Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, June 1954

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover artwork is by Sam Cherry, who did nearly all of the TEXAS RANGERS covers during the Fifties and always did a great job. This one illustrates, sort of, the opening scene of this issue’s novel.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s a Big Four of authors who wrote Jim Hatfield novels under the house-name Jackson Cole: A. Leslie Scott, the creator of the series; Tom Curry; Walker A. Tompkins; and Peter Germano, the author of this issue’s novel “The Outlaw Nobody Knew”. Germano, who also wrote a lot of very good novels under the name Barry Cord, was the most hardboiled of the bunch. His prose is terse and fast-moving, and there’s no “Yuh mangy polecat” dialect. While I love the standard Western pulp dialogue, I like this approach, too. (Roe Richmond actually wrote more Hatfields than Germano, but I don’t like his novels so I don’t count him as a major Hatfield author.)

Germano really packs a lot of plot and characters into “The Outlaw Nobody Knew”. The mysterious bandit boss of the title has kidnapped the governor’s son in an attempt to keep his brother from being hanged. Hatfield has only six days and the narrowest of leads to find the boy. His search takes him to a mining town in West Texas. At the same time, a young former carnival tightrope walker shows up in town on a quest of his own. Also on hand are a shady gambler/saloonkeeper, assorted gunmen, a hotel owner who quotes classic Greek literature, and an old desert rat prospector who thinks he’s actually a sea captain. There’s so much going on that it’s actually a little hard to keep track of at times, but Germano keeps the story racing along anyway until it arrives at a twist ending that isn’t really that much of a surprise but is very effective anyway.

There’s an oddity about this one in that Hatfield dresses differently than he usually does, sporting a long black frock coat, a string tie, and a flat-crowned black hat. That just happens to be what a character is wearing in an interior illustration which also features another character who looks like Wild Bill Hickok. And Germano specifically mentions that the local marshal resembles Wild Bill Hickok. My hunch is that this illustration existed before the story was written, and Germano made the descriptions match it. No way of knowing, of course, but I’m always suspicious about such things. What’s important, though, is that “The Outlaw Nobody Knew” is a good solid Hatfield novel, not one of the top rank but well worth reading.

Robert Virgil published only four stories, according to the Fictionmags Index. “Rancher’s Woman” in this issue is the first of those. And it’s a really good one, a well-written Western noir about a middle-aged rancher, his younger, beautiful, restless wife, and the world-weary hired hand who signs on. This is the stuff of countless Gold Medal novels, but Virgil distills it down to a few pages and then gives us a surprising, very effective ending. I know I have at least one of his other stories and may go ahead and read that issue soon.

Ben Frank was the pseudonym of a writer named Frank Bennett, who wrote mostly humorous Westerns for the pulps. He had a long series about an old-timer known as Doc Swap, and another about a deputy named Boo-Boo Bounce. I’m not a fan of either of those series. Frank’s story in this issue, “The Champ of Cottonwood County”, is a stand-alone, and while it’s a comedy, it’s not as silly as some of his that I’ve read. It’s a romantic comedy, at that, about a hapless rancher trying to woo the girl of his dreams while ignoring the fact that a female friend of his is prettier and more suitable in every way than the girl he pines after. There’s also a robbery, a fugitive outlaw, an overbearing rival rancher, and a little bit of action before things come to a predictable conclusion. It’s fairly well-written and mildly amusing, and for a Ben Frank yarn, I thought it was pretty good.

I’m a big fan of the cavalry novelettes Steuart Emery wrote for TEXAS RANGERS, and he did quite a few of them. The one featured in this issue is ”The Shooting Sawbones”. The protagonist, John Rawdon, is about to graduate from West Point when an accident leaves him with a permanent bum knee. He can’t serve as a combat officer, but he can become a medical officer, which he does. His first post is an isolated fort in Arizona Territory, and wouldn’t you know it, a series of unusual circumstances leaves Rawdon in command of the fort just as a horde of hostile Apaches show up to attack it. There’s also a girl—there’s always a girl—who, in this case, is the daughter of a bitter retired officer who hates army doctors. Sure, I knew most of what was going to happen in this one, but Emery can really write and his military stories have a definite air of authenticity. Plus his characters often don’t turn out exactly the way you think they will, and he can surprise me now and then with a plot twist. “The Shooting Sawbones” is a very entertaining story and I look forward to reading more of Emery’s work. He wrote hundreds of stories, going back to 1919, many of them aviation and air war yarns in the Twenties and Thirties. I need to sample some of those.

