Price is a long-time favorite of mine. Some of his stories are better than others, of course, but it seems like he always brought a solid effort to everything he wrote, no matter what the genre or market. Many years ago I got my hands on a copy of FAR LANDS, OTHER DAYS, a massive collection of his adventure stories from various pulps, and I absolutely loved it. I own a copy of that volume now, and I ought to reread it one of these days.
In the meantime, “Master of Dragons” is a World War II espionage yarn. Naval intelligence agent Gil Jordan undergoes plastic surgery to make him look like a shady Australian who may be working as a spy for the Japanese in the Dutch East Indies in the days shortly before Pearl Harbor. When the man is murdered, Jordan takes his place and finds himself up to his neck in a dangerous investigation involving a Japanese society of assassins, a beautiful and mysterious blonde who can’t be trusted, hidden airfields, and a date with a firing squad. Price keeps things moving along briskly, and although there are definitely some pulpish elements, this reads a little more like a serious espionage story of the type that would become more prevalent in the Fifties and Sixties.
I have a strong hunch that it was written a short time before Pearl Harbor, when people suspected the Japanese were about to do something but weren’t sure what, and then the ending was revised before the story was published in May 1942. But like I said, that’s just a hunch. Either way, it’s a good story and I enjoyed it.
Elsewhere in this issue, there’s a really strong line-up of authors, including H. Bedford-Jones, Day Keene, William MacLeod Raine, Caddo Cameron, Robert R. Mill, S. Omar Barker, H.S.M. Kemp, and Phil Richards. SHORT STORIES was a consistently top-notch adventure pulp and this appears to be an above-average issue.
The question is, did Maynard adapt it from any of his Flame Burns stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY? That certainly seems possible. Most of the Flame Burns pulp stories also feature Billy the Kid as a character, and in BOSS OF THE CHISHOLM TRAIL, Flame meets Billy for the first time, suggesting that this Big Little Book may have been taken from “Trail Pardners”, Flame’s debut novelette in the February 29, 1936 issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. Not having a copy of that issue, I can’t check for sure.
This is as good a place as any to mention that Maynard totally mixes up Jesse Chisholm, who laid out the route that came to be known as the Chisholm Trail, and John Chisum, the New Mexico rancher who was both friend and enemy to Billy the Kid at different times. However, is strict historical accuracy all that important in a book like this? Probably not.
Flame sets out to deliver Chisholm’s cattle to Abilene, but trouble lurks along the way in the person of the evil Whiskey Dick Slavens and his gang of rustlers. Flame has a personal run-in with Slavens even before leaving Santa Fe, so the varmint has a grudge against our hero to start with. Stampedes and gunfights ensue as Flame tries to meet the challenges of his first real job as a trail boss.
Despite being aimed at a juvenile audience, BOSS OF THE CHISHOLM TRAIL is no namby-pamby, “nobody dies” kid’s book. On the contrary, guns blaze a lot, and hombres both good and bad get ventilated on a regular basis. The violence may have been toned down a little, but this is a pretty hardboiled yarn. Obviously, kids in the Thirties were expected to be tough enough to take it. The story races along and comes to a satisfying conclusion.
My copy is missing the spine and is in fairly rough shape, but the text is all there and easy to read. The cover is truly ugly. The interior illustrations are by Ralph Hitchcock, and while most of them are pretty crude, some are not bad and do a good job of capturing the action. I’m not a collector or a regular reader of Big Little Books, although I read a lot of them as a kid when they were easier to find. But when one comes my way, I’m not going to hesitate to pick it up if it looks interesting.
I had read one of the later Flame Burns stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY and thought it was okay but nothing more than that. I think I actually enjoyed this version more. It’s an oddity, sure, but an entertaining one.
Solo Strant is a drifting gunfighter. He doesn’t hire out his gun, but he’s quick to pitch in when he sees someone being taken advantage of or an innocent person being threatened. As this yarn opens, that’s what happens when a gang of gun-wolves attacks a small ranch. Solo rides to the rescue, but as it turns out, he may not have done the right thing after all, since it looks like the rancher he rescued may be a murderer!
That’s the first mistake Solo makes in this story, but it’s not the last one. In fact, he seems uncharacteristically prone to making the wrong decisions. But that may have something to do with the extremely complicated plot Ford comes up with, which deals with a generations-long feud between two ranching families, assorted murders, mistaken identities, and the Haunted Corral, which is not a corral at all but rather an area of badlands where folks go in, but they seldom come out alive. The whole “shadow of the past” element in this novelette reminds me of many of Walt Coburn’s novels and stories.
