Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, December 1936

The excellent cover by Richard Lyon on this issue of THRILLING WESTERN is proof that, just like sitting down to a poker game or going to the barber shop, boarding a stagecoach was an invitation to a gunfight in the Old West! I like this one a lot, probably because this stalwart cowboy looks like Randolph Scott, one of my all-time favorite actors. The lineup of authors inside is top-notch as well: a novella by Leslie Scott writing as A. Leslie, novelettes by Tom Curry, Syl MacDowell, and Chuck Martin, and short stories by Lawrence A. Keating, Edward Parrish Ware, Buck Billings (probably Claude Rister), and Burt Stokes. Various real-life issues are pokin' their snouts in where they ain't wanted again, but I hope to get back to reading some Western pulps very soon!

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, March 1951

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The cover art is probably by Sam Cherry, although I’m not a hundred percent convinced of that. It’s a nice cover, no matter who painted it. That’s my copy in the scan.

For more than a decade, the stories about Texas Ranger Walt Slade were one of the regular series in THRILLING WESTERN. A. Leslie Scott, under the pseudonym Bradford Scott, wrote more than 70 yarns about Slade, who was also known as El Halcon (The Hawk) and was reputed to be an outlaw, although he was actually an undercover Texas Ranger. “Trail From Yesterday”, the Slade novelette in this issue, is the final pulp story in the series, although as most if not all of you know, a few years later Scott began a series of paperback original novels featuring the character that ran for even longer.

This is an excellent tale for Slade to go out on, as far as his pulp run. Most of the time, these stories find Slade chasing outlaws in the rangelands of West Texas or the brush country of South Texas. “Trail From Yesterday” begins in Dallas (a far different place in the 1880s from what it is today) and the trail of a famous Texas owlhoot was believed to be dead leads Slade to the treacherous swamplands of East Texas, with its dangers of snakes, gators, and quicksand. The plot involves smuggling, gun-running, and a fortune in black opals. Scott packs almost enough material for a novel into this novelette, and he keeps the pace racing along with his usual vivid descriptions and several terrific shootouts. Slade also has a great sidekick in this one, Little Mose Wagner, a black former cowboy who’s too stove up to ride the range anymore, but he functions as Slade’s guide and assistant during this adventure in the swamp. This is great stuff, one of the best Walt Slade pulp yarns I’ve read. Scott was at the top of his game here.

The name Dabney Otis Collins is familiar to me from many Western pulp TOCs, but I don’t recall if I’ve ever read anything by him until now. His short story in this issue, “The Third Outlaw”, is about a fateful encounter between a lone cowboy and a gang of bank robbers on the run from the law as a blizzard is closing in. It’s a very suspenseful, surprisingly hardboiled tale, and I liked it a lot. I’m going to have to keep my eyes open for more by Collins.

The last time I read a Swap and Whopper story by Syl McDowell, I surprised myself by kind of liking it. The S&W story in this issue, “The Roaming Riders”, is pretty entertaining, too. It’s the usual goofy mix of wild circumstances, this time including a runaway pair of pants with all the duo’s money in it, a housing development in the desert of Southern California (this series is a modern-day Western), and an escaped elephant that’s supposed to be in a jungle movie. McDowell pulls it all together and makes it work fairly well. I got a few smiles out of this one. No outright chuckles that I can remember, but the series is growing on me.

Jim O’Mara was a pseudonym of Vernon Fluharty, who also wrote Westerns under the name Michael Carder. He was never all that prolific but he had a steady career producing well-written Westerns. His short story in this issue, “Collateral”, is a cattlemen vs. sodbusters yarn, written from the point of view of a former cowboy turned farmer. It’s a rather bleak yarn, but it has some nice action and a dark but still somewhat hopeful ending. I liked it quite a bit.

The same can’t be said of “Crop o’ Calamity” by Roger Dee (pseudonym of Roger D. Aycock), an author probably best remembered for his science fiction. This is another humorous Western about a couple of characters named Nosy Nolan and Doc Durgin, and it has something to do with escapees from a wild animal show. I don’t know for sure because it’s written in present tense (a style I don’t care for) and is dialect-heavy, and I just didn’t care for it at all, leading me to give up after a few pages. I may be warming up to Swap and Whopper after all these years, but not this one.

