Walter Baumhofer did some great covers for DIME DETECTIVE during this era, and here's another of 'em. The lineup of authors in this issue is top-notch, as well: Carroll John Daly with a Vee Brown story, T.T. Flynn, Frederick C. Davis, William E. Barrett, and Robert Sidney Bowen. Excellent writers, every one of them. DIME DETECTIVE was a consistently superb pulp during the mid-Thirties.
The wounded hombre on this cover doesn't appear to be an Old Geezer, but we have two-thirds of our iconic trio, the Stalwart Cowboy and the Angry, Gun-Totin' Redhead. Great work on this cover by Walter Baumhofer, one of my favorite pulp cover artists. And inside, we have stories by Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, Bart Cassiday (also Harry F. Olmsted), Oliver King (actually Thomas E. Mount, who was better known under his pseudonym Stone Cody), John G. Pearsol, and John Colohan. That's a fantastic line-up of authors, but it was just another issue of DIME WESTERN MAGAZINE. I don't own this issue so I haven't read it, but I'm confident that it's a great one.
This issue of DETECTIVE TALES starts off with a good, dramatic cover by Walter Baumhofer and has a strong line-up of authors inside: top pulpsters Frederick C. Davis, Norvell Page, Paul Ernst, Wyatt Blassingame, Franklin H. Martin, J. Lane Linklater, R.T.M. Scott, and George Armin Shaftel (once as himself and once under the pseudonym George Rosenberg), plus lesser-known George Edson and Wilton Hazzard along with house-name Emerson Graves. Davis, Page, Blassingame, and Ernst would make this pulp well worth reading for me if I owned a copy, which I don't.
Walter Baumhofer is one of my favorite pulp cover artists, and I like this whimsical depiction of a harmonica-playing cowboy fending off an empty tomato can hurled at him by some listener, but I'm not sure how appropriate the scene is for a pulp subtitled "A Magazine of Hair-Trigger Hombres". But maybe that description refers to the music critic instead of the fella with the harmonica. I'd expect something more hard-bitten from a magazine called WESTERN OUTLAWS, but hey, owlhoots can enjoy a tune now and then, too. The best-known author in this issue is William Colt MacDonald, one of the big names of the pulp era and all the way through the Sixties, really. Chart Pitt and Thomas Thursday are on hand, too. Other than that, the writers are all unknown to me: Wolf Wilson, Willard E. Hawkins, Albert Wm. Stone, J.R. Johnson, Al H. Martin, R.T. Barkley, L. Simpson Turner, Charles P. Gordon, and Ludwig Stanley Landmichl. I may have heard, vaguely, of one or two of those, but I don't know anything about them. Still, I like the cover, a little odd though it may be, and MacDonald was always worth reading.
Yikes! What a disturbing cover by Walter Baumhofer for this issue of DIME DETECTIVE. I'm sure there are quite a few jolts in the stories, too. Authors in this issue include Fred MacIsaac (with a Rambler story), William E. Barrett (with a Needle Mike story), John K. Butler (with a "Tricky" Enright story--I'm not familiar with that character at all), Leslie T. White (with a Duke and Phyllis Martendel story--nope, don't know them, either), and forgotten pulpster Denslow M. Dade.
A dramatic cover by Walter Baumhofer graces this issue of STAR WESTERN, my favorite Western pulp published by Popular Publications. A look at the authors inside will tell you why I feel that way: T.T. Flynn, Ray Nafziger, Luke Short, W. Ryerson Johnson, Robert E. Mahaffey (twice, with a short story and a novelette), William F. Bragg, and Foster-Harris. I also like STAR WESTERN because it ran more novellas and novelettes than short stories. I like short stories just fine, but I think the novella is just about the perfect length for all types of genre fiction.
This is a dandy, very dynamic cover by Walter Baumhofer. The action seems to almost leap off the page, to use a cliché that happens to be accurate in this case. This issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY features the usual assortment of series and stand-alone stories, heavy on the series. In this case, The Whistlin' Kid by Emery Jackson (J. Allan Dunn), Sonny Tabor by Ward M. Stevens (Paul S. Powers), Shorty Master by Allan R. Bosworth, Hungry and Rusty by Samuel H. Nickels, and the Bar U Twins by Charles E. Barnes. The stand-alones are by Lee Bond, George C. Henderson, and Kent Bennett (who was actually Samuel H. Nickels, his second story in this issue).
I don't normally associate beautiful women with Walter Baumhofer's pulp covers, like I do with, say, Allen Anderson or Earle Bergey, but the blonde on this issue of PETE RICE MAGAZINE proves that he could paint one when he wanted to. The Pete Rice series is an odd one. Created by Street & Smith to try to recreate the success of DOC SAVAGE, it featured the heroic Pete Rice as an Arizona sheriff with a group of colorful assistants. The pulp ran for 32 issues and almost three years, with most of the novels being written by Ben Conlon under the house-name Austin Gridley. Then, after Pete's own magazine was cancelled, he appeared in 20 more adventures in WILD WEST WEEKLY, still under the Gridley name but written by Conlon, Laurence Donovan, Lee Bond, Paul S. Powers, and Ronald Oliphant. Despite all that material, few, if any, of the Pete Rice stories have ever been reprinted. I read one issue of the pulp many years ago with a Conlon novel in it, and I recall not liking it much. Even so, I'd be interested in reading more of them. Sometimes my first impression of a series doesn't hold up. At any rate, I like this Baumhofer cover, and the other authors in this issue are Harold A. Davis (who would go on to ghost some of the Doc Savage novels), Wilfred McCormick (whose juvenile sports novels were favorites of mine when I was a kid), and George Allan Moffett, who was really prolific pulpster Edwin V. Burkholder.
