Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western Stories, August 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know who did the cover. The background looks like A. Leslie Ross’s work to me, but the figures don’t. Whoever painted it, I think it’s a fairly effective cover. Since it was a Columbia pulp, REAL WESTERN STORIES had a reputation as a low-budget production, but editor Robert W. Lowndes regularly turned out enjoyable magazines, and I was eager to find out if this issue was one of them.

A friend of mine is a fan of Seven Anderton’s work, and based on his recommendation I’ve read several of Anderton’s stories over the years. His novella “Cyclone in Petticoats” leads off this issue. It opens with a determined young woman named Ruth Horn arriving from the East in the Western town where her uncle owns the bank. He’s her last living relative, or so she thinks. Actually, the bank was robbed and her uncle was killed a short time before she got there. During the journey, she’s made the acquaintance of veterinarian “Bones” Egan, who fills her in on the troubles in the area brought on a corrupt banker and a crooked cattleman, and Ruth decides to stick around, run the bank, and break the hold that the two villains have on the town and the basin where it’s located.

This is a very well-written story with lots of good dialogue, interesting characters, and a well-handled romance between Ruth and Egan. Anderton keeps things moving along at a nice pace. What there’s a shortage of is action. The story is almost over before anybody burns any powder. The big showdown/battle is pretty good, mind you. I enjoyed “Cyclone in Petticoats” mostly because of Anderton’s excellent prose.

If you’ve never read any of Lon Williams’ stories about Deputy Lee Winters . . . well, there’s really nothing else in the Western pulps like this lengthy series. Winters is always running into bizarre situations, often with a hint, or more than a hint, of the supernatural. Sometimes, as in “A Desert Hippocrates”, the story in this issue, the threat facing Winters is just weird. The plot involves a pair of British doctors in the Old West performing some rather odd surgeries. Williams’ work has a very distinctive voice, which I like, but I’ve found the Lee Winters series to be hit and miss for me, and probably more misses than hits. This one is an average entry, mildly entertaining, but somehow it doesn’t quite work.

Lee Floren makes his first of two appearances in this issue with the short story “A Trap for a Skunk”, under the pseudonym Lew Smith. I’m not a big fan of Floren’s work, but his stories usually move along at a nice clip and this one is no exception. The plot concerns a couple of old-timers who have to take drastic action to save a young friend of theirs from the cattle baron who’s plotting to kill him. This isn’t a bad yarn, but I thought it was sorely lacking one final twist that it needed. The ending is really flat.

A.A. Baker worked for Grayhound Bus Lines and wrote Western novels and short stories on the side, publishing steadily but never achieving much fame in the genre. I don’t recall ever reading anything by him before, but his short story in this issue, “Abel Cain Strikes Back”, is pretty good. Abel Cain is a frontier judge keeping law and order in a California mining boomtown. In this yarn, a mob storms the jail not to lynch a prisoner but to free him so that he can lead his rescuers to a new gold strike. Baker throws a nice twist into the mix and comes up with an entertaining story featuring good characters and some nice action. Baker wrote more than thirty Abel Cain stories between 1948 and 1959, and I wouldn’t mind reading more of them.

Richard Brister wrote hundreds of Western, detective, and sports stories for the pulps as well as a dozen or so Western novels. His short story in this issue, “Learn and Live”, concerns an encounter between a notorious outlaw and the consumptive doctor who patches up a bullet wound for him. It’s well-written and clever, a pretty good yarn.

“Boothill Double-Cross” is by Crag Martin, an author about whom I know absolutely nothing except that he published nine stories in various Western pulps in the early Fifties. This one is about a young sheriff trying to clear the name of a friend of his who has been accused of robbing the local bank. It’s a very predictable story with nothing that stands out about the writing or the plot. Average at best, partially redeemed by some decent action at the end.