Much, much better is “Who’ll Ride With Me”, from the always dependable Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson. This novelette is a reprint from the August 1947 issue of THE RIO KID WESTERN. It’s a cavalry vs. the Apaches yarn set in Arizona Territory, and as usual when Wheeler-Nicholson is writing about the military, there’s a real ring of authenticity to it. Some great action, although the ending isn’t quite as dramatic as it could have been. This story is also a good example of how the late Jon Tuska was wrong when he claimed that pulp editors wouldn’t allow romances between white and Hispanic characters. There’s a nicely handled romantic angle between the white cavalry lieutenant who’s the protagonist and the beautiful daughter of a Mexican rancher, and it’s written the same as any other romance in a Western pulp.

Harold F. Cruickshank wrote a lot of air war stories early in his pulp career and then became a prolific Western pulpster. I’ve never cared for his Pioneer Folk series that ran in RANGE RIDERS WESTERN. He has a stand-alone short story, “Prodigal Gun Thunder”, in this issue. It’s about a young man framed for being a horse thief who returns home from a stretch in prison to get to the bottom of things and settle the score. It’s a definite improvement over the other Western stories by Cruickshank that I’ve read, but there’s still something about his writing that just doesn’t resonate with me.

Harvey Ivison is a brand-new name to me. He wrote only a few stories for the pulps. His story “Thataway” is about a fugitive from the law who isn’t exactly what he appears to be. On the run from a posse, he shows up at a ranch where there’s a badly injured man, and unexpected things happen. This story is written with a very nice hardboiled tone that includes a few traces of dry humor. I really liked it and will have to be on the lookout for more stories by Harvey Ivison.

This issue concludes with a condensed novel, SCORPION by Will James. Is there a difference between a condensed novel and an abridged novel? I don’t know, but I feel like there should be. In a condensed novel, you take out words here and lines there, right? Whereas in an abridged novel, you take out entire scenes or sections. I have no idea which approach was taken in producing the version of SCORPION printed here. I remember reading James’s horse novel SMOKY when I was a kid, but that’s all I could tell you about it. SCORPION is a horse novel, too, and while I wanted to like it, page after page of horse-breaking narrative with no dialogue or actual plot did me in. I didn’t read this one, either. I just don’t have the time or patience I once did.

So the March 1951 issue of THRILLING WESTERN turns out to be a really mixed bag. The Walt Slade story by Scott is superb. The stories by Collins, O’Mara, Wheeler-Nicholson, and Ivison are all very good to excellent. The Swap and Whopper yarn by McDowell is okay, the Cruickshank story is readable but forgettable, and I didn’t finish the other two. As always, some of you might enjoy the stories I didn’t, so if you have this issue on your shelves, it’s worth taking down and sampling its contents.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, April 1939

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. I don’t have access to a scanner at the moment, so I took a picture of my copy instead, and that’s it above. The cover is by Carl Reiter, and all I know about him is that he did a few pulp covers. As you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I’m a long-time fan of the pulp TEXAS RANGERS and have been reading the Jim Hatfield novels published in it for more than 50 years, since I discovered them in paperback reprints in the Sixties.

This issue is from fairly early in the series’ run, when most of the Hatfield novels were written by either Leslie Scott, the series creator, or Tom Curry. “Vaquero Guns” is one of Curry’s entries, and as usual in his novels, it features a secondary hero. In this case, it’s drifting cowboy Jerry Farmon, who starts the action off by searching for a missing friend of his, a deputy sheriff who disappeared while on the trail of an escaped killer. But Hatfield, a Texas Ranger who’s known as the Lone Wolf, is soon involved, being sent by his boss, Captain “Roarin’” Bill McDowell, to West Texas to break up a gang of masked marauders that has been raiding settlements along the border.

When Hatfield arrives on the scene, he quickly discovers that there’s a violent feud going on between the biggest ranch in the area, the Square A, and everybody else in the region. The Square A’s crew is composed of vaqueros imported from Mexico, and they’re the ones who have been raiding the settlements. Or are they? Could something else actually be going on, something more sinister behind the scenes?

