Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Famous Detective Stories, June 1954

The cover on this issue of FAMOUS DETECTIVE STORIES is by Norman Saunders, and he's by far the best known name involved with this issue. The lead novella is by Wilbur S. Peacock, a fairly prolific pulp author and editor, but the other stories are by writers I'm not familiar with: Norman Ober, Marc Millen, Gene Rodgers, and Wallace McKinley. None of these are known to be pseudonyms or house-names, but they don't ring any bells for me, either. The cover is okay, but I'm not sure if I would have gambled a quarter on this one if I'd seen it on the stands back in 1954. (I was alive when this issue was on the stands, but since I was only a year old, I doubt if I'd have been reading it anyway.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western, June 1942

I don't know who painted the cover on this issue of REAL WESTERN, but I like it. Very dramatic. There's a nice group of writers inside, too: E.B. Mann, who takes up most of the pages with a novel-length story (I wonder if it was ever reprinted under another title), Wilbur S. Peacock, Anson Hard, Brett Austin (who was really Lee Floren), and house-name Cliff Campbell.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western, September 1948

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat tattered copy in the scan. I’m not sure of the cover artist. Might be Robert Stanley, who did a lot of Western pulp covers for Popular Publications during this time period. But it might not be.

DIME WESTERN, like the other Popular Publications Western pulps, always had good authors, but there’s a particularly strong lineup in this issue, leading off with a surprisingly good Walt Coburn novella, considering how late this story came in his career. “Shoot or Git Shot!” is a son-of-an-outlaw yarn, where a widowed rustler leaves his six-year-old son with the father of his late wife. The old-timer raises the boy to be a good man, rather than an owlhoot. But as usual in a Coburn story, there’s a lot of back-story and not everything is as it appears to be at first. There’s nothing in this one you won’t see coming, but it’s well-written and has a nice epic feel to it for a novella. Plus there’s a great, brutal fistfight and a spectacular shootout to wrap things up. Coburn was inconsistent by this point, but “Shoot or Git Shot!” is as good as most of his stories from ten or twenty years earlier.

Frank Bonham probably would be annoyed that one of the main things he's remembered for these days is his slightly embittered essay “Tarzana Nights” about his time spent ghostwriting Western pulp stories for Ed Earl Repp. But he was an excellent writer and that’s on display in “Good Squatters Are Dead Squatters”, his short story in this issue. It’s a big rancher vs. small rancher story, but it’s very well-written and does a fine job of capturing the Texas Panhandle country. The resolution is maybe a little hard to swallow, but this is still a good story from a consistently good writer.

Clifton Adams was one of the best of the hardboiled Western writers who broke into the pulps in the late Forties and then went on to write dozens of excellent novels during the Fifties and Sixties. His story in this issue is a novelette about a wounded outlaw on the run called “There’s Hell in His Holster!” It’s a good story in its own right, but it has some historical significance, too. I believe it’s the first appearance of Tall Cameron, who, a couple of years later, would be the protagonist of Adams’ iconic Gold Medal novels THE DESPERADO and A NOOSE FOR THE DESPERADO. Neither of the novels is an expansion of this story, which is sort of an alternate universe take on the character, but Adams took a lot of Tall Cameron’s history from this tale.

Wilbur S. Peacock was a pulp editor as well as a writer. He turned out scores of Western, detective, and science fiction yarns and appears in this issue of DIME WESTERN with a short-short called “Reward of Merit”, about an old sheriff who’s been pushed out of his job in favor of a younger man. It’s well-written but the ending falls flat as far as I’m concerned. I generally like Peacock’s work but think this one was a misfire.

I’ve read good things about George C. Appell’s stories but don’t recall if I’ve ever read anything by him before. His short story “The Search” relies on a gimmick: not revealing one character’s true identity until the very end of the story. That’s kind of interesting, and the search of the title, a hunt for hidden loot, has promise, but overall the plot is muddled enough that it’s hard to follow and I didn’t care much for this story, either.

Peter Dawson, actually Jonathan Glidden, brother of Frederick “Luke Short” Glidden, was always dependable, and he comes through in this issue with the novelette “It’s Your Town—Die in It!” The story concerns a new marshal who believes he’s been roped into a town-taming job under false pretenses. He wants to abandon the job and leave town, but a beautiful new seamstress just arrived in the settlement, so maybe she’ll provide a reason for him to stay and have a showdown with the local hardcases. There’s really not a lot to this story, but it’s well-written and entertaining.

This issue wraps up with a novella by an author I’ve read quite a bit by lately, E. Hoffmann Price (although he’s credited incorrectly as E. Hoffman Price on the cover, TOC, and the story itself). “The Cowman Who Damned His Brand” has a very intriguing twist: the protagonist, a prospector who enjoys hunting for gold, falls in love with a woman who wants him to buy a ranch and settle down. So he buys a spread and inserts himself into the middle of a range war, fully intending to be a failure so he can convince the girl he needs to go back to prospecting. Of course, things don’t work out as he planned. This offbeat plot and Price’s talent for storytelling combine to make this a very good yarn.

