That's a nice dramatic cover on this issue of WESTERN ACTION. I don't know the artist, but I like his work here. Inside are two stories by Charles N. Heckelmann, one as himself and one under the house-name Mat Rand, a story by house-name Cliff Campbell, and three well-known Western pulpsters, Wayne D. Overholser, Stephen Payne, and C. William Harrison, to go along with lesser-known authors Clem Barton, Dick Robson, and Duane Yarnell. Some of those may be house-names, too, for all I know.
(This post originally appeared in different form on May 18, 2005.)
I just finished reading LONE RIDER FROM TEXAS, a Thorndike Large Print collection of seven of Peter Dawson's pulp Western stories:
"Manhunt in Malpais", WESTERN STORY, February 4, 1939
"Lawman of Latigo Wells", COWBOY STORIES, September 1936
"The Boom-Camp Terror", DIME WESTERN, June 1937
"A Renegade Guards the Gold Stage", STAR WESTERN, January 1938
"Bushwhack Heritage", WESTERN STORY, April 2, 1938
"This One Good Eye" (as "Owlhoot Nemesis"), WESTERN STORY, July 30, 1938
"Lone Rider From Texas" (as "Lone Raider From Texas"), WESTERN STORY, March 11, 1939
There are the usual informative story introductions by Jon Tuska. Although it doesn't say so anywhere, this is sort of a theme anthology. Most of the stories deal with outlaws going straight or trying to keep their shady past from catching up with them. All of them are excellent. Peter Dawson (Jonathan Glidden, the brother of Frederick Glidden, who wrote as Luke Short) was one of the best writers in the Western pulps and always kept the purple prose to a minumum, although it sometimes creeps in during the gunfight scenes (not necessarily a bad thing). This is my favorite of the Dawson collections I've read so far. It'll probably turn up eventually as a Leisure paperback, and if it does, it'll be well worth picking up.
(This collection did indeed appear as a Leisure paperback, as you can see from the cover above. It's even still available as an inexpensive e-book from Amazon, if you've never read Peter Dawson's work and would like to check out one of the best Western pulpsters.)
Down, down, down screamed the Hurribombers, their pilots letting the bombs go only at the last possible second. Their target was a chateau which sheltered Brigadefuhrer Helmut Groot, the Nazi killer whose very name put shivers down the spine of all who heard it.
And in case the bombs failed, Captain Steve Simpson and a small band of men were playing a desperate game of “Hunt the Killer”. They all hated Groot so much they were praying the bombs would miss so they could settle the score in their own way.
(A friend of mine who's read a lot more of this series than I have recommended issues with art by Gordon C. Livingstone. This is one such issue, and I can see why my friend recommended it. The art is excellent, reminding me at times of John Severin and at others of Neal Adams. And the script by long-time COMMANDO author Eric Hebden is fast-paced and interesting. The edition I read is actually a reprint. This story was published originally in 1968, in the early days of the COMMANDO series, under the title "The Worst Enemy". This is acknowledged inside the book, so the publisher isn't trying to pass it off as a new one. But it was new to me, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.)
BORDER RIVER is another Western movie I somehow missed seeing on TV when I was growing up. The river of the title is the Rio Grande, of course. As the movie opens, a little prologue explains that the river's shifting course has created a no man's land known as Zona Libre (the "free zone") which is ruled by a Mexican military tyrant played by Pedro Armendariz. The time is the last days of the American Civil War.
A Confederate agent played by Joel McCrea arrives in Zona Libre to buy guns, ammunition, and supplies for the Confederacy, using gold stolen from the mint in Denver. The set-up results in double-crosses and intrigue between McCrea's character and the general, as well as a romantic triangle involving the two of them and Yvonne De Carlo, playing the beautiful co-owner of the local saloon. There are some other shady characters on hand, including Alfonso Bedoya, chewing the scenery with his usual entertaining gusto as the general's main henchman. Nobody ever played roles like that better than Bedoya.
McCrea is a likable and solid hero, as always, and De Carlo is pretty good, too. The action scenes are okay but a little lackluster at times. The script is very predictable. But there's quicksand, and as Crider's Law states, any movie is better with quicksand in it. That's true here. BORDER RIVER is a very average Fifties Western, but it passed the time pleasantly enough and I'm glad we watched it.
