Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy Detective Stories, June 1934

Egad! Is this a Weird Menace pulp or a detective mag? Either way, that's a mighty eye-catching cover. This is the second issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES and features the first Dan Turner yarn by Robert Leslie Bellem, who also has a story in here under his pseudonym Jerome Severs Perry. There are also two stories by Norman A. Daniels, one under his own name and the other as by Robert Marks. And since all the other authors in this issue are credited with five stories or less, it's likely that most or all of those are house-names and that Bellem and/or Daniels wrote most of those stories as well.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Six-Gun Western, August 1950

Another Old West poker game gone bad! SIX-GUN WESTERN being a Trojan Magazines, Inc. pulp, you'd expect a racy cover (check!) and a veritable plethora of house-names (not so much). In fact, Ralph Sedgewick Douglas is the only verified house-name in this issue, although two other authors listed in the Table of Contents, Tom Morant and Henry K. Dallett, are very little known today and published only a few stories, so who knows about them. Otherwise, though, it's a line-up of prolific pulpsters: E. Hoffmann Price, Clee Woods, Clark Gray, and Ben Frank (whose real name was Frank Bennett, a name under which he also published).

Forgotten Books: The Lone Ranger: Snake of Iron - Chuck Dixon

A comic book mini-series about The Lone Ranger (one of my all-time favorite characters), written by Chuck Dixon (one of the best comic book scripters of the past thirty years), and somehow I missed it when it came out back in 2012? How is that possible? Well, thankfully I’ve remedied that oversight and have now read THE LONE RANGER: SNAKE OF IRON.

This isn’t a Weird Western or a Revisionist Western (although it does feature the current, more politically correct version of Tonto rather than the Jay Silverheels version, which I suspect is the way the license holder wants it based on my own experience writing a Lone Ranger story). It’s pure Traditional Western, with the Kiowa going on the warpath and trying to join forces with the Comanche, a train derailed and stranded in a snowy winter Texas landscape, a plucky female newspaper reporter, a little kid in danger, a cavalry patrol, and a touch of Indian mysticism (but not enough to make it a Weird Western). In a bit of a twist, The Lone Ranger and Tonto are apart for most of the series, although it’s inevitable that their storylines will come together in the end, which they do with quite satisfactory results.

Dixon’s script is top-notch, with plenty of action, good characters, the occasional poignant moment, and bits of humor here and there. His Lone Ranger absolutely rings true to the character, and his Tonto lacks the pretentiousness that shows up in some other authors’ versions. I also like the fact that the story takes place in the winter, with snow on the ground, instead of the hot summer like most Westerns set in Texas. The art by Esteve Polls, an artist I’m not familiar with, is good as well, with strong storytelling so I was always able to keep up with what was going on. That’s not always true with modern comics artists. I could quibble a little with some things. There are no towering, snow-capped peaks in the part of Texas where this story takes place, and frontier forts didn’t look like how Fort Griffin is depicted. But that’s just part of the mythology of the Western, and overall I was quite pleased with the art. (Hey, West Texas doesn’t look like Monument Valley, Utah, either, but that doesn’t make THE SEARCHERS any less of a classic film, does it?)

I’ll admit I’m a bit of a curmudgeon and a purist where The Lone Ranger is concerned, so I haven’t liked some of the modern tales featuring the character. But I really enjoyed SNAKE OF IRON and don’t hesitate to recommend it to any Lone Ranger fan. It’s a good yarn.

Happy Easter

No pulp cover this morning, but I'll wish you all a Happy Easter with this installment of Stan Lynde's great comic strip RICK O'SHAY, which I read every Sunday morning with my dad when I was a kid. The ones featuring the gunfighter Hipshot Percussion were always my favorites. (Click on the image to read it.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Two-Gun Western, November 1953