This is a solid issue of DIME WESTERN with top-notch stories by Coburn, Bonham, Dawson, and Price, and the stories I didn’t much care for are readable and might be more to someone else’s taste. If you have a copy of it, it’s well worth pulling down from the shelf and reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Famous Western, Summer 1944

That's a nice dramatic cover on this issue of FAMOUS WESTERN, although the hand holding the knife looks 'way too large to me. It's almost as big as the other guy's head! There are some good authors inside, including T.W. Ford, Joe Austell Small, Wilbur S. Peacock, and Archie Joscelyn. Also on hand are Lee Floren, Brett Austin (Lee Floren), Lee Thomas (also Lee Floren), Charles S. Richardson, the completely unknown to me James Lebur (he published a dozen stories in various Western pulps, but I don't recall ever coming across his name before), and house-name Cliff Campbell. Hmm, wonder if that could be Lee Floren? I wouldn't rule it out.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Undercover Detective, April 1939

There's a lot happening on this cover. This is the sort of scene that Norman Saunders often painted on his pulp covers, and although the unknown artist of this one doesn't have Saunders' talent (in my opinion), I like it anyway because of its sheer enthusiasm. This is the third and final issue of the short-lived UNDERCOVER DETECTIVE. There are only a few authors on the table of contents whose name I recognize: Joseph Chadwick, Louis Trimble, and Wilbur S. Peacock. The rest are a mixture of house-names and authors who published a few stories and are little remembered. The star of UNDERCOVER DETECTIVE was Conway Clark, who was featured in all three of the lead novels. I don't know anything about the character. This story was published under the house-name John Cotton; the previous two were published as by "Richard Ariel". The first one is a rewritten version of a story by Oscar Schisgall published originally in CLUES. Whether Schisgall rewrote it for UNDERCOVER DETECTIVE and then wrote the other two Conway Clark stories, I have no idea.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, September 1946

Under the editorship of Kenneth S. White, ADVENTURE was still a good pulp in the late Forties. In this issue, that starts with a cover by Peter Stevens that I really like, illustrating an oil field story by Thomson Burtis. Also on hand in this issue are William Campbell Gault, Jim Kjelgaard, Joe Archibald, Wilbur S. Peacock, Hal G. Evarts, and Bill Adams, among others. This issue is available on-line here, and I'm intrigued enough that I'll probably read the Burtis story, if nothing else, because of my fondness for oil field yarns. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Giant Western, September 1949

This is another action-packed cover from Sam Cherry, one of my favorite Western pulp cover artists (and paperback cover artist, too, for that matter). Inside this issue of GIANT WESTERN are stories by Wilbur S. Peacock, Allan R. Bosworth, T.C. McClary, and Ben Frank, plus classic reprints by Charles Alden Seltzer and Frederick R. Bechdolt. The big guy in the red shirt looks a little like James Arness to me, but this is too early for Arness to have influenced the art, I think.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, Fall 1943

An excellent cover by George Rozen graces this issue of PLANET STORIES, and there's a really fine group of writers behind it: Leigh Brackett, Clifford D. Simak, Nelson S. Bond, Carl Jacobi, Wilbur S. Peacock, Charles R. Tanner, and Henry Hasse. I haven't read it, but you can read or download the entire issue here.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, Second April Number, 1949

That's a pretty, um, sultry cover for a late Forties issue of RANCH ROMANCES. But not surprisingly, I like it. I don't know who the artist was. Inside this issue are stories by some excellent authors, including L.P. Holmes, Wayne D. Overholser, Ray Townsend, Wilbur S. Peacock, and Walt Sheldon. Clearly RANCH ROMANCES was starting to take on some of the hardboiled tone that was common in it during the Fifties.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, Summer 1945

I'm seriously out of step with modern life in many respects, of course, and science fiction is one of them. This is the kind of SF I like: rayguns, space babes, and monsters. Just the sort of things PLANET STORIES specialized in. This issue has a nice cover by Parkhurst and stories by Fiction House regulars Emmett McDowell and Wilbur S. Peacock, as well as long-time SF pro Ross Rocklynne. The other authors are unfamiliar to me, but I wonder about one of them, George A. Whittington, who published only a handful of stories, all in PLANET STORIES. Makes me think that might be a pseudonym or house-name. At any rate, this looks like a fine issue to me, although most current SF readers would be either uninterested (at best) or horrified to the point of outrage (at worst).

