been a lot more unusual, but if it had, it probably would have rendered this story unpublishable. I don’t think Claussen will ever be one of my preferred authors, but so far he’s at least worth trying when I come across one of his stories.

Overall, this is a pretty decent issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN. While several of the stories have flaws, they’re all entertaining and held my interest just fine. I’ve read quite a few issues of this pulp over the past couple of years, and the reason for that is simple: most of my pulps are either in storage or hard to get to for other reasons, and I had a big stack of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN issues handy. I think there are four or five more unread issues in this batch, so I’ll continue spacing them out.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double Action Western, November 1945

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I’m pretty sure the cover art is by H.W. Scott. This issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN contains only two pieces of fiction, which makes it something of an oddity.

We all know that the stories billed as novels in the pulps nearly always weren’t. They were usually novellas or even novelettes. But “The Gallows Brand”, T.W. Ford’s Silver Kid yarn in this issue actually is long enough to be called a novel. Taking up 75 pages of fairly small, double-columned print, I figure it’s at least 40,000 words. I like Ford’s writing, and I like his character, the drifting gunman/adventurer Solo Strant, also known as the Silver Kid because of the silver trappings on his all-black attire, including a small silver skull that adorns the chin strap of his hat. So I was eager to plunge into this one.

The opening is intriguing. An outlaw and gunman known as Slow Joe Thorne is hired by the local justice of the peace to kill the Silver Kid. The judge claims that an enemy of his has hired Strant to kill him. And this is, in fact, true. Strant has accepted the job, but he doesn’t mean to carry it out. His guns aren’t actually for hire. He just wants to get to the bottom of the murder plot and isn’t aware that he’s also the target of a similar scheme.

But before any of that can really get underway, the Kid and Slow Joe wind up being thrown together as allies (neither of them being aware of the other’s true identity) and wind up fighting a gang of masked killers known as the Hangman Bunch, who always warn their impending victims with a drawing of a gallows with a body hanging from it. They always string up the men they kill, even if those unfortunate fellows wind up being shot first.

This is a complex plot, although it’s fairly easy to spot what’s really behind it. The Silver Kid is a very likable protagonist, Slow Joe is a great supporting character, and the villains are suitably despicable. There are plenty of well-written action scenes along the way.

However, if you sense a “but” coming, you’re right. This is a case where the story’s length actually works against it. There’s a lot of aimless riding around, and some of those action scenes, well-written though they are, don’t do anything to advance the plot. Don’t get me wrong: “The Gallows Brand” is a good story and I enjoyed reading it, but I have a feeling it would have been terrific as a novella.

The other piece of fiction in this issue is Roe Richmond’s novelette “Clean-Up”. This one is about a pair of U.S. Marshals, one an old veteran, the other a baby-faced kid who’s deadly fast with his guns, who are assigned to clean up a town being run by several outlaw bosses who have teamed up to take over. This story is almost non-stop action, and after a while I started to wonder if anybody was going to survive to the end, the way the bodies were falling. Richmond’s work is kind of hit-or-miss for me, but I enjoyed this one.

This is a good issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN, although if you don’t like T.W. Ford or Roe Richmond, you’re out of luck. I actually prefer Western pulps that feature a wider variety of stories, even when the lead novel really is novel-length, as in the various Thrilling Group pulps like TEXAS RANGERS, THE RIO KID, THE MASKED RIDER, etc. But this was a nice change of pace.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, December 1954

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my taped, trimmed, and tattered copy in the scan, but other than being beat up, it’s intact and fully readable. The cover art is by Sam Cherry, as usual during this era of TEXAS RANGERS. It’s not one of his better covers, in my opinion, but it’s certainly not bad. I don’t think Cherry was capable of painting a bad cover.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue, “El Diablo’s Treasure”, is by Roe Richmond. I’ve mentioned many times in the past that Richmond’s Hatfield novels aren’t really to my taste, but I read one now and then anyway because he was a pretty good writer otherwise. This one starts out very promising. Hatfield is in Del Rio, on the Texas-Mexico border, and is already in the middle of his current assignment. He’s supposed to accompany a famous archeologist, the man’s beautiful daughter, and a young mining engineer who’s engaged to the girl, as they search for a famous lost mine in the Sierra Madre of Mexico. Not only is there the potential for gold, but the mine also is supposed to be the hiding place for a fortune in gems left there a couple of hundred years earlier.

