Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dare-Devil Aces, July 1937

Man, Frederick Blakeslee could really pack a lot into an air-war pulp cover! Nine planes (assuming I didn't miss any), plus a bunch of ack-ack bursts in the air and bombs going off on the ground. I think this scene does a great job of conveying the controlled chaos of aerial combat in World War I. Inside, this issue features three authors I associate more with Westerns: Orlando Rigoni, Claude Rister, and William O'Sullivan. Also on hand are aviation pulp stalwarts Robert Sidney Bowen and Darrell Jordan, house-names William Hartley and Larry Jones, and Fred Flabb, which I suspect is this little-published author's real name, because it doesn't sound like what you'd come up with as a pseudonym.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, May 1947

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat ragged copy in the scan. The cover is by Sam Cherry, as usual, and I like it, also as usual.

Ah, Tombstone and Speedy! A ghost story seems perfect for this pair of bumbling but surprisingly astute range detectives, and the novella “Ghost of the Tumbling K” brings them to the title ranch on their latest assignment for the Cattlemen’s Protective Association. However, they don’t know why they’re there, because the rancher who sent for them lies seriously wounded and unconscious. Tombstone and Speedy fetch help for the injured man and, in the process, discover that the ranch is supposed to be haunted. Since they don’t know why they were summoned, they decide to stay there and keep an eye on the place, which, of course, leads to a ghostly encounter.

Author W.C. Tuttle packs a lot of plot into his yarn, as he always does with the Tombstone and Speedy stories. Most of it revolves around the hidden loot of a mysterious outlaw known as the Yellow Mask, who is believed to have died several years earlier. But is he really dead? If he is, could it be his spirit haunting the Tumbling K? Tombstone and Speedy untangle the whole thing, of course, with plenty of action and humorous banter along the way. These stories are pretty formulaic, but they sure are entertaining.

“Indian Slap” is by Barry Scobee, the only pulp Western author with a mountain named after him. Scobee’s work is hit-or-miss for me but mostly good, and I enjoyed this tale about a white boy who was a captive of the Comanches trying to fit back in among a community of settlers. Scobee does a good job with the Central Texas setting, too.

“West of Windigo” is a novelette by Norrell Gregory. I don’t recall if I’ve read anything by Gregory before, but I liked this story of a railroad detective trying to find out who’s been stealing construction supplies, smuggling whiskey to the Indians, and generally trying to stir up trouble on a spur line that’s being built. Gregory moves things along nicely. This would have made a good B-Western movie in the Forties or Fifties.

“Badmen Are Plumb Foolish” is by Donald Bayne Hobart, a very prolific pulpster whose work I’ve come to enjoy. This story is about a gambler framed for a murder he didn’t commit, and despite its short length, maybe 2500 words, Hobart manages to work in a train robbery and a plot twist, too. This is a nice, enjoyable yarn by a real pro.

“Sheriff” by William O’Sullivan uses the “old lawman whose time has passed” plot, and not surprisingly, the old badge-toter has some life left in him after all, as an election campaign against his young whippersnapper deputy proves. This isn’t a memorable story at all, but it’s well-written and pleasant enough.

I’m convinced that Donald Bayne Hobart is also the author of “Bait for a Range-War Gallows”, even though it was published under the house-name Jackson Cole. The style reads very much like Hobart’s work. This is a range war story, as you probably guessed from the title, but it starts with a very nice twist: the range war is already over when the story begins. And everybody who supported the losing side is now considered an outlaw, including young cowboy Dake Latimer, who is holed up in an old adobe hut trying to fight off a horde of gunmen led by his mortal enemy who hates him because Latimer once stopped the lowdown hombre from raping a young woman. Hobart drops the reader down right in the middle of the action, which is something I always enjoy. Latimer gets out of that scrape but almost immediately finds himself in another one with a wounded youngster’s life on the line. Hobart packs a lot into this story and the action never slows down for more than a few paragraphs. This is just a superb Western yarn, one of the best I’ve read recently.

The protagonist of Nels Leroy Jorgensen’s novelette “Longrider Gun-Law” is also a good-guy owlhoot, the son of an Arizona lawman. He’s been below the border in Mexico rustling cattle and horses as part of a gang of American outlaws, but when the group disbands, he heads home to find the area being plagued by a series of stagecoach robberies. The plot developments in this one are pretty predictable, but Jorgensen’s tough prose makes it entertaining reading. Jorgensen’s career started in the early Twenties with detective and adventure yarns. He was a regular contributor to BLACK MASK during that pulp’s early glory days and eventually became a prolific Western pulpster, as well. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by him.

There’s also an animal story by Harold F. Cruickshank in this issue, but I didn’t even try to read it. I loved wildlife yarns when I was a kid, but they just don’t work for me anymore.

Other than that, every story in this issue is good and I think it’s a fine issue overall. Although, as usual when there’s not a Navajo Tom Raine story, I missed that series.