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Mystery Magazine, March 1947

DIME MYSTERY was long past its Weird Menace phase by the time this issue came out in 1947, but that cover almost looks like it could have been from that earlier era, especially if it had been a little more lurid. And "Death Dance of the Broken Dolls" certainly sounds like a Weird Menace title. It's even by Arthur Leo Zagat, one of the masters of the genre. I believe I have a copy of that story somewhere. I'll have to read it. The rest of this issue's contents appear to be typical late Forties semi-hardboiled detective pulp, although by authors who were good at that: Talmage Powell, Robert Turner, Dale Clark, Cyril Plunkett, and Wilbur S. Peacock.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Popular Detective, July 1949

Bruno Fischer is probably the only author in this issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE who is still well-known at all. Pulp fans will recall Wilbur S. Peacock, Joe Archibald, and Morris Hershman (who is probably better known for the paperbacks he wrote later). One of the authors featured on the cover, along with Peacock, is William Degenhard, a name that's totally unknown to me. Just another example of the vast amount of once popular fiction that seems to have vanished forever.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, September 1952

This is a pulp I own and read recently. The scan is from my copy. EXCITING WESTERN is one of the Thrilling Group, and I tend to like those pulps.

Wilbur S. Peacock was a fairly prolific pulpster, writing dozens of mysteries, Westerns, science fiction, sports yarns, and jungle adventures for a variety of pulps during a career that lasted from the late Thirties on into the Fifties. He’s probably best remembered, though, as an editor at Fiction House on such titles as PLANET STORIES and JUNGLE STORIES. His novella “Riders of Rebel Range” in the September 1952 issue of EXCITING WESTERN is the first fiction by him that I’ve read, as far as I recall. It’s an excellent story, too, about a group of masked vigilantes in Texas battling carpetbaggers during Reconstruction. However, there’s a hidden mastermind using the vigilantes for his own nefarious purposes, and it’s up to the local sheriff to uncover the real plot . . . assuming, that is, that the lawman isn’t the actual bad guy himself.

Peacock really packs a lot into this novella. In addition to the main plot concerning the vigilantes, we get overlapping romantic triangles, sibling rivalry, bushwhacking, brutal fistfights, and an apocalyptic ending that threatens to destroy the whole town. The mystery angle is handled well enough that I really wasn’t sure what was going to happen or who would turn out to be the hidden mastermind. I enjoyed this one quite a bit. If Peacock had written any novels, I’d be on the lookout for them, but it appears he only published in the pulps. I’ll certainly watch for his name in the future.

Unfortunately, the next story, “Wine, Women, and—Who Cares?” by Al Storm, is an example of how difficult it is to write a comedy Western that works, at least as far as I’m concerned. Humor is highly subjective, of course. But this tale of gold miners with colorful names like Shammy and Zinger-Dip, doing colorful things, just never amused or interested me. I did not find it a “Rib-Tickler” as the cover claims.

Max Kesler is another author whose name I’ve seen in many pulps but have never read until now. His novelette “A Doctor Kills a Wolf” is a timber camp story, not a favorite theme of mine but one that can be okay if done well. The protagonist, a disgraced doctor, lands in the middle of a timber war and not surprisingly winds up being forced to use the medical skills he has tried to give up, as well brawling and shooting his way through to victory. This yarn has a nice hardboiled tone but suffers from the fact that the villain is pretty much a cipher and barely appears in the story. It’s hard to have a good hero without an effective bad guy. Kesler writes well enough that I would certainly read more by him, though.

I think “The Half-Mule Sodbuster” is the second story I’ve read by Seven Anderton. It’s a well-written cattlemen vs. sodbusters story, only in this case there’s only one sodbuster, a stubborn man who doesn’t carry a gun but is determined to homestead a farm even though everyone else in the valley wants to run him out . . . except maybe the beautiful daughter of one of the cattle baron. There’s some humor, some action, and even some surprisingly sexy stuff (for the time period) in this story, but I thought the ending could have packed a little more punch.

I don’t care much for stories about animals (we had a discussion about this on the WesternPulps group recently), but “Underdog” by Harold F. Cruickshank isn’t bad. The animals don’t talk, and the terrier of the title isn’t the viewpoint character. As a dog vs. bear story, it’s okay.

I’ve read some truly terrible Western paperbacks by Lee Floren, but he had a long, successful career so there must have been plenty of readers who enjoyed his work. I’ll admit, there are some nice moments in his novelette “This Trail to Bullets”. The protagonist is a two-fisted, gun-totin’ undercover bank examiner, not exactly the sort of character you find in Western pulp yarns that often, and I like that. Floren’s style is a little rough, but it has an effective hardboiled tone in places. I enjoyed this one enough I might give some of his novels a try again. Sometimes I warm up to an author as time goes by.

This issue wraps up with “Bad Medicine”, a short story by an author I’d never heard of, Tom Hopefield. He appears to have published half a dozen stories, all in the early Fifties. This one concerns rock climbing and a bully’s comeuppance, and while it’s nothing special, it’s pleasant enough.

Overall, this is a good but not great issue of EXCITING WESTERN. Wilbur S. Peacock’s story is the best and will have me keeping an eye out for his work. Seven Anderton continues to be a solid author, and Lee Floren’s story was better than I expected. The others were all good enough to keep me reading. I didn’t skip any of the stories, although I did just skim through the columns and features. I do think that by the early Fifties, the Western pulps had suffered from the fact that most of the best authors were concentrating on novels, both hardback and paperback.