“The Lie” is by Fred Landreth, his only credit in the Fictionmags Index. That always makes me wonder if the name was a one-time pseudonym. I don’t know about that, but this short-short about a youngster visiting the camp of two notorious outlaws, bent on taking up a career as an owlhoot himself, is well-written. There’s not much to it, but I enjoyed it.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a big fan of Lee Floren’s work, mostly because it’s so inconsistent. I think his early novels about drifting adventurers Buck McKee and Tortilla Joe are my favorites of what I’ve read by him. Floren wrote another long-running series about two-fisted jurist Judge Lemanuel Bates and his sidekick, postmaster Tobacco Jones. More than two dozen of these yarns were published in various pulps. Floren’s novelette in this issue, “Loco Lead”, is the next to last Judge Bates story in the pulps, although he would continue to write novels about the character throughout the Sixties. This is a pretty good one featuring a would-be killer employing an unusual method in an attempt to commit murder. The plot is solid, there’s some nice action, and I found Judge Bates and Tobacco Jones to be likable protagonists. The only sign of Floren’s frequent carelessness is that one of the characters changes names almost paragraph to paragraph, sometimes called Bart Smith and sometimes Luke Smith. I suppose Stan Lee would have explained that by saying that his full name is Barton Lucas Smith. Also, Lowndes should have caught that, but I doubt that he did much diligent line editing on these stories. I don’t recall ever reading any of the stories in this series before, but based on “Loco Lead”, I wouldn’t hesitate to try another one. I might even check and see if I have any of Floren’s Judges Bates novels on my shelves.

Overall, I’d say this is a very average issue of REAL WESTERN STORIES. The best story is Seven Anderton’s novella, which is very good although I thought it could be better. Lee Floren surprised me by contributing my second-favorite story in this issue with “Loco Lead”, followed by A.A. Baker with a tale about another frontier judge, Abel Cain. The other stories are all readable with varying degrees of entertainment value. If you’re inclined to check out any of these stories for yourself, you can find the entire issue on-line here.

One Good Deed - David Baldacci

Aloysius Archer is a combat veteran of World War II and also an ex-con who was sent to prison for a crime he was tricked into. When he’s released on parole in 1949, he winds up in Poca City, a small city in an unidentified Western state that’s probably Colorado, based on geographic clues in David Baldacci’s novel ONE GOOD DEED. Although Archer is supposed to stay out of trouble, he soon finds himself working for a rich local businessman, hired to collect a debt from the guy’s mortal enemy. Not only that, but Archer gets involved with the rich man’s beautiful mistress, who just happens to be the daughter of the man who owes the debt. Add a beautiful female parole officer with a deadly background of her own into the mix, and then a murder where it looks like Archer has been set up to be the fall guy, and you have the makings of a tough, terse Gold Medal-type novel, which is exactly what I think perennial bestseller Baldacci was trying to write in ONE GOOD DEED.

This trend continues with more murders, convoluted criminal schemes, the spectre of past crimes haunting the present, and some excellent action scenes. The problem is that Harry Whittington or Day Keene or Charles Williams would have spun this same yarn in 160 or 144 or even 128 pages, and David Baldacci takes 464 pages to tell his story.

I suspect there are two reasons for this: Baldacci’s publishers would have balked if he’d turned in a 40,000-50,000 word manuscript, and Baldacci, who has been writing fat contemporary thrillers for more than two decades (and very successfully, I might add) just doesn’t know how to write shorter books. This one could have been trimmed considerably by just not describing in detail every item of clothing and every piece of furniture, sometimes more than once.

But other than the length, which I really shouldn’t be complaining about because I knew it was that long when I started it—and it’s really not fair to judge books written today by the standards of books written 70 or more years ago (and vice versa)—how was it? Well, I read the whole thing and didn’t consider stopping (skimming did enter my mind a time or two, but I didn’t do it), so I’d have to say I liked it fairly well. Yes, it’s too long. Yes, there are some anachronisms. No, Baldacci doesn’t even come close to playing fair with the reader where the solution to the mystery is concerned. But the plot is interesting, the characters are good, and Archer is a great protagonist, smart and tough enough to untangle everything but far from a superman like Jack Reacher. I really liked the guy. Everything wraps up in a long, effective courtroom scene a little reminiscent of a Perry Mason novel.

