Happy Thanksgiving

 . . . from me and Cthulhu.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Adventures, August 1936

I don't know the artist (Richard Lyon, maybe?), but this is an eye-catching cover on this issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES. Nor am I familiar with Crawford Sullivan, evidently the real name of the author who wrote the featured story. But I know the work of the other authors in this one: Tom Curry, Frederick C. Painton, Jack D'Arcy (D.L. Champion), Chart Pitt, S. Gordon Gurwit, and William Merriam Rouse. An adventurous bunch, indeed!

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, June 1932

Here's another excellent cover by Arthur Mitchell, this time on an issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE. This pulp always had good writers, and this issue is no exception: Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, Art Lawson, C.K. Shaw, Foster-Harris, and Samuel Taylor all have stories in this one. Taylor is probably better remembered for his mysteries than his Westerns, but he wrote a lot in both genres.

The Gun With the Waiting Notch - Stone Cody (Thomas Mount)

Jed Carson is a drifting cowpoke who comes to the Texas border country on a mission: He’s searching for the man who murdered his father. He carries an ivory-handled Colt with a notch already carved in the butt, just waiting for Jed to catch up to the killer and dispense hot-lead justice.

But no sooner does Jed mosey onto this range than he finds himself rescuing a rancher’s beautiful daughter from a menacing gunman. He quickly discovers that this region is plagued by rustlers and decides to help the girl and her crippled father fight off the outlaws. But is it possible that this might dovetail nicely with Jed’s original mission and afford him the opportunity to finally settle the score with his father’s murderer after years of searching? I think you probably know the answer to that question just as well as I do.

Predictable or not, THE GUN WITH THE WAITING NOTCH is a very entertaining Western. The author (more about him later) spends about a fourth of the book setting up the various characters and factions warring along the border and giving us the hero’s back-story, and then the rustlers raid the Circle T round-up and set off a series of furious action scenes that continue almost without pause to the end of the book. Battle follows chase follows shoot-out with only very short respites for the characters to catch their breath. Some of the clashes reach almost epic proportions before a very satisfying final showdown and some last-minute revelations worthy of Walt Coburn. There’s nothing here you haven’t read many times before, but it’s very well done and I had a great time reading it.

THE GUN WITH THE WAITING NOTCH was published in September 1933 by William Morrow, had a cheap hardback reprint from A.L. Burt later that year, and was reprinted in England by Cassell in 1934 under the title CAROL OF CIRCLE T. It was reprinted, again in England, by Ward Lock in 1952 under that same title, and then in 1958, Jefferson House brought it out in hardback under its original as part of its Triple-A Western Classics line, with an introduction by Erle Stanley Gardner. That edition carries a 1938 original copyright date, but that’s incorrect. The Morrow edition was definitely published in September 1933. Kirkus reviewed it the same month and said, “A new Western writer, and a promising one. This has all the proper ingredients, well blended. Not particularly original in plot, but the telling has punch.” Yeah, pretty much what I said.

The by-line on this novel is Stone Cody, but behind that pseudonym is a pretty interesting Western novelist and pulpster. “Stone Cody” was really Thomas Ernest Mount (1898-1976), a former advertising man who, according to the copyright registration, lived in Woodstock, New York, at the time this book came out. As far as I’ve been able to determine, THE GUN WITH THE WAITING NOTCH is Mount’s second novel. His first, MUSTANG TRAIL, was published earlier in 1933 under the name “Oliver King”, a pseudonym he used for some of his later pulp stories. I don’t have a copy of MUSTANG TRAIL, but Kirkus said of it, “Lots of shooting and a bit of humor in a Western which departs somewhat from the conventional pattern. Card sharping and horse thieving, etc.” The next year, 1934, saw him begin a prolific career of writing for the Western pulps that lasted twenty years. He used both King and Cody pseudonyms and published several more novels under the Cody name, but it appears they were all reprints of the Five Mavericks pulp novels that were published originally under the name Kent Thorn. (The Mavericks novels are still in print from Altus Press/Steeger Books, by the way.)

Mount’s story has more to it than his Western writing, though. He was working at an advertising agency in New York in 1923 when he met a young copywriter named Laura Zemetkin. They moved in together and lived as husband and wife for several years but never actually married because Mount was already married to somebody else. After their relationship ended, Laura married publishing executive Thayer Hobson in 1930. Hobson bought the company he worked for, William Morrow, and decided to write a Western novel that his newly-bought company would publish. He came up with the characters and plot, and he and Laura collaborated on the book itself, writing alternating chapters, before Hobson edited the final draft. That book was OUTLAWS THREE, the first book in the very successful Powder Valley series that would run for thirty years, written by various Western authors under the house-name Peter Field. Thayer and Laura Hobson wrote the first two or three novels in the series before turning it over to other authors. They divorced in 1935.

Laura Hobson published her first short story in 1932 under the name Laura Mount. After her divorce from Thayer Hobson, she and Thomas Mount became friends again, although not in a romantic way. There are some indications that Laura Hobson may have collaborated with Mount on some of his Western stories, but at this late date we’ll probably never know for sure about that. However, we do know that under the name Laura Z. Hobson, she went on to become a bestselling novelist, with her most famous work being the novel GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT. I have no idea whether her early relationship with Thomas Mount had anything to do with her becoming a writer, but I like to think that it did.

