Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Star Western, August 1934

There was a brief discussion last weekend about whether the TOP-NOTCH cover I posted Sunday was painted by William F. Soare. Well, here's a STAR WESTERN cover we know was by Soare, and I like it quite a bit. Inside this issue are some fine writers, including Walt Coburn, Ray Nafziger, Cliff Farrell, and Robert E. Mahaffey. The lead story is a novella called "The Rider From Hell" by Robert Ormond Case. I love that title. Case is one of those writers whose name I've seen hundreds of times, if not more, but I don't recall ever reading anything by him. Come to find out, there's an e-book edition of "The Rider From Hell" available, and not only that, I already own the blasted thing! Maybe I'd better get around to reading it, huh? We'll see. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Arizona Guns - William MacLeod Raine

With some authors, you can be aware of their work for years, even decades, without ever reading any of it. That’s the way it’s been for me with William MacLeod Raine. If you’re like me and practically grew up in used bookstores during the Sixties and Seventies, you saw plenty of paperback Westerns by Raine. While he was never as popular as Zane Grey, Max Brand, or Louis L’Amour, Raine was prolific and a strong presence in the Western field for many years. Now, of course, he’s barely remembered, and based on ARIZONA GUNS, the first of his novels I’ve read, he deserves to be not only remembered but read.

Born in England in 1871, Raine moved to the American West ten years later and lived through much of the time period about which he wrote. Like Walt Coburn and another English immigrant, Fred East (who wrote as Tom West), Raine was an authentic Westerner with experience as a cowboy before he became a writer. ARIZONA GUNS was originally published in 1919 by Houghton Mifflin under the title A MAN FOUR-SQUARE. There were at least two paperback reprints under the title ARIZONA GUNS, which despite having a classic B-Western sound to it, isn’t appropriate at all. Not one bit of the novel takes place in Arizona, and the only connection is that one of the characters mentions having gone there.

Instead, nearly all the book is set in New Mexico Territory, in the fictional Washington County. If you’re sharp enough to realize that there’s a real county in New Mexico named after a famous president, you’ll have a pretty good idea where this story is going. Yep, this is another fictionalized version of the Billy the Kid saga, with the “Washington County War” taking the place of the real-life Lincoln County War. In Raine’s version, the young hero is named Jim Clanton. After growing up somewhere in the Appalachians and being involved in a feud there, Clanton goes west in search of his enemies who have fled the mountains. He winds up joining a cattle drive up the Pecos, fights outlaws and Indians, becomes friends with a cowboy named Billie Prince, meets up with his old enemies, makes new enemies, romances a couple of beautiful young women, and eventually winds up on the wrong side of the law. By this time, Clanton’s friend Billie Prince has become a lawman, making him the Pat Garrett stand-in for this story, and when Clanton is accused of murdering one of the local cattlemen, Prince has to form a posse and go after him.

Raine veers off from history in various places, so the story winds up being only loosely based on the Lincoln County War. Because of this, he’s able to throw some nice twists into the plot, especially where various romantic triangles are concerned. Romance plays a big part in this book, as was common in Westerns of the time period, especially the bestsellers authored by Zane Grey. ARIZONA GUNS reminds me quite a bit of Grey’s work, in fact, although it’s not nearly as flowery and melodramatic. Raine slips in a dark undertone to an otherwise happy ending, too, which sets it apart from Grey’s novels and the other popular Westerns of the period. The writing is a little old-fashioned in places (what else would you expect from a book written ninety years ago?), but it holds up well, the style tough and spare for the most part.

I’ve always liked Zane Grey’s plots, and when he finally got around to writing action scenes, he produced some corkers, but I also find it hard to wade through the long-winded prose in his books. If you’re the same way, I think you’d enjoy William MacLeod Raine’s novels, at least based on this one. I definitely intend to read more of them.