D.S. Halacy Jr. wrote dozens of stories for the pulps and the slicks in several different genres, including Westerns, mysteries, and sports stories. His contribution to this issue, a short-short titled “Family Affair” is about a U.S. Marshal corralling an outlaw, with a twist ending that’s pretty obvious. This is a minor but well-written story that doesn’t pack as much punch as it thinks it does.

Peter Fernandez is another author who published only a few stories, half a dozen according to the Fictionmags Index. “Apache Alibi” is about a shipment of gold on a stagecoach and the various would-be thieves plotting to get their hands on it. Like “Rancher’s Wife”, this is pure Western noir and is about as bleak as they come. It’s a good story, but it’ll leave you feeling a little grubby.

W.J. Reynolds wrote about 120 stories, most of them Westerns, in a career that covered the Forties, Fifties, Sixties, and a little way into the Seventies. “The Devil Walks Loudly” is about a braggart who tries to make himself into a fast gun, an effort that seems doomed to failure from the start. This story is hurt a little by the fact that there’s not a single likable character in it, but it moves along and works fairly well. Reynolds is worth reading, but this one isn’t one of his best stories.

There’s an installment of S. Omar Barker’s “Sagebrush Savvy” column, in which he answers questions from readers (supposedly; who know whether they’re legit or not) and I always enjoy these. Barker was an entertaining writer.

This is a good issue of TEXAS RANGERS. While some stories are better than others, they’re all worth reading and several of them are very good. The pulp era was starting to wind down by this point, but there was still plenty of good reading to be found among the ones that survived that long.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, August 1967

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. I’m pretty sure that the art in the inset is by Robert Stanley. I don’t have any idea who did the rest of the cover. That’s my copy in the scan.

Or is it a pulp? It’s slightly smaller than regular pulp dimensions, and the page edges are trimmed. And it was published long after the pulp era is considered to be over. However, it’s definitely not a digest, and it’s proudly part of an unbroken publication stretching back to 1924 (“43^rd Year of Publication”, it says on the title page), so I’m calling it a pulp.
 
And as I’ve mentioned numerous times in the past, RANCH ROMANCES is the only pulp I remember seeing on the newsstands when I was a kid. Everything else was gone by then. But it’s entirely possible I laid eyes on this very issue on the magazine rack in Stephenville Drugs, where we always stopped on our way through Stephenville, Texas, so I could check out the comic book and paperback spinner racks. But I wouldn’t have even considered buying it because, you know, it had ROMANCES in the title and I was 14 years old. (I bought the first two paperback reprints of THE SPIDER, the ones by R.T.M. Scott that came bound together, at least one Mac hardboiled mystery novel by Thomas B. Dewey, and my first ever copy of PLAYBOY at Stephenville Drugs, along with other things I don’t remember, I’m sure.)

Okay, to get out of the weeds of nostalgia and move on to the August 1967 issue of RANCH ROMANCES . . . this is the first of the later, semi-pulp issues I’ve read. By the time the magazine’s run ended in 1971, it was all-reprint, but there are only a couple of older stories in this issue and the rest are new. It leads off with the short story “Wolf At His Heels” by A.E. Schraff, which is about a young outlaw being pursued by a dogged lawman not out of a sense of justice but on a mission of personal vengeance. It’s a well-written story with a satisfying ending. I’d never heard of A.E. Schraff before, but according to the Fictionmags Index, the A.E. stands for Anne Elaine. She wrote more than a dozen stories for RANCH ROMANCES, ZANE GREY WESTERN MAGAZINE, and FAR WEST during the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, then did a handful of mystery yarns for ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE in the Eighties. That’s all I know about her, but based on this story, she was a pretty good writer.

And sure enough, a little research tells me this from Goodreads: “Anne Elaine Schraff grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. She received both her bachelor's and master's degrees from California State University at Northridge and taught high school for ten years.