That's a nice cover by Richard Lillis, an artist I'm not familiar with, on this issue of PRIVATE DETECTIVE STORIES. There's so much red and yellow on there I almost feel like I'm looking at a Western pulp cover. This issue is kind of an oddity in that there are no stories by Robert Leslie Bellem. However, the lineup of authors is still a good one: Roger Torrey, Wyatt Blassingame, Howard Wandrei (as Robert A. Garron), Victor Rousseau (as Lew Merrill), and lesser known writers Geoffrey North, Rex Whitechurch, and Donald C. Cameron.
This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The scan is from my copy, and the cover art is by Sam Cherry.
W.C. Tuttle’s series about range detectives Hashknife Hartley and Sleepy Stevens is justifiably more famous and successful than his series about another Mutt-and-Jeff pair of range detectives, Tombstone Jones and Speedy Smith, which ran for more than three dozen novelettes and novellas during the Forties and early Fifties, mostly in EXCITING WESTERN. I’ve always found the Tombstone and Speedy yarns reliably entertaining, though. Unlike Hashknife and Sleepy, Tombstone and Speedy are not, shall we say, the sharpest rowels on the spur. But while they may not be smart, they’re top-notch when it comes to fighting with gun or fist, and they solve plenty of complicated cases with a combination of luck, instinct, and cow country savvy. In “Six-Gun Cyclone”, the novelette in this issue, they’ve been fired by the Cattleman’s Association that usually employs them, but despite that they wind up in the middle of a case involving rustling, brand blotting, and a bank robbery, and of course they win their jobs back by bringing the bad guys to justice after a fast-paced blend of action and broad humor. Some of Tuttle’s stories are better than others, but I don’t think he’s ever let me down and this one is great fun.
Noel Loomis is best remembered these days as a science fiction author, but he wrote a considerable number of Westerns, too. His story in this issue, “Pitchfork Country”, is about a young couple trying to establish a farm in Colorado and clashing with their brutal cattleman neighbor. The history is a little shaky in this one, but it’s well-written and there’s an unusually violent fight at the end.
The novelette “No Peace for a Prodigal” is by Leslie Ernenwein, one of the old pros in the Western genre, and is a reprint from the First July Number, 1945 issue of RANCH ROMANCES. Like a lot of stories from RANCH ROMANCES, there’s not much actual romance in this one but plenty of action. A small rancher gets caught between the two sides in a range war, is framed for a murder, and has to fight his way out of trouble and expose the actual bad guys. This is a good, hardboiled Western action yarn by an author who knew how to keep a story moving along.
The next story, “Belled Cunning”, is by an author I don’t really care for, Harold F. Cruickshank, and is an animal story, with no human characters, and I’m not fond of those, either. So . . . I passed on this one.
“Jerk Line” by Willard Luce is a railroad yarn, and I do like those, so I enjoyed this tale of bank robbers trying to use a train for their getaway. This is a reprint and originally appeared in the January 1946 issue of RIO KID WESTERN.
Samuel Mines is best remembered, if at all, for being the editor of STARTLING STORIES and THRILLING WONDER STORIES for a while, but he also wrote a good number of Western stories, including a few of the Jim Hatfield novels in TEXAS RANGERS. His novelette in this issue, “Run, Sheep, Run”, is also a reprint, originally appearing in the May, 1944 issue of POPULAR WESTERN. It’s a very traditional cattlemen vs. sheepherders yarn, with the protagonist being the government man caught between the two factions, trying to resolve their differences without an all-out range war. The elements may be familiar, but Mines handles them well and the action scenes are very good.
When I started attending the Western Writers of America conventions on the mid-Eighties, Francis L. Fugate was one of the elder statesmen of the organization. He and his wife also wrote a well-regarded book about Erle Stanley Gardner. Unfortunately, his story that wraps up this issue, “Son of a Gun Stew”, about a chuck wagon cook’s encounter with an old enemy, never really caught my interest and I didn’t finish it.
Overall, I’d say this is an average, or maybe even slightly below average, issue of EXCITING WESTERN. The stories by Tuttle, Loomis, Ernenwein, and Mines are good but not outstanding, and the others range from just okay to didn’t-finish level. As always, though, I’m glad I read it.