THE GUN WITH THE WAITING NOTCH is the second novel by Thomas Mount that I’ve read. Many years ago, I read a hardback reprint of FIVE AGAINST THE LAW, the first of the Five Mavericks novels, but I don’t recall anything about it except that I enjoyed it. I liked this one enough that I want to read more by Thomas Mount. If you’re a fan of action-packed traditional Westerns, I give THE GUN WITH THE WAITING NOTCH a high recommendation.

(Note: My copy of this is just a plain brown hardcover with no dust jacket, and I can’t find any images of either edition on-line, so I’m using an image I found of one of the British reprints. The title and cover make the book look like a Western romance, which it definitely isn't.)

A Million Words and Counting, One Last time

I knew I was approaching a million words again this year, but I've been so busy I just forgot about it. So it slipped by me on Saturday when I passed that mark for the 17th straight year. This is actually the earliest I've achieved that in several years. There had been some rough patches this year, but some really productive stretches, too. However (and stop me if you've heard this before; on second thought, don't), this will be the end of the streak. When Rough Edges Press was relaunched as part of Wolfpack Publishing and I agreed to stay on as the editor, I knew that job would take up a lot of my writing time. I still had (and still have) quite a few writing commitments, so I've been juggling both jobs for the past couple months and will continue to do so through much of next year. But I don't have as many books under contract anymore, so I can start easing out of that full-time writing schedule over the next six months or so.

Of course, one should never say never. I have several books of my own I'd like to write, so who knows how much I'll find the time to do. Really, though, I expect my output to be more like half a million words.

As always, thanks to Livia, Shayna, and Joanna for making everything I do possible, not just the writing, and to all the editors over the years who have put their trust in me, and most of all to the readers who enjoy my books and stories. You've all made this journey a lot of fun.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Black Book Detective Magazine, June 1937

Norman Saunders covers are always full of action and detail, and this one on the June 1937 issue of BLACK BOOK DETECTIVE MAGAZINE is no exception. This was the final issue of this pulp from Ranger Publications. It was relaunched ten months later by Better Publications (the Thrilling Group) and a little more than a year after that became the home of the series character The Black Bat. The Ranger Publications version didn't fail because of the covers or the authors it published. There are only four stories in this issue, and they're by Philip Ketchum, Norman A. Daniels, Robert Sidney Bowen, and Allan K. Echols, all of them top-notch pulpsters.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, December 1936

The Gun-Totin' Redhead, a fixture on the covers of Western pulps from Popular Publications, even shows up on Dell's ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, as in this cover by Arthur Mitchell. She doesn't appear particularly angry in this one, more like annoyed, but she's still ready to burn some powder and throw some lead. It's a safe bet that plenty of powder gets burned inside this issue, with stories by Tom Roan, Charles M. Martin, Hapsburg Liebe, Sam H. Nickels, Galen C. Colin, house-name Clay Starr (who might well have been Martin, too), and lesser known authors Victor Kaufman and Stanley Hofflund.

Gang Rumble - Edward Ronns (Edward S. Aarons)

Despite the title and cover painting, GANG RUMBLE by Edward Ronns (Edward S. Aarons) isn’t really a juvenile delinquent novel as we usually think of them. One of the main characters is the warlord of a gang, and there’s a rumble at a bowling alley (although it takes place mostly off-screen), but this is actually a tidy little crime/suspense novel that takes place in about twelve hours, one hot Saturday night in a bad neighborhood in Philadelphia known as the Jungle.

There isn’t really a protagonist in this novel. Instead we have a large cast of characters weaving in and out of the story, including the above-mentioned gang warlord, his toadying sidekick, a hanger-on from a rich family who’s really a brutal sociopath, an old cop with a drinking problem, his beautiful daughter, the old cop’s idealistic rookie partner, a wealthy reformer who wants to clean up the city’s youth gangs, and a scheming underworld boss. Mix them all together and you come up with murder and a desperate hunt for a killer, with some torture and rape thrown in for good measure. GANG RUMBLE, as you might expect, is a pretty lurid book.

It’s also very well-written, and old paperback pro Aarons keeps the pace rocketing along. I had no idea what was going to happen next and kept flipping the pages to find out. If there’s one flaw in this book, it’s that the ending isn’t quite as dramatic as it could have been, which actually is pretty common in Aarons’ books, as if he can’t quite bring himself to go all the way over the top.

Despite that, I really enjoyed GANG RUMBLE and give it a high recommendation. As far as I know, it hasn’t been reprinted since being published by Avon in 1958, but Black Gat Books has a new edition coming out soon. It’s an excellent suspense novel and is well worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, October 10, 1932

That's a nice, evocative "red sun" cover by Edgar Franklin Wittmack on this issue of SHORT STORIES. And you certainly can't argue with the great bunch of writers inside: H. Bedford-Jones, W.C. Tuttle, William Chamberlain, James B. Hendryx, Lemuel de Bra, and Cliff Farrell, among others. Jacland Marmur is listed on the cover but according to the Fictionmags Index doesn't actually have a story in this issue. Still plenty of good adventure reading there.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western, October 15, 1934

Nearly all of the DIME WESTERN covers from this era feature the same redheaded girl, usually angry and toting a gun. With covers like this, you can understand why she was mad. Tied to a cactus? That's just not right. You can't go wrong, though, with the authors in this issue: Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted (twice, once as himself and once as Bart Cassidy with a Tensleep Maxon story), E.B. Mann (with a Whistler novelette), Miles Overholt, and Malcolm Reiss, who's probably better remembered as an editor for Fiction House but who turned out a decent number of pulp stories himself.