“Feud of the Haunted Corral” is a fast-moving, entertaining story. Solo Strant is a likable protagonist, and I’ve enjoyed every story I’ve read about him. It’s pretty easy to spot the evil mastermind in this one, but that doesn’t take away from the pleasure of reading it. My thanks to Cullen for making that possible.
Elsewhere in this issue are stories by a number of WILD WEST WEEKLY stalwarts. Norman W. Hay, writing under the house-name William A. Todd, contributes a Risky McKee yarn. (All the Risky McKee stories are by Hay, and while William A. Todd is considered a house-name, it’s possible Hay wrote everything under that by-line. We’ll probably never know for sure.) There’s a Calamity Boggs story by Lee Bond. Guy L. Maynard pitches in with a Reckless Blaine story. (There are six Reckless Blaine stories, published in six consecutive issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY. I’d be surprised if Maynard didn’t cobble them together into a fix-up novel, but if he did, I can’t find any record of it.) J. Allan Dunn, Charles M. Martin, and Carl Raht contribute stand-alone stories. This appears to be a very good issue of one of my favorite Western pulps.
Edwin Booth is a familiar name to me because he wrote at least a dozen Western novels, many of them published in the Ace Doubles line. I don’t recall ever reading anything by him until now. He’s the author of this issue’s lead novella, “Once a Killer”, which finds the protagonist, Fred Irwin, returning to the hometown he left ten years earlier after killing a man in a gunfight. Everybody figured that meant he had turned into an outlaw, but in reality, he’s become a hard-working cowboy and finally saved up enough money to buy a ranch of his own. Unfortunately, he finds himself in the middle of trouble orchestrated by a crooked saloon owner who wants to take over the town and all the surrounding ranches. Naturally, Irwin comes to the aid of an old rancher and the man’s beautiful daughter, and more trouble ensues. This is a very standard plot, but Booth provides some nice action scenes and a few well-developed characters. Overall, though, his style is definitely on the bland side, and that keeps this story from having the impact it might have had otherwise. It’s not bad, and I would read Booth’s work again, but I’m not going to be on the lookout for it.
Frank C. Robertson was a long-time, very prolific Western pulpster and novelist. His short story in this issue, “Practical Woman”, is a contemporary Western set in the Fifties, a domestic drama about the marriage of a spinster schoolteacher and a hard-headed rancher. It’s well-written, as all of Robertson’s work that I’ve read is, but it’s very low-key and unexciting and really peters out in the end. Robertson was a good author, but this isn’t a very good story.
Thankfully, old reliable Walker A. Tompkins comes along next with the novelette “The Deputy’s Daughter”. In this one, a young cowboy who buys a ranch finds himself framed for murder by the local cattle baron who wants to take over his spread. His only hope is the deputy sheriff’s beautiful blond daughter, who takes a likin’ to him and believes he’s innocent. This is a fast-moving, very entertaining yarn that suffers a little from the fact that it’s not a novella or even an actual novel. I felt like it could have used some room to develop the plot and characters more, and because of that, the ending feels a little rushed. I still liked it quite a bit, though.
“Heritage of Wrath” by M.E. Bradshaw (Marjory Bradshaw) is a Mountie story about a young RCMP officer who has to arrest the father of the girl he loves for murder, which makes her break off their engagement because she refuses to believe he’s guilty. Our Mountie hero has to dig deeper into the case to find out what really happened. This is an okay tale with a somewhat disappointing ending. Bradshaw published two dozen stories during the Fifties, all of them in RANCH ROMANCES.
Stephen Payne was very prolific, turning out several hundred stories for various Western pulps and digests between 1925 and 1970, along with a handful of novels. “Killer’s Conscience” in this issue is narrated by a 14-year-old ranch kid whose father was convicted of a murder he didn’t commit and sent to prison. The narrator’s encounter with an outlaw may hold the key to clearing his father’s name. This is a solid, well-written story that I enjoyed.
There’s also an installment of a serialized novel, Philip Ketchum’s THE STALKERS, that I didn’t read. I may have the book version of that one. I’ll have to check my shelves.
I should mention, as well, that there are several excellent interior illustrations by Everett Raymond Kinstler. I don’t talk about interior illustrations much, and I probably should. Kinstler was one of the very best at those.