Unfortunately, the arrangement with Mexico calls for the party to be escorted by a troop of Rurales commanded by an officer who is actually little more than a bandit, and there’s a gang of actual bandits roaming the area where the search is to take place. Throw in the fact that the archeologist’s daughter is a beautiful hellcat with her eye on Hatfield, angering her fiancée, and there’s plenty going on to wind up with Hatfield getting plenty of trouble heaped on his head.

That’s exactly what happens, as Richmond provides plenty of gritty, well-written fistfights, shootouts, and even some epic battles. There’s quite a bit to like in this novel. However, Richmond makes a serious misstep by never providing any sort of interesting backstory for the fortune that’s supposed to be hidden in the mine. It’s just sort of there, with a couple of vague hints that maybe the Conquistadores left it. There’s also no mention of anyone known as El Diablo, let alone an explanation of why it’s his treasure. Was Richmond simply referring to the Devil? Who knows?

My main objection to Richmond’s Hatfield novels is the presence of the annoying sidekicks he introduced to the series. Hatfield is called the Lone Wolf for a reason! Thankfully, although those characters are mentioned once, they play no part in this novel.

Ultimately, “El Diablo’s Treasure” isn’t a bad yarn. But Richmond shares something with Joseph Chadwick: he just doesn’t have a feel for the Jim Hatfield character. Hatfield never really seems like the same person who’s in the novels by Leslie Scott, Tom Curry, Walker Tompkins, and Peter Germano. If this had been a stand-alone with a totally different Texas Ranger, it would have been a better story. As is, it’s worth reading but not a great example of the series.

“War Bonnets in Wyoming” is a cavalry yarn by Gordon D. Shirreffs, one of the best all-around Western writers who was especially good in the cavalry sub-genre. In this one, the captain who’s in charge of establishing a new fort saves the life of a young Shoshone brave who’s being pursued by hostile Arapahoes. Will this be enough to save the lives of the captain, an Indian agent’s beautiful daughter, and a troop of cavalry later on? I think we know the answer to that, but Shirreffs is such a good writer it doesn’t matter. This story doesn’t have a lot of action, but it’s very suspenseful and I enjoyed it.

Harry Harrison Kroll isn’t somebody I think of as a Western writer. He wrote non-fiction about folklore and Americana, and his fiction is usually of the backwoods, hillbilly variety. But he made a few appearances in Western pulps, including the story “Catchers is Keepers” in this issue. It’s not actually a Western, though. It’s about a riverman on the Mississippi who finds a valuable raft and tries to salvage it, only to end up with trouble and a beautiful girl (but I repeat myself). Out of place though it may be, this is a fairly entertaining story.

Frank Castle got his start in the business assisting and ghosting for Western author Tom W. Blackburn, then went on to write dozens of stories under his own name for the Western pulps in the late Forties through the mid-Fifties. After that he became one of the most reliable novelists in the business, turning out books by the score: Westerns, hardboiled crime, nurse novels, soft-core novels, movie novelizations, and a lot of juvenile TV tie-in novels for Whitman under the name Cole Fannin. I’ve always thought Cole Fannin would have been a great Western pseudonym, but Castle chose to use Steve Thurman instead for the Westerns he didn’t publish under his real name. He also wrote some of the Lassiter novels under the house-name Jack Slade. I really like his work, so I was glad to see that he has a novelette in this issue called “Wild Night in Dodge”.

And a wild night it is. Dodge City is past its hell-raising peak since the railhead has long since moved on westward, but plenty of trouble is lurking there anyway for Kelly Shannon, who brings in a herd from Colorado. Before you know it, he’s met a beautiful redhead who looks just like a long-dead lover of his from Texas, he’s been accused of cheating at cards, he’s been blackjacked and knocked out, and he’s had ten thousand dollars stolen from him. And that’s just the start of a night full of fights, shootouts, double-crosses, and nefarious plans.