(This time, for a change, when I said I was going to read more by an author, I actually did. Since this post first appeared on December 12, 2008, I've read four or five more novels by William MacLeod Raine and enjoyed all of them. You can find several different e-book editions of ARIZONA GUNS/A MAN FOUR-SQUARE on Amazon for very affordable prices if you'd care to check it out.)

Review: Doomsday Mesa - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

DOOMSDAY MESA was published originally by Robert Hale in 1995, making it one of the earliest Chap O’Keefe novels I’ve read. It’s available now in new e-book and paperback editions from Amazon. That’s a great title, and being a long-time fan of the work of Keith Chapman, the veteran writer/editor behind the O’Keefe pseudonym, I was looking forward to this one. It’s safe to say, I wasn’t disappointed.

Chapman spends a little time giving us the back-story of his protagonist Yale Cannon, who, as a young man of somewhat shady character with a reputation as a gunman, joins a wagon train heading west in the days before the Civil War. There’s a budding romance between Cannon and a young woman whose family is traveling with the wagon train, but unfortunate circumstances arise to split them up.

The story then moves ahead a couple of decades to a time when Yale Cannon, a decorated war hero and veteran Deputy U.S. Marshal, arrives in the town of Antelope, Colorado, to pick up a captured outlaw from the jail and take him back to Arizona to face charges there. Of course, things don’t work out that easily. There’s a war brewing between the local ranchers and a religious cult that’s been established on a nearby mesa where there used to be a gold mine. The ranchers believe the followers of the charismatic cult leader are rustling their stock, and they’re prepared to go to any lengths to put a stop to it, including breaking out the owlhoot Cannon’s supposed to pick up and hiring him to run off the settlers on the mesa.

That’s enough for a book right there, but Chapman packs several more plot twists into his book, including a connection to Yale Cannon’s tragic past. He weaves all these strands together until they finally result in an explosive climax and one final, very effective twist.

DOOMSDAY MESA is an excellent traditional Western novel with plenty of action and the interesting, slightly offbeat characters you’ll always find in a Chap O’Keefe novel. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and give it a solid recommendation for Western fans.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Giant Western, June 1952

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat ragged copy in the scan. The covers aren’t in great shape, but the pages inside are really nice, just lightly tanned and very supple. I think the cover art is by Sam Cherry, but I’m not absolutely sure about that.

For a change, a story in a pulp billed as a novel actually is long enough to be considered one. “Nobody’s Neutral in Kansas” by Roe Richmond is about 40,000 words, I’m guessing, maybe even a little longer. It’s only sort of a Western, though, more of a historical yarn taking place in Kansas in the late 1850s and early 1860s and dealing with the violence there between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the lead-up to the Civil War. Rupe Maitland and his father and brother have come from the east and settled on a farm in Kansas, and they just want to be left alone instead of taking sides in the conflict. But then tragedy occurs, hostilities increase, and inevitably Rupe and his family and friends are drawn into the bloody clashes. Roe Richmond knew how to keep a story moving along briskly and his action scenes are excellent. The biggest problem I have with this story is how unrelentingly bleak and grim it is. Of course, given the subject matter, it couldn’t exactly be a light-hearted romp. Still, it makes for heavy reading. But worthwhile, I’d say. (As a bibliographic aside, there’s a story of the same title by Richmond in the December 1951 issue of REAL WESTERN STORIES, but it’s much shorter. I haven’t read it, so I have no idea if Richmond expanded it for this version in GIANT WESTERN or if he just liked the title and they’re completely different stories.)

I don’t recall reading much by Cliff Walter in the past. He was a prolific contributor to the Western pulps. His story “Montana Man” in this issue is about a colorful old mountain man and his encounter with some settlers. It’s written in a folksy, supposedly humorous style that fell completely flat with me. Didn’t like it at all and wound up skimming through it.

