Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1948

This issue of THRILLING WONDER STORIES has a good, if somewhat offbeat, cover by Earle Bergey. I don't think I've ever seen a Bergey cover that I didn't like. And the lineup of authors inside can't be beat: Arthur Leo Zagat, Henry Kuttner, Arthur J. Burks, Carl Jacobi, Frank Belknap Long, George O. Smith, and a couple of pseudonyms, Matt Lee (who was really Sam Merwin Jr.) and Kenneth Putnam (who was really Philip Klass, much better known under his pseudonym William Tenn). I don't own this issue, but if you want to check it out, the whole thing is online here.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 5 Western Novels Magazine, June 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. My copy isn’t in the greatest shape, but that’s it in the scan, featuring a nice, evocative cover by Clarence Doore. You can feel the sweltering heat just looking at it, can’t you? One oddity of note is that it’s 5 WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE on the cover and the masthead on the title page, but FIVE WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE on the spine, the indicia, and the page headers. I’m going to make the arbitrary decision to use the version with the number when I refer to it in this post.

Calling this 5 WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE was something of an exaggeration, of course. The contents actually consist of three novellas, two novelettes, and a bonus short story. This title was, for the most part, a reprint pulp. There’s only one original story in this issue, and that’s the novella that leads things off, “Pistol Partners” by Lee Floren.

Now, Lee Floren has never been one of my favorite Western authors, but I’m coming to enjoy his work more over time. Also, this story features his longest-running series characters, Buckshot McKee and Tortilla Joe, a couple of drifting cowpokes who always manage to wind up in the middle of dangerous situations and sinister mysteries. I’ve read several novels starring Buck and Joe and enjoyed them. In “Pistol Partners”, they’ve come to New Mexico to answer a call for help from an old friend who is sick and has to go to the hospital. He wants Buck and Joe to take care of his pet cat for him.

That cat turns out to be a tame mountain lion named Madagascar Jones. The “hospital” in which the old friend is holed up is a boarding house run by a beautiful former madam, and all the boarders are beautiful saloon girls, one of whom is the unlikely bride of the old codger who summoned Buck and Joe. A ruthless cattle baron wants the old-timer’s land, several men have been killed, supposedly by the mountain lion Madagascar Jones, and Buck and Joe get shot at several times. This is the goofiest Lee Floren story I’ve read, rivaling W.C. Tuttle’s Sheriff Henry yarns in places. But it’s also full of action, well-plotted, and a lot of fun. There are a few examples of the slapdash writing common in Floren’s work—a guy rides up on horseback, for example, and in the very next paragraph he came up on foot and his horse is hidden in the brush—but if you can forgive that, and I can, “Pistol Partners” is pretty darned enjoyable.

William Hopson’s novelette “Trail Drive Boss” first appeared in the September 1945 issue of POPULAR WESTERN. As you can tell from the title, it’s a trail drive yarn in which a young cattleman butts heads with a crooked town boss who controls the only water in the area and uses exorbitant prices to steal herds. There’s also a beautiful woman involved, of course, and not everything is as it seems at first. Hopson was inconsistent but mostly very good, and this is an excellent tale that I enjoyed.

“Sixgun Sweepstakes”, a novella by Walker A. Tompkins, is a reprint from the June 1948 issue of POPULAR WESTERN. Tompkins is a long-time favorite of mine, and he doesn’t disappoint in this story about a town-taming lawman from Texas who’s the marshal of a town in Washington state. He throws in an intriguing angle about the friction between ranchers and wheat farmers but never really does anything with that plot element. Instead, this is a Fourth of July story with a rodeo and a big celebration highlighted by a stagecoach race. One of the marshal’s old enemies shows up in town before the shindig begins, and the romantic triangle between the two of them and the beautiful daughter of a state senator complicates matters before the villain’s true plan is revealed.

Tompkins is in good form in this story. There’s plenty of action, a fight on a train, the stagecoach race, and a few plot twists. It would have been better if the fight had been on top of the train (anybody who’s read much of my work knows I love those scenes), and a running shootout during the stagecoach race would have been nice. But that’s just me. “Sixgun Sweepstakes” is a solid yarn that would have made a good 1950s Western movie.