Journalist Tom Wicker, best known for writing about politics, wrote three hardboiled crime novels for Gold Medal in the early to mid-Fifties under the pseudonym Paul Connolly. I didn’t know about this until last year when the great Paperback Warrior blog reviewed the middle one of that trio, TEARS ARE FOR ANGELS.
The protagonist and narrator, Harry London, is like a lot of Gold Medal protagonists: he’s not having a good day. In fact, he’s had a bad couple of years because of a tragedy that took his wife’s life and left him full of hatred and thirsting for vengeance on the man he blames for her death. That incident cost Harry his left arm, too, so he’s left crippled, drunk, nearly broke, and living in a shack on a worthless old farm somewhere in the South.
Then a beautiful young woman shows up, and yep, just like in a lot of other Gold Medal novels, Harry’s life suddenly changes. But since he finds himself caught up in a plan to murder the man who caused all his troubles, it’s up for debate whether that change is actually for the better . . . or if it’s going to cost Harry his life, too.
A typical Gold Medal plot this may be, but Wicker’s prose is so smooth and vivid that it elevates TEARS ARE FOR ANGELS into the top rank of books from that iconic publisher, a worthy companion to the best novels by Harry Whittington, Charles Williams, John D. MacDonald, and Day Keene. The first half of the novel is, frankly, a little slow, but the second half races by, especially the last 40 or 50 pages. Wicker really had me flipping the pages to see what was going to happen, and that’s about the highest compliment I can pay to a book. This is top-notch hardboiled fiction and will soon appear in a reprint edition from Stark House’s excellent Black Gat line. I give this one a high recommendation. If you’re a fan of hardboiled crime fiction, you need to read it.
They were a motley bunch - two Scotsmen, one Englishman, one Welshman, one Irishman and an Australian. Led by the unconventional Captain James Ramsey, they were known as the Special Raiding Force, and their job was to operate behind enemy lines in North Africa. They wrote their own rules, and their specially armed jeeps packed a real punch.
They were good at their job - very good - and the Germans had every reason to fear Ramsey's Raiders!
When I was a kid, I loved the TV series THE RAT PATROL, as well as the paperback tie-in novels based on it. When I was writing my World War II series years ago, that was a big influence on parts of those novels, as well. As you can see from the description above, this Commando comic, RAMSEY’S RAIDERS, uses a similar premise, and does a great job of it as far as I’m concerned. Written by Ferg Handley, with art by Ian Kennedy, I found it to be a very enjoyable yarn. There are several more Ramsey’s Raiders stories in the Commando series, and I plan to read them all.
I’m not sure which Spaghetti Western was the first one I ever watched, but I think it may have been A PISTOL FOR RINGO, which came out in 1964 and starred “Montgomery Wood”, actually Italian actor Guiliano Gemma. I remember watching it on TV at my sister’s house in 1969 or ’70. But whether that was the first one or not, I’ve seen plenty of ’em since then and nearly always enjoyed them. Sure, they’re not at all realistic, but neither are the American B-Westerns that I love so dearly. The Spaghetti Westerns have different but interesting sensibilities and traditions.
You won’t find a better examination of the genre than Fred Blosser’s new book SONS OF RINGO: THE GREAT SPAGHETTI WESTERN HEROES. Blosser knows these movies very well and probably has seen more of them than anyone else I know, and he writes about them extremely well, discussing the actors, writers, and directors who made them and tracing the evolution of the genre over the years of its popularity. What you get is a very readable volume that’s both informative and entertaining. This book makes me realize there are still a lot of Spaghetti Westerns out there that I haven’t seen yet and really makes me want to watch them. I suspect I’ll be doing so soon. In the meantime, if you’re a fan of these movies, you can’t go wrong with SONS OF RINGO. I give it a high recommendation.
Gangway! I'm not sure why I like this cover by L.J. Cronin, an artist I'm not familiar with, but I really do. It just seems dynamic to me. And of course, ADVENTURE had some pretty dynamic authors in its pages, too, including in this issue Talbot Mundy, with a story featuring a character named Ben Quorn (also unfamiliar to me), Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Allan Vaughan Elston, Thomson Burtis, Bill Adams, and Warren Hastings Miller, among others.