I’ve found Robert L. Trimnell’s work to be a little inconsistent, but when he’s on his game, his stories are really, really good. His novelette in this issue has a pretty generic title, “Gun For Hire”, so I was a tad bit leery of it, but it didn’t take me long to realize that this is a terrific yarn. Tough Texas cowboy Mike Morrow trail bosses a herd to Montana, and once it’s been delivered, the crew blows off some well-earned steam in a night of drinking and debauchery. Unfortunately for Mike, when he wakes up the next morning, he has more than a hangover to contend with. He’s been framed for murder, and he winds up in the middle of a war between two rustlers, one of whom happens to be a beautiful young woman with a fondness for wearing red silk shirts with nothing under them. (Yeah, it’s a little risqué for a Western pulp story in 1952.) Mike is blackmailed into working for the young woman, but mostly he wants to sort things out and keep her from getting into too much trouble. Trimnell tells the story in hardboiled prose that reminded me of 1950s Gold Medal crime novels even more than the Western Gold Medals. He even provides a small but effective twist in the big showdown at the end. This is one of the best Western pulp stories I’ve read in a while.

Giff Cheshire is yet another author who’s hit-or-miss with me. “Drivers’ Pass” in this issue centers around the conflict between a railroad spur line being built into a mining town and the freight outfit that hauls goods with mules and wagons. It’s an interesting, well-written story that suffers from a really rushed ending, but other than that, I liked it.

Inconsistency seems to be an unofficial theme of this issue. I’ve read plenty of very good novels and stories by William Hopson, but I’ve read some that were pretty bad, too. His story “The Blue Mule” wraps up the fiction in this issue. Which was it going to be? This story is narrated by the eight-year-old son of a horse trader and starts out like it’s going to be a humorous, Doc Swap sort of story. Then it gets more serious with the introduction of a bully and a new county attorney from the east. The plot meanders around as if Hopson couldn’t decide what he wanted to write about and comes to an inconclusive ending. I hate to say it because I like Hopson’s work more often than not, but despite the narrator’s engaging voice, this just isn’t much of a story and isn’t very good.

I believe this is the first issue of GIANT WESTERN I’ve ever read, and it’s very much a mixed bag. The Trimnell story is fantastic, the Richmond novel is very good if depressing, the Cheshire story is okay, and the other two stories I didn’t like at all. Don’t go running to your shelves to look for this one, but if you do have a copy, I highly suggest you check out Trimnell’s yarn.

Review: Jubal Stone, U.S. Marshal: The Town With No Tongue - Casey Nash

U.S. Marshal Jubal Stone and Deputy U.S. Marshal Tanner Burns, who work out of Waco, Texas, are sent to a settlement in west Texas to bring back two prisoners. When they get there, they discover that no one in town is willing to talk to them except the two local lawmen. The citizens aren’t unable to speak—they’re afraid to!

That’s the intriguing premise of THE TOWN WITH NO TONGUE, the latest installment in the long-running Jubal Stone series by prolific author Casey Nash. I don’t believe I’ve ever run across this particular plot before, and when you’ve read as many Westerns as I have, that’s saying something.

THE TOWN WITH NO TONGUE has another oddball element to it, and that’s the appearance of a dime novelist who happens to be named James Reasoner. Well, “happens to be” is stretching things, since I knew Nash was going to feature me as a character in this book, along with my faithful canine friend Marlowe, and I have to say, he captures us both pretty well. Eagle-eyed readers will spot a couple of other familiar names, too.

This is a fast-moving, entertaining yarn with a couple of very likable protagonists. It’s actually the first book I’ve read in the series, and I’m going to have to go back and catch up on some of the others. THE TOWN WITH NO TONGUE, another strong entry from Dusty Saddle Publishing, is available in e-book and paperback editions.

Review: Tex: Cinnamon Wells - Chuck Dixon and Mario Alberti

This is the second volume I’ve read from the set of six Tex Willer graphic novels I backed on Kickstarter. Chuck Dixon is one of my all-time favorite comic book authors, and ever since I found out he wrote some Tex stories, I’ve been curious about them.