The novella “Dead Man’s Gold” by Larry A. Harris first appeared in the June 1948 issue of THRILLING WESTERN. A young man’s search for a fortune in gold supposedly hidden by his crazy uncle in the Devil’s River country of Texas puts him in conflict with a crooked banker and a corrupt lawman. The story moves right along and there’s plenty of action, but the writing is pretty flat and bland and the protagonist is so stupid that it stretches the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief too far. He does one dumb thing after another just to keep the plot going. Harris wrote hundreds of stories for the pulps but only a few novels, all of them featuring the Masked Rider. One of those was reprinted in paperback, Harris’s only book publication that I know of. I’ve read a few things by him in the past and found them okay at best. This one is a clear misfire.

The short story “Reunion at Amigo” is by veteran Western writer Allan K. Echols and originally appeared in the June 1948 issue of MASKED RIDER WESTERN. It’s about an old outlaw who has escaped from prison and is searching for his son. It’s pretty well-written overall, but the final twist is so obvious that it detracts quite a bit from the story’s appeal.

This issue wraps up with “The Necktie Party”, a novelette by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson from the July 1948 issue of EXCITING WESTERN. At first glance, this is a cavalry vs. the Apaches yarn, but as it turns out, there’s more to it than that as a young lieutenant tries to save a civilian scout from being lynched, prevent a new Indian war, and round up the bad guys, all at the same time. As always, Wheeler-Nicholson brings an undeniable air of authenticity to a story with a military background. This is an enjoyable tale weakened by an ending that’s not very dramatic and resolves things too easily.

As far as I remember, this is the first issue of 5 WESTERN NOVELS MAGAZINE, so I don’t have any basis to compare and say how it stacks up against the others in the series. Just as a Western pulp, though, I think it’s a little below average. I was surprised at how good the Floren story is, and there’s nothing wrong with the Hopson tale, but the entries by Tompkins, Wheeler-Nicholson, and Echols were good but could have been better, and the one by Harris just isn’t very good. I really like the cover by Clarence Doore, though. Overall, probably worth reading, but don’t rush to your shelves to see if you have a copy.

Review: Kit Sloan, Texas Bounty Hunter #1: Wolf's Crossing - Jamie Mason

I’ve edited several of Jamie Mason’s novels in the past, but these days I read them as a fan of his work. His recent novel KIT SLOAN, TEXAS BOUNTY HUNTER: WOLF’S CROSSING is the first book in a new Western series from Dusty Saddle Publishing, and it promises to be a very good one.

Despite the title, WOLF’S CROSSING takes place in Arizona, not Texas, but Kit Sloan, who rode as a guerrilla with Quantrill during the Civil War, is a bounty hunter. However, in this book he’s not after a wanted fugitive. Instead, he’s hired by a wealthy rancher to track down and recover a very valuable bull that’s been stolen. The rancher sends one of his sons along to accompany Sloan, a stipulation that the bounty hunter doesn’t like but has to accept if he wants the job.

Sloan and the young man pick up a third member of their group in short order: an Apache woman whose family has been wiped out by the same vicious outlaws who stole the bull. Sloan doesn’t like taking her along, either, but again he has no choice. He’d rather have her where he can keep an eye on her.

Their quarry is a young Mexican bandit known as Kid Danny, who is accompanied by his grandmother, who’s just as ruthless and dangerous as he is, and an Irish mercenary. Sloan and his companions catch up to them at Wolf’s Crossing, an isolated settlement near the Arizona-Mexico border, and as you might expect, all hell breaks loose.

This is a very entertaining, action-packed Western. Kit Sloan is plenty tough and hardboiled, but he’s also a likable protagonist. Kid Danny is a great villain, as despicable as they come despite his youth and innocent appearance. There are a few plot twists to liven things up, and the plentiful action scenes are top-notch. This isn’t as bloody as, say, a Piccadilly Cowboys Westerns, but it’s got plenty of bark on it. I had a really good time reading WOLF’S CROSSING. If you enjoy hard-edged Westerns, there’s a good chance you will, too. It’s currently available as an e-book on Amazon with a print edition in the works.