There are two more novels, so far, about Aloysius Archer. Did I enjoy ONE GOOD DEED enough to read them, too? The jury is still out on that (no pun intended), but honestly, I’m leaning toward giving the second one a try. If I do, I’m sure you’ll read about it here.

ONE GOOD DEED Kindle Hardcover Paperback

Happy Fourth of July

This is a bit of a somber cover by Robert Fuqua, but modern life has gotten a bit somber, hasn't it? On the other hand, I'm a firm believer in carrying on, since we can't really do anything else. I do hope it's an enjoyable day for those of you celebrating in the United States. My own low-key plans include getting some writing done and maybe watching a few fireworks from our front porch tonight, if the mosquitoes aren't too bad. By the way, "Frank Patton", the author of that cover story, was a house-name. Authorship of this one has been attributed to AMAZING STORIES editor Raymond A. Palmer.

20 Years of Rough Edges

On Saturday, July 3, 2004, I published my first post on this blog. Here's how I started it:

Following the example of my friends Bill Crider and Ed Gorman, I've decided to start a blog. I may not post every day, and what gets posted here may be pretty haphazard sometimes, but I intend to talk mostly about what I'm reading and sometimes writing, as well as the events in my life I don't deem too boring. (Whether the readers find it too boring is, of course, up to them.) Don't expect anything about politics or religion.

We've lost Bill and Ed since then, of course, Ed in 2016 and Bill in 2018, and I still catch myself thinking now and then that I'm going to tell them about something I read or ask them about some book or author. I've never known two finer men than those two, and their inspiring me to start this blog is only one of the very, very many things for which I'm thankful to them.

Over the years, Rough Edges has become primarily a book review blog, although my own writing sneaks in now and then, as well as some real-life stuff. But still no politics or religion.

Here's how I ended that first post:

For those of you who don't know, I'm a professional writer and have been since 1976. Yesterday I finished my 165th novel, so I'm sort of between projects at the moment. I have to do some research and come up with a proposal for a historical novel, and then the next thing on the schedule is a house-name Western novel. I have work lined up through the spring of '05, which in the world of freelance fiction writing is considered pretty good job security. Of course, it could all come to a crashing halt after that.

That's enough to start this off. Feel free to comment if the mood strikes you.

The writing didn't come to a crashing halt. I'm currently working on my 425th novel. That means I've written 260 novels (or 61% of my novel output) since starting this blog. I don't think there's any connection, but I like playing with numbers. I have house-name work lined up through the end of 2025 and plan to continue writing some under my own name, too, assuming I stay sane enough to do it. And this blog will continue, too. As I said about the WesternPulps group a few months ago, it's a labor of love and I intend to keep on with it as long as I'm capable of doing so, even if it gets to the point where I'm just posting to myself.

My sincere thanks to all of you who have visited, whether you're new here or have been reading since 2004, and everything in between. Your comments and emails and just knowing that you're out there have meant a great deal to me.

The Other Woman - Charles Burgess

As we all know, many of the soft-core sex novels published in the Fifties and Sixties were actually crime or mystery novels in disguise. That’s certainly true of Charles Burgess’s THE OTHER WOMAN, published originally by Beacon Books in 1960 and about to be reprinted by Black Gat Books.

The narrator/protagonist of this one is Neil Cowan, a real estate agent in a small city on the west coast of Florida. Neil gets involved in a deal to sell a large piece of land to a wealthy developer who’s going to put houses all over it. In the process of arranging this, Neil meets the developer’s wife Emmaline, a blonde who is the most beautiful woman Neil has ever seen. He’s happily married with a nice sexy wife and a small child, but he falls for Emmaline despite that and soon they’re having a torrid affair, which continues until, in true noir novel fashion, Emmaline suggests what a good life they’d have if her husband, who’s considerably older than her, was dead. And who better to hurry him along off this mortal coil than Neil?