CINNAMON WELLS, which has artwork by Mario Alberti, opens with a violent bank robbery in the town of the title. The local lawman is organizing a posse to go after the outlaws when Tex, who is a Texas Ranger, rides in. He joins the posse, of course, and off they go after the bank robbers.

Posse stories are one of my favorite Western sub-genres, and Dixon does some unexpected and enjoyable things in this one, rather than sticking with the standard plot. Eventually it’s just Tex and one prisoner on the trail of the gang. That prisoner becomes a reluctant ally when they encounter an unrelated threat. That leads up to a classic showdown and an epilogue that’s also unexpected but quite satisfying.

This volume has some interesting angles besides the story and art. As I was reading it, some of the dialogue seemed, well, unDixon-like. Curious about that, I went to the source, and Chuck confirmed that his script was written in English, translated into Italian for this story’s original appearance, and then translated back into English for this volume by someone else. So it’s Dixon’s plot all the way, but the words are only sort of his. Despite the occasional awkwardness, the script moves along briskly, and Alberti’s art works well for me, too. CINNAMON WELLS is a fast, entertaining read.

Chuck also told me this story was inspired by the many hardboiled Western movies starring Randolph Scott, a mutual favorite of yours, and the outlaw who’s both ally and enemy to Tex is modeled on actor Henry Silva, who played one of the villains in the Scott film THE TALL T. I love finding out this kind of background info, and my thanks to Chuck for answering my questions and allowing me to pass it along here.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Two Gun Western Stories, October 1929

TWO GUN WESTERN STORIES is a pretty obscure Western pulp, although it managed to run for about four years during the late Twenties and early Thirties. I've never seen an issue of it. The cover on this issue is by Fred I. Good, an artist I've never heard of. It has some good authors in its pages, though: L.P. Holmes, Archie Joscelyn, John G. Pearsol, Raymond W. Porter, and Arthur H. Carhart. It also has some authors whose names aren't familiar to me at all: K. Carleton Unthank, Francis W. Hilton, and Gordon E. Warnke.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Hottest Fourth of July in the History of Hangtree County - Clifton Adams

A lot of Western authors have written Fourth of July novels. It’s a situation with plenty of built-in dramatic possibilities: hot weather, small town, lots of people crowded in, etc. I believe Harry Whittington’s well-regarded Gold Medal Western SADDLE THE STORM is a Fourth of July novel. Not sure because it’s been a lot of years since I read it. 

THE HOTTEST FOURTH OF JULY IN THE HISTORY OF HANGTREE COUNTY is Clifton Adams’ entry in this little sub-genre, and it’s a good one. The title itself is an ironic joke, because, as it’s explained in the novel, Hangtree County is only three years old. The book is set in Oklahoma in 1892, three years after the territory was opened for settlement. All the action takes place in one day, which places the novel in another sub-genre I like, books with a compressed time span.

Marshal Ott Gillman is getting too old to be a lawman, or at least he thinks he is. His deputy is another old-timer, even though he’s still known as Kid Fulmer, just as he was when he was a young outlaw in Texas before going straight. They make a good pair, both still more capable than they think they are, but this Fourth of July tests their ability to keep law and order because of all the outsiders coming into town for the celebration. Not everyone is in town because of the holiday, though. Some of them show up because of an old grudge against Marshal Gillman, and violence threatens to break out along with the festivities.

This isn’t a Grand Hotel sort of book with a lot of interweaving storylines, as Adams keeps the focus on Ott Gillman and the danger facing him, as well as several moral dilemmas the marshal has to grapple with. The pace is deliberate, even slow, for most of the book, but the occasional scenes of violence are sudden and brutal and effective. Anybody who thinks that all Westerns are just shoot-em-ups should read a book like this, which is almost all characterization and mood. Everything leads up to a very suspenseful climax.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on September 12, 2008. You'll hardly ever go wrong with a novel or story by Clifton Adams. He's one of the most consistent Western writers I've found when it comes to solid, entertaining yarns. This novel isn't currently in print, but his series about another lawman, Amos Flagg, written under the pseudonym Clay Randall, is available in e-book editions from Piccadilly Publishing, and I highly recommend those books, too.)