Anne paid her way through college by writing short stories for magazines. Since college she has written hundreds of stories and over eighty books including historical fiction, biographies, science books, and her favorite, fictional books for young people. She is published as both Anne Schraff and Anne E. Schraff.

Her background, which she describes as "multicultural, lower middle-class neighborhood, including African Americans, Mexican Americans, Arab Americans, and Filipino Americans," is her greatest inspiration when writing.”

Lee Martin has been used as a pseudonym by several different writers, but the Lee Martin who wrote the short story “Live Bait” in this issue was actually Margery Lee Martin, author of several dozen Western and mystery stories in the Sixties. “Live Bait” is sort of the opposite of “Wolf At His Heels” because in this story, a lawman is the target of some outlaw brothers who want to kill him, and they’re willing to use another brother’s widow to trap their quarry. This is another solid yarn with a satisfying, if predictable, ending.

Mona Jennings has only one credit in the Fictionmags Index, her short story “Indian Girl” in this issue. Mostly domestic drama with a little action at the end, this tale is about a young rancher who finds an Indian girl with her leg caught in an animal trap and takes her home to care for her injury. He has a younger brother and sister, all of them made orphans by an Indian attack several years earlier. Emotional turmoil ensues. Another well-written tale, although the ending is a little too unresolved for my taste.

Giff Cheshire was an old pro, of course. His novelette “Dry Summer” in this issue is a reprint from the 2^nd July, 1956 number of RANCH ROMANCES. It’s the story of a young cowboy caught in the middle of a clash between a big rancher and a group of smaller ranchers over water rights. The plot is very traditional, but the story is well-written for the most part. I’ve read enough by Giff Cheshire now to know that I usually find his work a little on the bland side, and that’s true of this yarn.

W.J. Reynolds was another prolific Western pulpster, authoring approximately 120 stories between the mid-Forties and the early Seventies, most of them appearing in various Western pulps, but he also sold Western stories to some of the lower-rung men’s magazines such as ADAM and KNIGHT. I’ve read several stories by him and enjoyed them all. In “Bloody Butte”, his yarn in this issue, an army scout rescues a girl from a gang of marauders and scalphunters, and then they have to escape the gang’s pursuit, eventually forting up at the butte of the title.

In 1967, when this issue reprinted Elmer Kelton’s novella “Die by the Gun” (original appearance in the 2^nd January Number, 1954 issue of RANCH ROMANCES), Kelton was a well-regarded author of traditional Western stories and novels, but he was still several years away from the elevated literary reputation he would begin to enjoy later in his career. One of the lines he often used when speaking to groups was “Louis L’Amour’s heroes are seven feet tall and invincible. Mine are five-foot-seven and nervous.” I don’t know if Dolph Noble, the protagonist of this tale, qualifies as nervous, but he certainly has his share of angst to deal with. He’s the sheriff of a West Texas county and has a wild younger brother who wants to be either a lawman or an owlhoot and isn’t all that particular about which. He’s in love with the wife of an outlaw whose gang has been plaguing the area. The townspeople believe he hasn’t been able to corral the gang because he’s holding back on account of his feelings for the woman. His ambitious but flawed former deputy wants to take his job away in the next election. So Dolph has plenty of trouble on his plate, and Kelton keeps twisting the screws to make it worse for him. Not surprisingly, this is easily the best story in the issue, with solid writing and excellent characterization.

This is the first of the Sixties issues of RANCH ROMANCES that I’ve read, and overall it’s very good. Cheshire’s story is the weakest in the bunch, and it’s not bad, just not as good as the others. I think the tone isn’t as hardboiled as the Fifties issues I’ve read, and the romance elements are played up a little more, but there’s still good action in every story. It came out in the summer between eighth and ninth grade for me. As I mentioned above, I wouldn’t have bought it at the time . . . but if I had, I would have enjoyed it. It’s well worth reading if you have a copy on your shelves.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, April 1954

This is a pulp I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with the usual excellent, evocative cover by Sam Cherry.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue is “The Seventh Bullet”, written by Walker A. Tompkins under the Jackson Cole house name. Tompkins was the third-most prolific author of Hatfield novels after Leslie Scott (who created the series) and Tom Curry, who between them wrote a little more than half the series’ entire run. Tompkins wrote a bunch of them, though, and the ones I’ve read have ranged from very good to excellent.