That's a pretty gruesome but certainly effective cover by Walter Baumhofer on this issue of DIME DETECTIVE. And as usual, the lineup of writers inside can't be beat: Carroll John Daly (with a Race Williams novella), Erle Stanley Gardner, Norvell W. Page, Cornell Woolrich, and O.B. Myers, best remembered these days for his stories in the aviation pulps but also a prolific author of detective yarns.
With the exception of BLACK MASK in the Twenties, I'm not sure there was ever a better detective pulp than DIME DETECTIVE in the Thirties. And DIME DETECTIVE runs BLACK MASK a pretty close second! With Walter Baumhofer as the regular cover artist, you know the magazine was going to look great. This issue has a pretty typical line-up of authors inside: a Cardigan story by Frederick Nebel, a Needle Mike story by William E. Barrett, a Carter Cole story by Frederick C. Davis, a Kip Lacey story by Robert Sidney Bowen, and a stand-alone yarn by Hugh B. Cave. You might find a better bunch of writers than that in some other detective pulp, but not often.
For the last pulp cover post of the year, we have a dandy cover by Walter Baumhofer on one of the iconic pulp magazines, DIME DETECTIVE. Inside this issue, there's a Race Williams story by Carroll John Daly, Raymond Chandler's "The King in Yellow", a Keyhole Kerry story by Frederick C. Davis, and stories by a couple of lesser known writers, William Edward Hayes and Maxwell Hawkins. Baumhofer, Chandler, Daly, and Davis are more than reason enough to think this was a great issue of DIME DETECTIVE.
A Norman Saunders cover yesterday, a Walter Baumhofer cover today. That's an all-star weekend as far as cover artists go. And some all-star authors in this issue of DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE, too, including Hugh B. Cave, Wyatt Blassingame, William B. Rainey (who was also Wyatt Blassingame), Arthur Leo Zagat, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, and John H. Knox. I love lurid but eye-catching covers like this. Where else but on a Weird Menace pulp are you going to find a hunchback with an eyepatch?
That's a dynamic Walter Baumhofer cover (but I repeat myself) on this issue of PETE RICE MAGAZINE. The other notable thing about this issue for me is the title of the lead novel: "Wolves of Wexford Manor". Somehow I never expected to see the name "Wexford Manor" in the title of a Western pulp novel. Sounds more like some eccentric amateur detective should be gathering the suspects in a picturesque English country house to reveal who really killed Aunt Henrietta. There are two back-up stories in this issue, both by Harold A. Davis, one under the pseudonym Rand Allison. I've read only one Pete Rice novel and wasn't impressed with it, but the magazine had very good covers.
When it comes to covers, such as this one by Walter Baumhofer, and the authors inside, DIME DETECTIVE was a great pulp. Authors in this issue include Frederick Nebel (with a Cardigan story), William E. Barrett (with a Needle Mike story), Frederick C. Davis, and James P. Olsen. That's a fine line-up of top pulpsters.
Some days Norman Saunders is my favorite pulp cover artist; some days it's Walter Baumhofer. Today is a Baumhofer day. That's a really striking, evocative cover, and the authors inside this issue ain't bad, either: Carroll John Daly (with a Race Williams story), Erle Stanley Gardner, Norvell Page (a Ken Carter story), and Cornell Woolrich. As I've said many times before, just another day at the newsstand during the pulp era.
You can't ask for much more out of a Western pulp than this issue of DIME WESTERN delivers. Start with a colorful, exciting cover by Walter Baumhofer and then add stories by Harry F. Olmsted, Walt Coburn, E.B. Mann, Gunnison Steele, John G. Pearsol, Miles Overholt, and more. And that's just a normal issue for this great pulp.
Well, things don't look too good for the hair-trigger hombre in front on this cover by Walter Baumhofer. Of course, you never know what will happen, and I doubt if things will go smoothly for that star packer behind him. A Western reader ought to be pretty pleased with this issue, though, considering that it includes stories by William Colt MacDonald, E.B. Mann, Philip Ketchum, Bennie Gardner, Clee Woods, and Lawrence A. Keating, among others.
Another great-looking issue of DIME WESTERN with stories by Walt Coburn, T.T. Flynn, and Harry F. Olmsted, three of my favorites, plus Cliff Farrell and Murray Leinster among others. And a Walter Baumhofer cover, to boot.
STAR WESTERN is one of my favorite Western pulps, and why wouldn't it be with covers by Walter Baumhofer and stories by Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, James P. Olsen, John G. Pearsol, Cliff Farrell, Robert E. Mahaffey, George Armin Shaftel, and William F. Bragg?
Hard to go wrong with a Walter Baumhofer cover and a line-up of Western pulpsters that includes William Colt MacDonald, Lawrence A. Keating, Claude Rister, Clee Woods, and Russell Bankson. My favorite thing about this pulp, though...that line "A Magazine of Hair-Trigger Hombres". I want to be a Hair-Trigger Hombre, too!