To end on a more serious note that usual, I’ve realized that on several occasions recently, I’ve read and reviewed books and pulps that I previously read and reviewed several years ago, with absolutely no memory of reading and reviewing them before. At my age, this is a mite worrisome. If I have any doubts about a book or a pulp, I try to remember to search the blog and see if I’ve already covered it. But the key phrase there is “try to remember” because that’s where the problem lies, isn’t it? If any rate, if you see such duplication, it’s not intentional, and don’t hesitate to bring it to my attention. It’s helpful for me to know about such things.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, September 1947

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the image, but it’s a photograph instead of a scan this time since I find myself without scanning capability at the moment. The cover is by the prolific and always dependable Sam Cherry, and it’s something of a rarity because it actually illustrates one of the stories in this issue. More on that later.

“Alias Adam Jones” is a rather bland title for one of W.C. Tuttle’s rollicking adventures of hapless range detectives Tombstone Jones and Speedy Smith. (The editors of EXCITING WESTERN loved the word “rollicking”.) In this novella, one of Tombstone’s long-winded, colorful lies causes Speedy to be kidnapped, and that plunges the boys into a complicated case of rustlers, inheritances, and mistaken identities. This plot is actually a little easier to figure out than some in the series, and a few late developments come from ’way, ’way out in left field, but the whole thing races along in wonderful fashion and Tuttle’s dialogue had me laughing out loud in places. This series is pretty formulaic, but the more I read of it, the more I love it.

“The Marshal of Goldfork” is a stand-alone novelette by Walker A. Tompkins, another of my favorite Western pulpsters. Set in a California mining boomtown during the Gold Rush, it’s about the final showdown between the local lawman and a saloon owner, both of whom were badly injured in a shootout with each other five months earlier, before the town was snowed in for the winter. Now it’s the spring thaw, and the lawman has recovered from his injuries and is back to settle the score and bring law and order to the town. Tompkins was great at keeping a story racing along, and he does so here, creating some interesting characters in the process. This is an excellent yarn.

Joseph Chadwick is yet another favorite of mine. His novelette in this issue, “The Indian Ring”, is about a hardboiled Arizona rancher who takes on the web of corruption involving the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the army, and various crooked business interests. Chadwick was one of the best at tough, gritty action, and this is a fine story that could have been expanded into a top-notch novel if he had chosen to do so.

Next up is “Too Smart for His Own Good” by Andrew Bronson, who published 15 stories in various Thrilling Group Western pulps during the Forties and Fifties. This story about a cowboy trying to recover a ranch payroll that was stolen from him is the one illustrated by Sam Cherry’s cover. In fact, it matches that cover painting so exactly that I have a hunch it was written to match. And the fact that all of “Bronson’s” stories appeared in Thrilling Group pulps leads me to suspect he might have been editor Charles S. Strong, who, as Chuck Stanley, did a feature in EXCITING WESTERN called “The Cowboy Had a Word For It”. Strong wrote a number of Western novels under the Chuck Stanley name, too, and was perfectly capable of knocking out a short story overnight to fit a cover painting. Pure speculation on my part, of course. The story itself, in this case, is entertaining but not particularly memorable.

I haven’t read a great deal by Richard Brister, but so far he’s proven to be a pretty dependable Western author. His story “Bandy Legs” is an offbeat yarn about a rivalry between two storekeepers that turns deadly. This is a well-written and suspenseful story that I enjoyed.

Cliff Walters is another very prolific Western pulpster who is forgotten these days. “Broad Shoulders” is about a big, powerful hombre who could accomplish a lot if he tried, but nothing seems to move him to either working or fighting. That changes during the course of the story in a fairly predictable way. This is a minor tale but entertaining.

“Crisis on the Curly Q” is by Don Alviso, who wrote several dozen stories for the pulps, nearly all of them Westerns. It’s a humorous story about a ranch cook who goes on a drunken bender and loses the wagonload of supplies he’s supposed to be taking back to the Curly Q spread. I wasn’t sure I was going to finish this one, but I stuck with it and it turned out to be mildly amusing. Absolutely unmemorable, though.

The issue wraps up with “Men of Their Word” by William O’Sullivan. It’s about two Irish prospectors who are partners but still scrap with each other all the time. They have to put aside their differences to keep from being swindled by a couple of slickers. This is another story that’s pretty lightweight but reasonably enjoyable.

Overall, this is a good issue of EXCITING WESTERN, although any issue without Navajo Tom Raine and Alamo Paige seems a little lacking to me. However, two very good stand-alone stories by Walker A. Tompkins and Joseph Chadwick makes up for that, and I always enjoy Tombstone and Speedy. So if you have this issue on your shelves, it’s worth reading. You can also find the whole issue on-line if you want to check it out that way.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sky Raiders, April 1940

A recent discussion on the WesternPulps email group about author T.W. Ford prompted speculation about whether he and Eric Rober, another prolific author of air war and sports stories for the pulps, were indeed the same person. According to pulp editor Robert A. Lowndes, they were, and Rober was the real name, although there’s some confusion whether it was Eric Rober or Ford Rober. There’s an Eric Rober buried in Newhall, California, but the Find-a-Grave website doesn’t give birth or death dates and you can’t read them on the photo of his tombstone. According to Lowndes, Ford died in 1952.