From this point on, THE OTHER WOMAN veers off into something a bit less like a Gold Medal novel. Even though he’s obsessed with Emmaline, Neil isn’t just about to commit murder for her. Unfortunately, her husband winds up dead anyway, and Neil is the only potential suspect who doesn’t have a solid alibi. When one of the local police detectives learns of the affair between Neil and Emmaline, he’s convinced that Neil is the killer and goes after him doggedly, looking for proof—proof that the actual murderer is willing to provide to pull the frame tighter around Neil. In order to save himself, he’ll have to uncover the real killer.

I’d never heard of Charles Burgess, but the Florida setting and the excellent writing had me suspecting that Burgess was a previously unknown pseudonym for Day Keene or Harry Whittington or Talmage Powell. The book doesn’t really read like the work of any of those authors, however, and a bit of subsequent investigation turns up the fact that Burgess wrote another hardboiled novel called BACKFIRE, apparently published only in Australia. I don’t think he was Australian, though. He had at least one story in MANHUNT in the late Fifties, and he wrote a number of true crime stories for various detective magazines. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s probably his real name, and he might well have been a reporter since many of them wrote those true crime yarns as a sideline. But that’s purely guesswork on my part.

As for THE OTHER WOMAN, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Although the affair between Neil and Emmaline is what the whole plot hinges on, there’s really not much sex in the book, only a few scenes that don’t go on very long. I’m a little surprised Beacon published it. It’s more of a solid mystery novel with a reasonably clever solution. It reads very much as if Burgess wrote it intending to try to sell it to Gold Medal or Ace, and when it didn’t click at one of those houses, he sexed it up a little and sent it to Beacon. We’ll never know if that’s true, of course, but you can tell from that description what sort of book this is. I liked it, and if you’re a fan of noirish, hardboiled mysteries, I think THE OTHER WOMAN is well worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Crack Detective Stories, November 1945

This issue of CRACK DETECTIVE STORIES has a nice cover by Irene Endris, one of several female pulp cover artists I know of. Inside are stories by T.W. Ford (probably best remembered as a Western author although he wrote a little bit of everything in the pulps), Talmage Powell, Emil Petaja (best known as a science fiction author), Rex Whitechurch, Marcus Lyons (who was really James Blish, definitely well-known as a science fiction author), and house-names Cliff Campbell and Grant Lane. As usual with a pulp produced on a very small budget by editor Robert W. Lowndes, this is probably better than it has any right to be. I haven't read it, but if you want to check it out, the whole issue can be found here.  

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Rangeland Romances, March 1955

A very late issue of this long-running pulp that debuted in 1937. The cover is by Frank McCarthy, an artist I associate more with paperback covers. The pulp era may have been winding down, but there are new stories in this issue by such long-time pulpsters as Norman Daniels, Arthur Lawson, Theodore J. Roemer, and Kenneth L. Sinclair, as well as a reprint by the prolific Western romance author Isabel Stewart Way. Pretty close to a last gasp (there was only one more issue of RANGELAND ROMANCES after this one) but I'll bet it was fairly entertaining.

Under the Lake - Stuart Woods

Quite a while back, prompted by a recommendation from Bill Crider (I think), I went on a little Stuart Woods binge and read maybe a dozen of his novels over a couple of years. I would read one from time to time after that, but Woods began concentrating most of his efforts on lawyer Stone Barrington, a character I really didn’t care for, so I stopped reading him altogether.

But I remember always intending to get around to one of Woods’ early novels I’d heard quite a bit about, the Southern Gothic/thriller UNDER THE LAKE. The e-book edition of it was on sale recently, so I thought, why not?

The protagonist of this novel, first published in 1987, is journalist/columnist John Howell, who has left the newspaper business after winning the Pulitzer Prize for a true crime book he wrote. Against his better judgment, he takes on the job of ghostwriting the autobiography of an ambitious businessman/politician. To accomplish this task, he holes up in a rustic cabin owned by his brother-in-law on a picturesque lake in the north Georgia mountains.

In what will come as no surprise to most readers, many of the inhabitants of the local area are eccentric and colorful and some of them are vaguely sinister. Odd things begin to happen. Howell has visions and is visited by what seem to be ghosts. He gets hints of hidden secrets and long-ago crimes that center on the lake next to the cabin. Can Howell uncover the truth without endangering his own life and the lives of people he’s come to care about?