Review: Conan the Barbarian: Thrice Marked for Death - Jim Zub and Doug Braithwaite

When the latest incarnation of the Conan comic book series began being published, I decided to read the individual issues as they came out, just like I did in the old days—the difference being that I read them digitally instead of on cheap newsprint. (For the record, I prefer cheap newsprint over digital, but I prefer digital over slick paper.) After finishing the first story arc, however, I decided to wait for the collected edition of the next arc. It just seemed simpler that way, plus I get to read the stories one right after the other.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN: THRICE MARKED FOR DEATH reprints issues #5-8 of the series and deepens Conan’s involvement with the mysterious and deadly Black Stone. It’s written by Jim Zub and the art is by Doug Braithwaite. The story begins with Conan in the city of Shadizar, mourning the death of Belit, the pirate queen and great love of his life, who Conan met in Robert E. Howard’s classic story “Queen of the Black Coast”. Short flashbacks to Conan’s time with Belit run throughout these stories. The main storyline, however, involves Conan being hired along with several other thieves to steal an artifact from one of the local temples. Things go wrong. Evil ensues. Lot of people die. And Conan is left in a heap of trouble.

Despite the dreaded “To Be Continued” at the end of this book, I enjoyed THRICE MARKED FOR DEATH quite a bit. Jim Zub’s script is fast-paced and packed with action, and more importantly, he writes a version of Conan that is recognizably REH’s character. Really, that’s what you’re looking for in a Conan pastiche. Doug Braithwaite’s art is excellent, with good storytelling and a gritty quality that really works well with the story.

All of this is leading up to a big crossover event featuring numerous Howard characters besides Conan. I’m not that fond of the idea of doing that, but given Zub’s track record, I’m cautiously optimistic that he can pull it off. I certainly intend to continue reading in order to find out. In the meantime, THRICE MARKED FOR DEATH is an entertaining yarn and is available in e-book and trade paperback editions.

Bibliography of Jim Hatfield/Walt Slade Novels and Stories by A. Leslie Scott

I'm happy to announce that the A. Leslie Scott bibliography Anders Nilsson and I have been working on is available for free download on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/lesliescott_bibliography_nilssonreasoner_2024/mode/1up

This includes a brief biography of Scott, a detailed listing of all his Jim Hatfield and Walt Slade novels and stories, and information about all the rewritten and expanded versions of the stories when they were published later as hardback and paperback novels. There's also the most complete listing to date of Scott's non-series novels and many excellent cover scans of various publications. Putting this together has been a real labor of love, and Anders has done all the heavy lifting, make no mistake about that. But I'm proud to have been able to help and to be included in this project. If you have any interest in Leslie Scott, the Western pulps, or Western fiction in general, I'm sure you'll find it entertaining and informative, and I hope you'll check it out.

Review: Killer Tarmac - T.W. Ford (Sky Birds, September 1934)

I read a Western pulp story by T.W. Ford a while back and enjoyed it, as I nearly always do with his Westerns, but being in the mood for something different, I decided to try one of his air war stories. I’d never read anything but Westerns and the occasional detective yarn by Ford.

In “Killer Tarmac”, originally published in the September 1934 issue of SKY BIRDS, stalwart young replacement pilot Art Crain arrives at an aerodrome in France with two things in mind: fighting the Boche, and getting revenge on the two men he blames for the death of his best friend, who was shot down battling the deadly German ace von Kunnel, also known as the Black Tiger. In addition to wanting vengeance on von Kunnel, Art also blames the squadron commander, Major “Bloody” Doll, who accused Art’s friend of cowardice and shamed him into facing von Kunnel alone.

However, once Art finds out more about what happened to his friend, he discovers that not everything is as it seems. While mixing in some top-notch dogfight action, Ford creates some memorable characters who don’t turn out at all like I expected. He does a masterful job of yanking the reader’s sympathies back and forth with each new plot twist. Art Crain is our protagonist, no mistake about that, but as for everyone else in this novella, we’re not sure who to root for, and as Ford leads up to a very suspenseful climax, I had no idea what was going to happen.

“Killer Tarmac” is a fabulous story, just a tad melodramatic and over-the-top now and then but in a good way, and told in terse, hardboiled prose that races along like a Nieuport in the middle of a dogfight. A PDF of it can be downloaded from the Age of Aces website. If you’ve never read an aviation/air war pulp story before, this would be a great place to start.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947)

I’ve been a big fan of Cary Grant’s movies for a long time, but there are some I’ve just never gotten around to watching. I’m not sure how I missed THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBY-SOXER, from 1947, since it ran endlessly on TV when I was a kid, but I’ve seen it now. Probably most of you have, too, so bear with me.