Overall, considering how highly I rate many of the 1950s issues of RANCH ROMANCES, this one is probably a little below average. All of the stories kept me reading, but none of them really stood out as being top-notch, either. The ones by Tompkins and Payne are easily the best of the bunch, and the one by Booth is worth reading. Maybe don’t rush to your shelves to see if you have a copy, though.
According to the Fictionmags Index, Bedford-Jones wrote other Denis Burke stories that were published in THE POPULAR MAGAZINE before these, and more published afterward in SHORT STORIES. Not having read them, I don’t know how they’re related, nor do I know right offhand if they’ve ever been reprinted. But I do know BUCCANEER BLOOD is a fine collection, and if you’re a Bedford-Jones fan or just enjoy pirate yarns in general, I give it a high recommendation. It's available in e-book and paperback editions from Amazon.
Well, I’m not one to ignore an omen like that, so I promptly read “The Rider From Hell”, which is almost long enough to be considered an actual novel, as it’s billed in its STAR WESTERN appearance.
If I had to guess, I’d say this yarn is set somewhere around the turn of the Twentieth Century. Two adventurers from Texas, seasoned frontiersman John Thurston and his young friend Dal Givens, are captured south of the border while smuggling ammunition to Mexican revolutionaries. They’re put on trial and thrown into a Mexican prison from which no gringo has ever come out alive, let alone escaped. The commandant of the prison has an idea, though: he knows the prisoners have stashed $5000 in gold somewhere north of the Rio Grande in Texas, so he’ll set up an “escape” for one of them, who will retrieve the gold and then return to the prison to ransom his friend. Dal Givens is the one who will go, leaving John Thurston locked up in the hellhole for the time being.
Of course, things don’t work out that way. Givens never returns with the ransom, and a spy for the commandant brings back the news that the young man has rejoined the outlaw gang with which he and Thurston used to run. Filled with hate at being double-crossed and abandoned like this, Thurston vows to escape for real, track down Givens, and have his revenge on his former partner.
I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to reveal that Thurston does get away and try to carry out his plan, but since this is one of those stories where very little is what it first appears to be, Case throws in plot twist after plot twist on the way to an inevitable showdown. Do some of these twists stretch credibility just a tad too much and verge on melodrama? Well, yeah, they do. Did I care? Not at all. Case makes the reader want to believe these things are possible, and so they do.
“The Rider From Hell” reminds me very much of the work of Case’s contemporary Frederick Faust, especially the physical and psychological torment through which he puts his characters. In fact, if I hadn’t known who wrote this one, I might well have believed it’s a previously unknown Max Brand yarn. This really makes me want to read more by Case. I didn’t know anything about him, so here’s some biographical info I found on-line.
Robert Ormond Case was a well-known Oregon author and a prominent, long-time resident of Portland. He was born in Dallas, Texas in 1895 and moved to Portland as a boy. He graduated from Tualatin Academy in Forest Grove, Oregon and went on to attend the University of Oregon.
In 1917, while a sophomore at the University, Case enlisted in the U.S. Army. He served 22 months with the 65th Artillery, CAC, including 52 consecutive days at the front. Case returned to U.O. and received a B.A. in 1920. During his years at the university he was a member of the Delta Tau Delta social fraternity, Sigma Delta Chi honorary journalistic society, and Sigma Upsilon honorary fiction society. In addition he was a member of the Cross-Roads philosophical society and founder of a campus humor magazine.
After his graduation from the University of Oregon. Case went to work as a reporter for the Portland Morning Oregonian. In 1921 he served as financial editor. From 1922 to 1925 he was involved in the Oregon State Chamber of Commerce. His career as a free-lance writer began in 1926 and soon thereafter published his first western, historically-inspired stories. He is best remembered as a writer of western stories, his most well-known dating from the 1930s through the 1950s. He wrote fourteen books and over 200 novelettes. In 1944 he received a Peabody award for the radio scripts of Song of Columbia. Most of Case's serials and short stories were written for national magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's and Country Gentleman.
Case spent most of his mature life in Portland, Oregon with periods of residency in New York and California. In Portland he was a member of the school board as well as the City Club and the Rotarians. He was a prominent member of the state Republican Party, particularly as a leader of the Conservative wing during the time of Wayne Morse. He spent the final years of his life in Oakland, California, where he died on 27 March 1964.
“The Rider From Hell” appears to be Case’s only fiction available in an e-book edition, but used copies of some of his novels are readily available and fairly inexpensive, and there are quite a few pulps containing his stories to be found on the Internet Archive. Like a lot of other Western fiction from that era, his work may not resonate with some modern readers, but I flat-out loved this story and give it a very high recommendation.