Review: Apache Rising - Marvin H. Albert

First of all, check out the upper right corner of this cover: “A Whipcrack Western”. That’s right, this is the first book in a brand-new imprint devoted to reprinting classic hardboiled Western novels. It’s from the fine folks at Stark House Press, who have reprinted some Westerns in their regular Stark House books and in their Black Gat Books line. Now the Westerns have a line of their own, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Nor could they have picked a better book to launch Whipcrack Westerns. APACHE RISING by Marvin H. Albert was published originally by Gold Medal in 1957 and later reprinted by GM under that title as well as DUEL AT DIABLO, the title of the movie based on this novel. It’s been out of print for a long time, though, and it’s great to see it back. I had never read it, so I’m glad to get this chance.

Oddly enough, considering my history of watching Western movies, I’ve never seen DUEL AT DIABLO, so I went into this source novel with no real preconceptions. The protagonist is Jess Remsberg, a tough, seasoned civilian scout for the army who is searching for the man who raped and murdered his wife. That search takes him to southern Arizona Territory and involves him with a cavalry detail taking some wagons full of ammunition from one fort to another. There are rumors that an Apache war chief is about to bring his followers out of Mexico and start raiding again, and the army is getting ready to campaign against him.

At the same time, Jess’s quest is complicated by an American woman who was captured by the Apaches and held captive for a couple of years, only to be rescued by the army and brought back to her husband, who no longer wants her. And she wants to return to the Apaches and the baby she had with the war chief’s son. Both she and her estranged husband wind up traveling with the same cavalry detail as Jess, as does a gambler who’s a former Confederate soldier.

You may think this sounds a little like a frontier soap opera, and it could have been if not for Albert’s storytelling ability and his skill at creating morally complex characters. It helps that there’s plenty of tough, gritty action as the group gets attacked by Apaches numerous times, and the reader honestly doesn’t know who’s going to survive to the end of the perilous journey. This is a really suspenseful novel that had me flipping the pages swiftly to find out what was going to happen.

The Whipcrack Western edition of this book also includes a fine introduction by Eric Compton and Tom Simon, the guys behind the Paperback Warrior blog and podcast, who provide an entertaining, informative look at Albert’s life and career.

I’ve never read a book by Marvin Albert I didn’t enjoy, and APACHE RISING continues that history. It’s a superb hardboiled Western novel, and I give it a very high recommendation. The paperback edition will be out later this week, and it’s available for pre-order now. I assume there’ll be an e-book edition, too, once the book is released.

And I’m very much looking forward to seeing what the next Whipcrack Western will be.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, May 1948

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with a dramatic and very effective cover by Sam Cherry. I’ve always liked leather shirt cuffs like the ones the cowboy on this cover is wearing.

“Brains in Broken Fork”, the featured novelette in this issue, opens with our intrepid range detective due Tombstone Jones and Speedy Smith on their way to the cowtown of Broken Fork on a rainy night. They start to take shelter from the storm in an isolated cabin, only to find it occupied by a recently deceased corpse, and a rather active one, at that, since it starts to move around and startles our heroes into lighting a shuck out of there.

After that atmospheric opening, the rest of the story is the usual mix of action, mystery, colorful characters, and humorous dialogue. Tombstone and Speedy have been sent to Broken Fork to corral some rustlers, but they find that an old robbery and a cache of missing loot are mixed up in the case, as well. And of course, there’s a pretty girl, an old sheriff, and a deputy who’s smarter than he looks, which is a good description of Tombstone and Speedy, too. As much as I enjoy this series—and I got some good chuckles out of this one—it still strikes me as one of the more uninspired entries. The plot relies heavily on elements that author W.C. Tuttle has employed in other Tombstone and Speedy yarns, and unless I missed something, he leaves one fairly important plot point completely unresolved, as if he totally forgot about it. Tuttle definitely wasn’t at the top of his game in this one, although I enjoyed reading it.