Grant plays Richard Nugent, a famous painter who’s also something of a ladies’ man. After a nightclub brawl, he comes up in front of Judge Margaret Turner (Myrna Loy, who will always be Nora Charles to me), who lets all the participants go with a warning not to get into any more trouble, especially Nugent. Later, he gives a lecture on art at the high school where Judge Turner’s younger sister Susan (Shirley Temple, no longer a child star but a cute 19-year-old in real life) is a student. Susan falls in love with Nugent, sneaks into his apartment, and is caught there with him the next morning by her sister and the assistant district attorney (Rudy Vallee, of all people). Nothing happened, but the impropriety of the situation lands Nugent in trouble, as does the punch he lands on the ADA’s jaw. After that, the court psychiatrist, who happens to be the uncle of the Turner sisters and is played by Ray Collins, who will always be Lt. Tragg from PERRY MASON as far as I’m concerned, hatches the crazy scheme of having Nugent pretend to date Susan so that she’ll grow tired of him naturally and realize he’s much too old for her.

If you’ve followed all that convoluted set-up so far, you’ll know that it’s all just a flimsy excuse for Grant to act like a teenager, spouting slang and driving a jalopy and being his usual charming but flustered self. It’s a well-worn bit, but let’s face it, nobody was ever better at it than Cary Grant. And there are no bonus points for anticipating that a real romance will develop between Grant and Loy, who admittedly have some pretty darned good screen chemistry together.

The cast is top-notch, no doubt about that. I think the director, Irving Reis, could have kept things moving at a bit faster pace at times. This movie was written by Sidney Sheldon, long before he created I DREAM OF JEANNIE and became a best-selling novelist, and it won the 1947 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. I didn’t think this was my idea of an award-winning script at all. It’s consistently pleasant, mildly amusing now and then, but not all that funny and the cast has to work hard to achieve the laughs they do. Don’t get me wrong. THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBY-SOXER is not a bad film. I enjoyed it and am glad I finally watched it. But I don’t think it lives up to its reputation.

Review: Hunter at Large - Thomas B. Dewey

I’ve been reading Thomas B. Dewey’s books off and on for close to 60 years since discovering his series about the private eye known only as Mac while I was in high school. He’s never failed to entertain me. He’s one of those writers who never achieved huge success but published steadily for 25 years and was always well-regarded by readers and critics. Black Gat Books has just reprinted one of his stand-alones, HUNTER AT LARGE, published originally in hardcover by Simon & Shuster in 1961 and reprinted in paperback by Pocket Books in 1963—an edition I owned for many years but never got around to reading.

The protagonist of this one is Mickey Phillips, a police detective in an unnamed Midwestern city, who is home one night with his wife Kathy when two men show up at the house, take Mickey by surprise, make him a prisoner, and torture and kill his wife in front of him. They leave thinking that they’ve killed Mickey, too, but he survives, which is a bad mistake for them to make.

After months of recuperation, Mickey is well enough to set out on the trail of the killers. He has to resign from the police force to do it, but he doesn’t care. He just wants revenge for Kathy’s murder. The trail leads him across the country with stops in Kansas City, Denver, and a small town in Nevada. Mickey puts his training to good use in conducting a dogged, methodical investigation which ultimately leads him to his goal with a few surprises along the way.

This is a fine suspense novel written in Dewey’s usual smooth prose with well-developed characters, especially Mickey Phillips. He never comes across as hysterical or overwrought, just very, very determined. The mystery angle is well-constructed. It’s a very bleak, humorless book, but given the plot, I don’t see how it could have been anything else. If you’ve never read Dewey’s work before, HUNTER AT LARGE isn’t really representative of his private eye novels featuring Mac or his other series protagonist Pete Schofield, but it’s well worth reading and it gets a solid recommendation from me. It’s available in paperback and e-book editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: 10 Story Mystery Magazine, February 1942

Popular Publications' 10 STORY MYSTERY MAGAZINE lasted only nine issues, a lot shorter run than the much more successful 10 STORY WESTERN MAGAZINE. But that doesn't mean the stories weren't good. I have no idea who did the cover on this one, but I know you can't trust a skeleton in a top hat. That's just common sense. There's a good, if somewhat odd, mix of authors inside, several of them better known in other genres: Western writer Lee E. Wells, Weird Menace author John H. Knox (to be fair, Knox wrote a lot of mysteries, too, but it's his Weird Menace stuff that's still in print), science fiction author C.M. Kornbluth (under the pseudonym Walter C. Davies), WEIRD TALES stalwart Carl Jacobi, and prolific aviation/air war author O.B. Myers. Also on hand are Francis K. Allan, Jackson Gregory Jr. (the son of Western and adventure author Jackson Gregory, I suppose), house-name Ray P. Shotwell, and two single-sale authors, Adam King and Scott Coudray. I don't own a copy of this pulp, but it certainly looks like something I'd be interested in reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, July 1955

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with a cover by Sam Cherry, as usual. This one doesn’t depict an actual scene in the story, as some do.