This issue of TWO-GUN WESTERN features another appearance of the trio who turn up on so many Western pulp covers: the Stalwart Cowboy, the Wounded Geezer, and the Gun-Toting Girl. True, there's a little variation on this one. The Geezer isn't quite as old as some, but he's still got the blood-stained bandage on his head. And the Girl is a brunette instead of the usual redhead and is also showing a little more cleavage than most. But as always, their presence makes for a good cover. What's puzzling is why stories by Philip Morgan (who?) and John Lumsden (again, who?) are featured on that cover, when inside there are also yarns by Noel M. Loomis, Bennie Gardner (once as Gunnison Steele and once as house-name Johnny Lawson), Jonathan Glidden (as Peter Dawson), L.L. Foreman, Stephen Payne, and Lee Floren. There are also stories by house-names Brent North and Ken Jason, who was also at various times Bennie Gardner or Jon Glidden, so the story in this issue may be by one of them. Or it might be by editor Robert O. Erisman, who was known to use the name as well and sell stories to himself. Hard to say. All I really know is that this looks like a pretty good issue.

Forgotten Books: Captain Shark #2: Jaws of Death - Richard Silver (Kenneth Bulmer)

The second Captain Shark novel, JAWS OF DEATH, begins mere seconds after the previous novel, BY PIRATE’S BLOOD . . ., ends. (See last week’s Forgotten Books post for the story on that one.) This makes me even more convinced that author Kenneth Bulmer, who wrote these books under the pseudonym Richard Silver, intended for the story to be told in one long novel.

The cliffhanger from the previous book is resolved quickly, and then Captain Shark sets out on a new adventure, a quest for Morgan’s Gold, the treasure that famous pirate Henry Morgan was after when he sacked Panama, but then the loot mysteriously disappeared. What’s a pirate yarn without a treasure map, and to get his hands on it, Shark has to resort to disguise as he penetrates into the very heart of his mortal enemy’s stronghold.

It’s all very dashing and swashbuckling and romantic (of course there’s a beautiful countess at said stronghold), and just as you’d expect, the action winds up on the deserted island where the treasure is buried, with Shark and his crew in a desperate race against the Spanish to reach the treasure and recover it first. There’s no cliffhanger this time, but once the action is over, one of the buccaneers declares, “Cap’n Shark will return!” Alas, he doesn’t. That’s the end of this short-lived series.

However, the two books taken together make for an exciting, if somewhat rambling, tale. Bulmer has a sure hand with the action scenes, Captain Shark is a likable protagonist (and for a bunch of bloody-handed pirates, his crew is pretty sympathetic, too), the villains are properly despicable, and some welcome touches of humor crop up here and there. These novels are also as violent and lurid as you’d expect from books written for the men’s adventure market in the mid-Seventies, which, of course, doesn’t bother me a bit. I have quite a few historical novels by Kenneth Bulmer on hand and look forward to reading them.

Overlooked Movies: Colorado Territory (1949)

I didn’t mean to write about two Raoul Walsh movies in a row, but that’s the way it’s worked out after last week’s post on DESPERATE JOURNEY. COLORADO TERRITORY is a Western remake from 1949 of the Humphrey Bogart classic HIGH SIERRA, also directed by Walsh eight years earlier in 1941. Both are based on the novel HIGH SIERRA by W.R. Burnett. In COLORADO TERRITORY, Joel McCrea plays outlaw Wes McQueen, in prison for robbing banks and trains, who is broken out so he can take part in a payroll heist from a train in Colorado. Along the way there, following the same general outlines as the story in the first film, he encounters a farmer (Henry Hull) and his daughter (Dorothy Malone), who are heading west to make a new start. McQueen falls for the girl, of course, and starts to think about going straight and making a new start for himself . . . after this one last job, of course.

COLORADO TERRITORY, despite its Western setting, is pure film noir. The other members of the gang, once McQueen meets them, can’t be trusted, and they have a beautiful dance hall girl (a perfectly cast Virginia Mayo) with them who stirs up even more trouble among thieves. Double-crosses and plot twists abound, and McQueen’s goal of giving up the outlaw life seems more and more out of reach. Will fate catch up to him, or will he manage somehow to avoid it?

This is a wonderful film, very well-acted by a good cast and directed with great skill by Walsh, who balances the action and characterization about as well as I’ve ever seen. The train robbery sequence is excellent and had me grinning all the way through it. The stunt work is top-notch. The gritty black and white photography is very effective, too.