This is a terrific story, a 1950s Gold Medal Western novel in miniature. It’s got a hardboiled hero, a beautiful girl, and despicable villains everywhere Kelly Shannon turns. Frank Castle developed a very distinctive style that makes his later novels easy to identify, but it’s just in the formative stages here. The story races along and comes to a satisfying conclusion, and it just makes me want to read more by Castle. 

“Bedlam on the Box X” is by Ben Frank, the author of the Doc Swap series and a writer whose work I’ve grown to heartily dislike. This isn’t a Doc Swap story, so I had a little hope for it, but it’s the same sort of cutesy, allegedly humorous story and I gave up on it after a few pages. Ben Frank just isn’t for me, and I think I’m going to stop trying to read his stories. (I felt the same way about Syl McDowell’s Swap and Whopper series and finally warmed up to it, but I don’t believe it’s going to happen with Ben Frank.)

I don’t know a thing about Garold Hartsock except that he published a couple of dozen stories, mostly Westerns and a few detective stories, in the pulps during the Forties and Fifties. His story “Feud” in this issue is a grim tale about feuding families in Oregon and includes a stereotypical Romeo-and-Juliet element. Hartsock’s writing is pretty good, though, and he kept me turning the pages to the end, which was a major letdown. So, not bad, but not particularly good, either.

And that’s a pretty accurate description of this issue of TEXAS RANGERS, too. The Frank Castle novelette is superb, and the Shirreffs cavalry yarn is very good and well worth reading, too. The Hatfield novel is okay if you’re not expecting too much but frustrating in that it could have been much better, although if you just want to sample one of Richmond’s novels, this would be a good pick because the sidekicks aren’t in it. Otherwise, I’d say that if you own this one, read Castle and Shirreffs and skip the rest.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Ace High Stories, February 1954

WESTERN ACE HIGH STORIES was one of the last Western pulps from Popular Publications and managed only six issues in 1953 and 1954. It's not to be confused with ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, which was published by Clayton and then Dell from 1921 to 1935, then from 1936 to 1951 by Popular Publications, where it was known variously as ACE-HIGH WESTERN MAGAZINE, ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, and ACE-HIGH WESTERN STORIES. WESTERN ACE HIGH STORIES, which we're concerned with today, lacks the hyphen in the title. Maybe Popular was trying to cash in on some nostalgia for the earlier versions when they brought back a similar title in '53-'54, or maybe they just had a lot of stories in inventory they needed to burn off. I don't think the cover of this issue is a particularly good one, but it is another example of the iconic "poker game interrupted by a fight" scene that's so common on Western pulps. There are actually some really good authors in this issue: Gordon D. Shirreffs, Frank Castle, J.L. Bouma, Roe Richmond, Bruce Cassiday, and house-names Lance Kermit and David Crewe. I suspect Bouma wrote one or both of those house-name yarns, but that's just a guess on my part. Really, the authors could be almost anybody. I don't own this issue, and I don't recall ever seeing any issues of WESTERN ACE HIGH STORIES. That's a lineup of authors worth reading, though. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: New Western Magazine, March 1954

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I’m not sure who did the cover. It might be A. Leslie Ross. The hats look like his work, and so does the sketchiness of some of the details. But I’m not completely convinced it’s by Ross. As always, I’d love to hear what some of you think. NEW WESTERN MAGAZINE lasted only two more issues after this one, so it was on its last legs, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t still a good Western pulp.

I’ve come to realize that Roe Richmond was a pretty good hardboiled Western author despite my dislike for his Jim Hatfield novels in TEXAS RANGERS. His novelette “Bullets Speak My Name!” leads off this issue. The first half of this story is mostly domestic drama as Marshal Jim Elrod tries to reform his wastrel best friend Tucker Brody. Jim and Tuck grew up together, but then Tuck married the girl Jim might have. Now Tuck neglects his family to gamble and carouse with the bad element in town. A murder for which Tuck is blamed raises the stakes even more and leads to several gritty action scenes. Richmond keeps things moving along at a reasonably fast clip and wraps things up in a satisfying way. This is a solid story, nothing special but definitely entertaining.