This issue leads off with another Tombstone and Speedy novelette by W.C. Tuttle, “The Hunches of Tombstone Jones”. In this one, our intrepid range detective duo aren’t on the trail of rustlers for a change. As a favor to their boss at the Cattlemen’s Association, they set out to investigate a case of high-grading at a gold mine. But when they arrive on the scene, they find the mine owner and his lawyer both dead. Is it murder? What does it have to do with the kidnapping of an inept young drummer from back east who sells ladies’ ready-to-wear goods? Why’s everybody so interested in a beautiful young woman and her son? Tombstone and Speedy will untangle all those threads, of course, with a lot of banter and gunplay along the way. After being a little disappointed in the last yarn I read in this series, “The Hunches of Tombstone Jones” really hits the mark. The dialogue is funny, the action is good, the detective work, mostly by Tombstone, is canny, and the plot hangs together nicely. This is a top-notch Tombstone and Speedy story.
“Catch Rope” is the third and final story in Chuck Martin’s short-lived series about crippled range detective Jim Bowen. It’s a good hardboiled Western yarn in which Bowen goes after a gang of rustlers who have kidnapped a rancher. Martin is nearly always worth reading, and this is an enjoyable story. I hoped it would bring some resolution to Jim Bowen’s continuing storyline, but it doesn’t, which is a shame.
Nels Leroy Jorgensen started out as a hardboiled crime and mystery writer in BLACK MASK before concentrating on Westerns later in his career, and I’ve enjoyed a number of his stories in the past. “Bullet Trail to Bexar”, his novelette in this issue, gets off to a promising start. It’s set in Texas in the spring of 1836, during the Texas revolution, and is about a young Texan on a mission to San Antonio. He gets saddled with a beautiful young woman along the way, and she has an agenda of her own. This should be a good story, but it’s riddled with anachronisms and blatant historical errors, as well as continuity glitches such as the young woman’s stepfather suddenly becoming her half-brother for the rest of the story. I wound up abandoning this one halfway through. It just has too many problems for it to be entertaining to me.
“Killer, Here I Come” is by Robert J. Hogan, best-known for the G-8 series, of course, but he wrote quite a few Westerns as well. This is the second story in this issue where the protagonist has a crippled leg. In this case, he’s not a range detective but rather a saddlemaker and veterinarian. He’s a very likable character, and you can’t help but root for him as he has to deal with an old enemy turned bank robber. I didn’t like this one whole-heartedly—there’s some cruelty to animals in it, and I have a hard time with that—but it’s a pretty good story overall.
Tom Parsons was a Thrilling Group house-name. The story under that by-line in this issue, “Born to Hang”, is the one illustrated by Cherry’s cover. Actually, I strongly suspect this is another case of a story being written to match an existing cover painting, because the scene lines up perfectly with the story. I also think there’s a very good chance the story was written by editor Charles S. Strong, who was also Western writer Chuck Stanley, author of a regular non-fiction column in EXCITING WESTERN. It’s a good yarn about a drifter framed for murder, and its only real drawback is that the ending isn’t as dramatic as it might have been. Still an enjoyable story, though.
Arizona Ranger Navajo Tom Raine has become one of my favorite Western pulp characters. In “Ride the Ghost Down, Ranger!”, he’s sent to find out who’s been attacking and burning out some homesteaders, which leads him to a mystery involving the inheritance of a valuable ranch. It’s a good story, and I’m convinced it’s the work of Lee Bond writing under the house-name Jackson Cole. Bond created the Navajo Tom Raine series and wrote more of the stories than anyone else, although C. William Harrison contributed quite a few, as well. This one ends with a big shootout between Raine and multiple bad guys, one of the trademarks of his stories.
The issue wraps up with “Reba Rides Alone” by D.B. Newton, one of my favorite Western authors. Of course, I can’t see that title without thinking about the country singer, but in this case, Reba is Mike Reba, a veteran outlaw who’s wounded and on the run when he encounters a young man determined to take up the owlhoot trail. This story is kind of predictable, but it’s very well written, and like all of Newton’s work, it’s worth reading.
This is a good issue overall of EXCITING WESTERN with a strong Tombstone and Speedy entry, a solid Navajo Tom Raine story, and the other stories are all okay with the exception of Jorgensen’s. If you have a copy, it’s certainly worth taking down from the shelves. If you don’t, the whole issue is also available on the Internet Archive.