I remember watching this movie on TV with my dad when I was seven or eight years old. All the more adult stuff went over my head, but I’ve never forgotten the closing scenes set in an abandoned Indian cliff dwelling known as the City of the Moon. No spoilers here, but that was the first time I had encountered such an ending, and it’s stuck with me for nearly six decades since then. You don’t hear much about COLORADO TERRITORY anymore, but it’s a classic Western and gets a high recommendation from me.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: 10-Story Detective Magazine, January 1943

This issue of 10-STORY DETECTIVE MAGAZINE features another great Norman Saunders cover, with stories inside by some top-notch authors: Norman A. Daniels (with a second story under his pseudonym David M. Norman), Harold Q. Masur, Walt Sheldon, J. Lane Linklater, and even Walker A. Tompkins, best known for his Westerns, of course. Plus some I haven't heard of, such as Tagre Detbar, Byron Dalrymple, and Thomas Lamar.

Saturday Morning Bonus Pulp: Popular Western, January 1944

The cover of this issue of POPULAR WESTERN is further proof, as if we needed it, that every poker game in the Old West ended in a shootout or a brawl. I'm sure there are plenty of fisticuffs and gunplay in the stories inside, which are by Tom Gunn (actually Syl McDowell, in this case, with another Painted Post yarn featuring Sheriff Blue Steele), Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Laurence Donovan, Oscar J. Friend, and house-name Scott Carleton with a Buffalo Billy Bates story. I've always found POPULAR WESTERN to be a pretty good Western pulp, and I'm sure this issue is no exception.

Forgotten Books: Captain Shark #1: By Pirate's Blood . . ., Richard Silver (Kenneth Bulmer)

British author Kenneth Bulmer is best remembered for his scores of fantasy and science fiction novels, but like a good freelancer, he wrote a little bit of everything and was especially good at historical and nautical fiction. Those two genres are combined in the Captain Shark novels, a two-book series of paperback originals Bulmer wrote for Pinnacle Books in 1975. Both books are available as e-books from Thunderchild Publishing.

It seems unlikely that the protagonist of these books, Captain Sebastian Shark, was born with that name, but that’s the only way he’s ever referred to in BY PIRATE’S BLOOD . . ., the first volume. Shark is the captain of the sloop Draco, and he’s not so much a pirate as he is the mortal enemy of the Spanish, out for revenge on them more than loot. He does, however, have the usual motley, colorful crew of buccaneers sailing with him.

Bulmer barely touches on a fairly extensive back-story in which Shark is captured by Barbary Corsairs as a young man and learns swordplay from another captive, a Spaniard (the only Spaniard Shark likes) and medicine from an Arab. (Wasn't Captain Blood actually a medical doctor? It’s been close to fifty years since I read Sabatini’s novel.) Eventually escaping from the Corsairs, Shark winds up in the Caribbean, throws in with Henry Morgan, takes part in the sacking of Panama, and finally becomes the captain of his own ship and crew. Because many of his friends have suffered at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, Shark declares an unofficial war on them.

And that’s where BY PIRATE’S BLOOD . . . begins. It’s a rather episodic tale in which Shark and his men clash with other pirates, capture a Spanish ship, and take a beautiful young Spanish noblewoman prisoner. Shark and the girl even wind up marooned on a deserted island, but things don’t play out the way you might expect. And before you know it, he’s a prisoner in a castle on a Spanish-held island, and then who should show up but the beautiful Captain Elizabeth Wren, a female pirate who is Shark’s former lover, sometimes ally, and sometimes enemy. The action hardly ever slows down, and Bulmer really packs this yarn full of twists and turns and then . . . it’s over.

Yep, BY PIRATE’S BLOOD . . . ends in a semi-cliffhanger, and this really leads me to believe that Bulmer wrote this story as one long novel that Pinnacle split in two for publication. In those days, short books were in fashion, and Pinnacle published a lot of ’em in the men’s adventure genre, which includes swashbucklers like this.

I really enjoyed this book. Bulmer had a good touch with his characters and wrote some really good action scenes. I’m a landlubber, through and through, but I was able to follow the sea battles just fine. I would have been really annoyed, though, when I got to the end and found that the story just stops . . . if I didn’t have the second and final book, JAWS OF DEATH, queued up on my Kindle ready to read.

And that’s what I’ll be posting about next Friday.