UNDER THE LAKE is a very slow burn, but Woods somehow kept me turning the digital pages anyway. I always thought that his prose was often flat and clumsy in places, but he had that indefinable storytelling ability. This one actually seems a little better written than most of the others of his that I’ve read.

Then, after that lengthy build-up, there’s an avalanche of plot twists and revelations in the last 40 or 50 pages. I’ve mentioned before that when Livia and I are watching some movie or TV show that begins to stretch credibility, one of us usually makes the sarcastic comment, “Sure, why not?” UNDER THE LAKE reaches the “Sure, why not?” point in the late going. And yet, I have to admit I enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s different from what I usually read, it’s pretty well-done, and it might be enough to get me to read some of his other early books that I never got around to. We’ll see.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Something For Cat - Henry Mancini

I came across this video a few months ago and must have played it a hundred times since then. The animation is cute and appeals to my fondness for the Sixties, but I usually just listen to the music, which really resonates with me. It's from the soundtrack of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, and I've seen that movie so I must have heard the song in it, but I don't recall it from that at all. Instead, to me it sounds like it should have been the theme song from an early Sixties private eye TV series, and I can almost see the opening montage in my head as I listen to the music. I was a huge fan of PETER GUNN and 77 SUNSET STRIP and all the others from that era, and this would have fit right in. One of these days I might just write something like that. It would be a pretty limited market, but it sure would be fun.

Hands Beyond the Grave - Henry Treat Sperry

I’ve gotten interested in the obscure pulp author Henry Treat Sperry, probably because when I looked him up on the Fictionmags Index, I noticed something odd. His first published story was “Hands Beyond the Grave” in the September 1934 issue of TERROR TALES, the first issue of that iconic Weird Menace pulp. Sperry’s second story, though, was “Posies for the Widdy” in the First December Number, 1934, of RANCH ROMANCES. Anybody who can go directly from TERROR TALES to RANCH ROMANCES is my kind of writer!

I don’t have that issue of RANCH ROMANCES, but I do have the facsimile reprint edition of that TERROR TALES published by Steeger Books, so I went ahead and read Sperry's story. It starts off as if Sperry was influenced to a certain extent by H.P. Lovecraft. The narrator of the story is a well-to-do young New Englander named Robert Mercer, who awakens one night to find a sinister, amorphous shape lurking at the foot of his bed. There’s lot of “nameless dread”, “unspeakable terror”, and “too horrified to move”. But then, unlike most of Lovecraft’s protagonists, Sperry has his hero bound out of bed, grab an ornamental javelin off the wall, and attack the lurking presence. It doesn’t do much good, of course: the thing vanishes with an explosion that leaves Mercer senseless. He calls a buddy of his, a doctor who’s also a psychical researcher, and with the help of an elderly female medium, they set out to find out what it is that’s haunting Mercer and why.

That early battle is the high point of the action in this story, which goes back to brooding and being scared, as well as a murder and finally an explanation of sorts. Honestly, I thought this yarn cried out for one more twist that never came, but for a debut story, it’s well-written and flows well, even though you wouldn’t exactly call it fast-paced. More action and dialogue than HPL, though.

I haven’t been able to find out much about Henry Treat Sperry. He was born in 1903 and died in 1938 at age 35. He was married and worked as an assistant editor at Popular Publications, helping with several of the pulps to which he sold stories. His writing career lasted only four years, but during that time he published almost 70 stories, most of them Weird Menace but with a scattering of detective and G-Man yarns, a few Western romances, and even an air-war story or two. One of his Western romances was called “Locoed Cowgirl” (RANCH ROMANCES, First February Number, 1938). I’m sure it was innocent enough, but I can’t help but think that would be a good title for a Weird Menace/Western romance crossover about a seemingly demonically possessed cowgirl. I’d read that.

In the meantime, the other stories in the first issue of TERROR TALES look great, and I plan to read them, too. That facsimile reprint is available on Amazon or directly from the Steeger Books website.