With no luck on that research, I decided to at least read some of Eric Rober’s stories and compare them to those of Ford’s. As it happens (which it would if they were the same person), both of them often had stories in the same issue, the first one of which I came across on-line being the April 1940 issue of the air war pulp SKY RAIDERS, which you can find here. The excellent cover is by A. Leslie Ross, an artist I don’t really associate with air war or aviation pulps, but it’s a good one. Ross is one of my favorite cover artists on Western pulps and paperbacks.

This issue leads off with “Slave of the Sky King”, a World War I novelette under the Eric Rober name. The Sky King is a German ace, an aristocrat with crippled legs who glories in soaring through the sky even though he’s hobbled on land. But when his son, also a pilot, is killed in a dogfight, the Sky King goes insane. Fate brings him into contact with a trio of American aces known as the Horsemen, and things take an even stranger turn when one of them becomes the Sky King’s prisoner. This is a terrific yarn full of angst and psychodrama and dogfights. The characters are excellent and the aerial action is vivid and well-written. A little over-the-top, maybe, with its melodramatic plot twists, but I really enjoyed this one.

Normally I read a pulp straight through, but in this case, I skipped right to “Screwball of the Skies”, a short story under the T.W. Ford byline. This is about a Canadian pilot serving with the R.A.F., a farmer in his pre-war life who cares only about playing his fiddle and will dare any danger to protect the instrument. It starts out like it’s going to be a fairly lightweight story but then turns pretty dark halfway through. It’s well-written and entertaining, but there’s not nearly as much to it as there is to “Slave of the Sky King”. But the real question I was trying to solve is whether those two stories are the work of the same writer. I feel pretty strongly that they are. The styles match up almost perfectly, and both stories contain references to planes “sledding” through the sky during dogfights. Maybe that’s a common term in air war pulp stories; I haven’t read nearly enough of them to be anywhere close to an expert. But I don’t recall encountering it before. Even so, that’s hardly definitive proof. I need to read more by Ford and Rober to get a better idea.

Now on to the other stories, since I downloaded this issue anyway. “The Rainbow Ace” is by prolific pulpster William J. O’Sullivan and is also set in the early days of World War II. An American pilot pretends to be British so he can join the R.A.F. and get revenge for his father, who was killed by the Nazis during a vacation in Germany several years earlier. This is a good story, and it’s also a good example of how American pulp writers struggled to find ways to have Yank protagonists in their stories when America’s official entry into the war was still a couple of years away.

I don’t know anything about Metteau Miles except that he published less than two dozen stories in his career, most of them aviation yarns. His story in this issue, “Wings of Clay”, is a World War I tale about a young American pilot, the brother of a downed ace, who wants to avenge his brother’s death. Unfortunately, he suffers from crippling fear every time he goes up in his crate. Miles does a good job with this plot and comes up with a satisfying resolution. This is another enjoyable story.

Jack Straley is another obscure pulp author who published eighteen aviation and detective stories between 1932 and 1940. His story in this issue, “Bullets Fly Faster”, is about the Germans disrupting an espionage scheme to smuggle vital information across the lines. It’s reasonably entertaining, although it’s very easy to figure out what’s really going on.

“Quiet on the Maginot” is the only credit in the Fictionmags Index for Casey Sumfer (as he’s listed on the table of contents)/Sumter (as he’s by-lined on the story itself). Was that a pseudonym or simply a writer who sold only one story? No telling. The story itself isn’t bad. It’s another “Yank in the R.A.F.” yarn set in the early days of World War II. In this case, the Yank is actually a Southerner from Mississippi who writes letters to his pappy back home, the Cunnel, bemoaning the lack of action along the Maginot Line. Which, of course, then erupts in a huge battle. That’s all there is to it, but the writing is decent even if the story doesn’t really amount to much.

The final story in this issue is “Paper-Made Ace”, by David C. Cooke, a forgotten pulpster who wrote scores of aviation, detective, and sports yarns for various pulps. This is another R.A.F. story in which a newspaper reporter hypes up a British flyer in an attempt to encourage enlistment. The pilot doesn’t know what’s going on, though, which leads to complications when he finds out. This is a decent tale helped by the fact that the reporter has a secret Cooke doesn’t reveal until late in the story.

This is the only issue of SKY RAIDERS I’ve ever read and quite possibly the only one I ever will read, but I enjoyed it. The Eric Rober novella is definitely the best story in the issue, but all of them were entertaining. I consider this a good beginning to my efforts to figure out if Rober and T.W. Ford were the same person.