After a long series of gunfights, fistfights, captures, and escapes, Hatfield uncovers the truth and exposes the criminal mastermind who will have been obvious to most readers from very early on in the novel. That’s the main problem with this one. Even for a pulp yarn, everything is just too predictable.

Even so, there are some things to like about “Vaquero Guns”. The opening scene, which features a nighttime escape from a train, is very evocative and well-written. The action scenes are always good in a Curry novel, and the big battles have a nice epic feel. There are clever callbacks to previous Hatfield novels written by Curry. And Hatfield himself is a great character as always, mostly superhuman but still likable and believable. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who hasn’t read a Hatfield novel before, because it really is one of the series’ weaker entries, but as an old-timer, I found it enjoyable reading.

Moving on to the back-up stories, “White Hat for an Outlaw” is by Robert E. Obets, who, under that name and as Bob Obets, wrote scores of stories for various Western pulps between the mid-Thirties and the mid-Fifties. Almost completely forgotten now, he was a solid writer, and his story in this issue is very good. It’s about a young outlaw infiltrating a company of Texas Rangers to lead them into a trap, then having to decide whether he wants to continue on the owlhoot trail or go over to the side of law and order. I liked it quite a bit.

“Gun-Gang Plot” is by an even more forgotten writer, Anson Hard. It’s about a saloon swamper who witnesses a confrontation between a gang of stagecoach robbers and a stranger who might be a Texas Ranger. This one has a twist ending I should have seen coming but didn’t, and again, I enjoyed it.

Syl MacDowell is best remembered for his humorous Swap and Whopper series and the Sheriff Blue Steele series he wrote under the pseudonym Tom Gunn. But he wrote plenty of traditional, stand-alone Western tales, too, including “West of the Pecos” in this issue, which finds a young Ranger trying to rescue the sister of a dead pal from a life of shame and degradation as a soiled dove, although MacDowell is never quite that blunt about what’s going on. This one is well-written and also has a twist ending that’s a little more of a stretch but still effective. I don’t care for Swap and Whopper but have enjoyed everything else I’ve read by MacDowell, including this one.

Given that the Hatfield novel isn’t one of the best and it takes up most of the pages, this is probably a below-average issue of TEXAS RANGERS. Of course, I’m still glad that I read it. If you’re a long-time Hatfield fan like me, you’d probably enjoy it, too.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Ranch Stories, March 1936

Although THRILLING RANCH STORIES was considered to be a Western romance pulp, the covers often featured gun-blazing action like this one, which I think may be by Richard Lyon. The authors inside are Western pulp action aces, too: Leslie Scott (as A. Leslie), Stephen Payne, Lee Bond, Syl MacDowell, Bruce Douglas, Eugene A. Clancy, and house-name Jackson Cole, who could be any of those guys (but if I had to bet, I'd say in this case it was probably Lee Bond, for some reason). I've never read an issue of THRILLING RANCH STORIES. I'm not sure I own any. I need to check on that.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Popular Western, September 1936

A great cover by A. Leslie Ross on this issue of POPULAR WESTERN, and by coincidence, the lead novel is by A. Leslie Scott, writing under his A. Leslie pseudonym. Other authors on hand in this issue are Syl MacDowell (as himself and as Tom Gunn with a Sheriff Blue Steele novelette), Tom Curry, Galen C. Colin, Miles Overholt, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Frank Carl Young, Eugene A. Clancy, Dabney Otis Collins, Claude Rister (as Buck Billings), Charles D. Richardson Jr., and house-names Jackson Cole, Buck Benson, and Sam Brant. Not an all-star lineup, maybe, but with Scott, Curry, Gardner, Overholt, and MacDowell, probably pretty good reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, August 1935

I think that's a roulette wheel behind the cowboy in this cover by R.G. Harris, adding to our list of unsafe activities in the Old West. I've heard of losing your shirt while gambling, but I think he's carrying it to an extreme. This issue of THRILLING WESTERN includes stories by Ray Nafziger (writing as Grant Taylor), Syl MacDowell, Allan K. Echols, Claude Rister, Cliff Walters, Wilton West, Frank Carl Young, and house-name Jackson Cole. With the exception of Nafziger, MacDowell, and Echols, none of those are remembered much today, but I'm sure it was an entertaining issue.