The Lone Wolf has a partner in this issue’s Jim Hatfield novel, “Ranger Law for Ladrones”. Thankfully, it’s not one of the numerous sidekicks Roe Richmond saddled Hatfield with in his entries in the series. This time it’s a young Ranger on his first assignment. Al Rich is pretty full of himself and not very bright, but Hatfield thinks he might have the makings of a decent Ranger eventually—if he lives long enough. That’s in doubt because Al’s big mouth tips off the bad guys that he and Hatfield are in the West Texas town of Ladrones to investigate a robbery of the local Western Union office in which a $50,000 payroll was stolen. That loot is still missing because one of the robbers was killed after he buried the money, and nobody knows where it is. Hatfield and Al are captured by the villains, but they escape and round up the varmints about halfway through the story.

Of course, there’s more to it than that, as they soon discover. But the real mystery is who wrote this one. The Fictionmags Index attributes it to Walker A. Tompkins, and there are places where it reads like Tompkins’ work. But there are also places where it doesn’t. For much of the story, it’s pretty talky and light on action, although the big gun battle at the end between Hatfield and the villains is excellent. That part really does read like Tompkins. My thinking is that maybe some other author wrote and turned in a draft of this one, and then the editor, seeing that it wasn’t very good, sent it to Tompkins to rewrite and salvage it. We’ll almost certainly never know if that’s what happened, but it seems feasible to me.

George H. Roulston is an author who’s new to me. He published only half a dozen Western pulp stories in the mid-Fifties. His story “The Fighting Tinhorn” fits its title. It’s about a drifting gambler who’s always been on the shady side, until he has to step up and stop a gun-running scheme that will plunge the Arizona frontier into bloody chaos. This is a well-written, suspenseful story that I enjoyed quite a bit.

Ray G. Ellis wrote several dozen stories for various Western pulps in the Fifties and Sixties. His story in this issue, “A Long Ride to Santa Fe”, is a stagecoach yarn in which a deputy U.S. marshal tries to deliver three desperate outlaw prisoners to the authorities in Santa Fe, a job that’s complicated by a beautiful female passenger from back east who sympathizes with the owlhoots because she doesn’t know any better. And there’s a blizzard, too. Ellis does a good job with a very traditional Western story.

Eric Allen specialized in stories set mostly in Arkansas, Missouri, and Indian Territory. His novelette in this issue, “Ambush”, finds a former Confederate guerrilla returning to his old stomping grounds in Arkansas only to find that a vicious gang of carpetbaggers led by an old enemy of his is terrorizing the people in the area. I had a little trouble warming up to this one at first, but it won me over and I wound up enjoying it quite a bit. Its biggest problem is that the main villain doesn’t show up until very late in the story. Still, it’s the sort of yarn that would have made a good 1950s movie.

Ed Montgomery published about twenty stories split evenly between the Western pulps and the slicks, mostly THE SATURDAY EVENING POST. “A Girl Named Mike” is a range war story featuring a rather lighthearted romance between a roguish rustler and a rancher’s beautiful tomboy daughter. It reads to me like it was probably aimed at the POST, but Montgomery sold it to the Thrilling Group Western line when it failed to click elsewhere. Which is not to criticize it. It’s an entertaining if very lightweight story.

The final story in the issue, “Blood on His Star”, is by-lined L.J. Searles, but that’s Lin Searles, of course, who wrote a few pulp stories but is better remembered as a Western novelist from the Sixties. The protagonist of this one, a former town-taming lawman, is clearly based on Wild Bill Hickok, right down to accidentally killing a deputy during a shootout. It has a nice hardboiled tone to it and some good action, but I wasn’t overly impressed by it.

That pretty much sums up my impression of the entire issue. None of the stories are bad. They’re all entertaining, some more than others. But none of them reach any special heights, either. This is a below-average issue of TEXAS RANGERS. I’m still glad I read it, of course, but I hope the next one I pull off the shelf will be better.