Will Cook has a solid reputation as a Western writer, but I haven’t been impressed by what I’ve read from him. His story “The Devil’s Double” resembles Richmond’s novelette in that it’s mostly domestic drama. Instead of best friends, we have brothers clashing in this yarn. One is stalwart, the other a ne’er-do-well. The action is sparse, nobody in the story is particularly sympathetic, and I didn’t care for it. So it didn’t change my opinion of Will Cook’s work. Maybe the next one I encounter will.

“Death Rides My Guns!” is the cover story by Richard Ferber. It’s almost entirely very gritty action as a young man fights to reclaim the ranch that’s been stolen from him by his three half-brothers. I’m not sure if it was intentional, but this is the second story in a row in this issue in which the conflict is between brothers. I liked Ferber’s story considerably more than Will Cook’s.

H.A. DeRosso is well-known for the emotional, and sometimes physical, torment he heaps on his characters. In “Two Bullets to Hell”, railroad troubleshooter Sam Lane returns to his home to seek revenge on the man he blames for the murder of his brother-in-law, while at the same time keeping the ranch going that his widowed sister now owns. It’s a very well-written yarn, as you’d expect from DeRosso, and has several twists and turns in the plot. The only real problem with it is that none of the characters are the least bit likable, even the ones you’d think would be sympathetic. It’s a bleak, bitter story. I admire the writing, but I didn’t find it particularly enjoyable.

William Heuman is one of my favorite Western authors, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a cavalry vs. Indians story by him. He generally wrote about lawmen, outlaws, and gunfighters. His story in this issue, “Dead Man’s Pass”, is a cavalry story with a slight twist. It’s set in Oregon instead of somewhere in the Southwest, as such stories usually are, and the Indians are Modocs, not Apaches or Comanches. A group of cavalrymen are pinned down and outnumbered, and the only way for them to escape involves a daring plan almost certain to result in the death of the officer who leads it. However, one of the lieutenants who would normally lead such a breakout is the son of the major in command of the troops. It’s a compelling moral dilemma, and Heuman comes up with an interesting way to solve it. The writing is excellent. I thought the ending might have been a bit too abrupt, but overall “Dead Man’s Pass” is a very good story.

Stone Cody’s novelette “The Kid From Hell” was published originally under the title “The Lost Gunman” in the November 1937 issue of STAR WESTERN. Cody was actually Thomas E. Mount, who also wrote under the pseudonym Oliver King. Mount is one of my favorite Western pulpsters and was also a pretty interesting character in real life. You can read more about his background here in my review of his novel THE GUN WITH THE WAITING NOTCH. “The Kid From Hell” is an amnesia story, something that you come across now and then in the pulps. Young Dave Walker and the old-timer who raised him are gunned down by hired killers working for the range hog who wants their ranch. The old-timer is killed, and Dave is thrown into an empty boxcar on a passing train. The gunmen figure he’ll be dead by the time he’s found. But he survives, of course, except he doesn’t remember who he is or how he got shot. And when he recovers, he falls in with a gang of outlaws . . .

Mount packs enough plot into this novelette for a novella or possibly even a novel. In fact, I think it would have been even better at a longer length since he has to cover quite a bit of ground in a hurry at times. But it’s still a very, very good yarn. I really like the way Mount writes. The characters are interesting, the dialogue is good, the action is plentiful, and even his shorter stories have an epic feel to them. I definitely intend to read more by him.

The stories by Mount and Heuman are certainly the highlights of this issue, but Richmond and Ferber turn in pretty good stories, too. The DeRosso was slightly disappointing but still readable, and the one by Will Cook was the only story I didn’t like. So I’d say this is a good issue of NEW WESTERN MAGAZINE, worth reading if you have it on your shelves.

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.