By the Fifties, the Hatfield stories were a little grittier and more realistic than the ones from the Thirties and Forties, and “The Seventh Bullet” is no exception. As it opens, Hatfield is in a West Texas cowtown to pick up a prisoner: a member of a counterfeiting/smuggling ring that has been flooding the country with fake ten-dollar gold pieces. The prisoner also murdered the local sheriff, leaving the lawman’s beautiful blond daughter to pin on the badge and take the varmint into custody.

Hatfield’s mission seems simple: deliver the prisoner to Austin. But of course, things don’t work out that way. The prisoner is rescued by a shadowy gunman wielding a six-shooter that somehow fires seven bullets instead of the usual six. Naturally, Hatfield’s not going to let a prisoner get away, and in the process of going after him, the Ranger sets out to bust up the counterfeiting ring and discover the mastermind behind it.

Tompkins keeps things moving along at a brisk pace with plenty of action, and as usual, he throws in some clever plot twists, too, such as the method the villains use to smuggle the phony coins into the country. “The Seventh Bullet” isn’t in the top rank of Tompkins’ Hatfield novels, but it’s a solid, very entertaining yarn.

Moving on to the backup stories, first up is a short story entitled “The Brass Ring”, by an author whose work I’m not very fond of, Ben Frank. This is a stand-alone, not part of Frank’s two series featuring Doc Swap and Deputy Booboo Bounce. It’s a mild little comedy, the sort of thing Frank specialized in, featuring a good-hearted rancher who’s too much of an easy touch for hard-luck stories and is always broke because of it. It’s really predictable but pleasant enough that I read the whole thing.

“Ride to Tucson” by W.J. Reynolds couldn’t be more of a contrast. This is a grim, violent, suspenseful yarn about a man and woman trying to escape from a band of marauding Apaches in Arizona Territory. I’ve read several stories by W.J. Reynolds and been impressed by them. This is another good one. I don’t know anything about Reynolds except that between the mid-Forties and the early Seventies, he wrote about 120 Western and crime stories for assorted pulps, digests, and men’s magazines. I’m always glad to see his name in a Table of Contents.

George Kilrain was a pseudonym used by one of my favorite Western writers, William Heuman, for approximately 30 stories in various Western and sports pulps in the decade between the mid-Forties and the mid-Fifties. The Kilrain novelette in this issue, “Too Tough”, is, in fact, the final story to be published under that name. And it features one of the most unusual protagonists I’ve come across in Western pulps: a two-fisted, fast-shootin’ ventriloquist. Sad Sam Bones is a vaudeville performer, a comedian and song-and-dance-man as well as a ventriloquist, who travels the West performing with different theatrical troupes and also righting wrongs. In this tale, he helps out a theater owner in a mining boomtown whose shows keep getting sabotaged. This results in a number of fistfights and shootouts in which Sad Sam’s enemies keep underestimating him because, going by his description, he looks a lot like Don Knotts. And how I would have loved to see Don play the part on TV! Anyway, the ending of this story really makes it seem like Heuman intended it to be the first of a series, but as far as I know, it’s Sad Sam’s only appearance. That’s a shame, because this is a great story and I really enjoyed it. (Heuman also used the Kilrain name on two novels, SOUTH TO SANTA FE and MAVERICK WITH A STAR, both published as halves of Ace Doubles.)

You know Gordon D. Shirreffs’ work is nearly always good. He rounds out this issue with the short story “The Hollow Hero”, about a deputy marshal’s clash with a notorious gunman recently released from a 20-year stretch in Yuma Prison. The man claims he wants to go straight and even opens a law office, but are his old killer instincts still there just waiting to be unleashed? This one has a decent plot, some nice action, and a clever resolution. It’s minor Shirreffs, but that’s still pretty darned good.

Overall, this is an exceptional issue of TEXAS RANGERS with a good Jim Hatfield novel, a terrific story by William Heuman, and solid yarns by Gordon D. Shirreffs and W.J. Reynolds. Even the Ben Frank story is inoffensive and mildly entertaining. If you’re a TEXAS RANGERS fan and have this one on your shelves, it’s well worth reading.