“Shotgun Nester” is by Ray Hayton, an author I’m unfamiliar with. He appears to have been rather prolific for a while, turning out 20 stories in various Western pulps from 1946 to 1948. According to the Fictionmags Index, he died at 1947 at a young age, so I was intrigued enough to do a little research. Turns out he was from Monroe, Louisiana, but committed suicide in New York City when he was only 25. His obituary on the Find A Grave website says that he served in the Army during World War II and had been writing since high school. More than half of his published fiction came out after his death, so he had stories in inventory at several magazines. Judging by “Shotgun Nester”, he was a decent writer. The protagonist is a sodbuster with a chip on his shoulder who clashes with the local cattle baron. It’s a pretty traditional story, nothing special, but well-written. I have to wonder why a writer who was apparently selling stories hand over fist would kill himself, but there’s always a lot more going on in people’s lives than we know, isn’t there?

I’m happy to report that Navajo Tom Raine makes an appearance in this issue, in the novelette “A Ranger to Reckon With”. This series, published under the house-name Jackson Cole, was created by Lee Bond, who shared writing duties on it with C. William Harrison. I’m convinced this story is by Lee Bond. For one thing, the characters stand around explaining the plot to each other, a very common technique in Bond’s stories. For another, the final shootout pits Raine against three villains, a setup that occurs in almost every story I’ve ever read by him. In this one, Raine is sent to find out who’s responsible for lynching three sodbusters. Despite being familiar, it plays out just fine and is an enjoyable read.

The last time I read a Ben Frank story, I surprised myself by kind of liking it. His story in this issue, “Circle C Checker Coup”, doesn’t have a promising title. I was expecting a humorous yarn about a checker game. Well, checkers figures in the plot, all right, but so do robbery and murder. The protagonist is a young cowhand who has a photographic memory, something I don’t think I’ve encountered before in a Western pulp yarn. I liked this one, too, quite a bit, in fact.

“Stranger in Rocky Gulch” is by Reeve Walker, a Thrilling Group house-name, so I don’t know who wrote it and couldn’t hazard a guess from reading the story. It’s about a young trail boss trying to get home with the money from selling his herd, only to be detoured into a poker game with some sinister characters. It’s a decent story, slightly unpredictable in how it plays out.

The novelette “Owlhoot Buckaroo” is the second appearance in this issue by Lee Bond (assuming I’m right about him being the author of the Navajo Tom Raine story). This stand-alone story is about a young cowboy who spent ten years being raised by an outlaw gang, although he didn’t take part in any of their criminal activities. He’s trying to put that shady past behind him, but of course, it keeps coming back to haunt him, especially when he tries to save a ranch belonging to a beautiful young woman. Although the plot is pretty standard stuff, this is an excellent story, well-written with good characters and plenty of action. Bond was a formulaic writer but capable of turning out a really good yarn. This is one of the best I’ve read by him.

“Lead Evens the Score” is by the prolific Gladwell Richardson. The protagonist is a young cowboy who returns to a crooked town to get even with the stable owner, saloonkeeper, and sheriff who robbed him on his previous visit. He discovers he’s not the only one with a grudge against that trio and has to move fast to settle their hash himself. I haven’t read a lot by Richardson. This story is okay, if nothing special.

“Judge Guppy’s Colt Law” sounds like it might be a humorous story, which is not something I expect from Wayne D. Overholser. But no, this tale of a frontier jurist trying to save a young cowboy from a murder frame is the straightforward, slightly dour sort of Western yarn Overholser usually turned out. It’s not bad, but I’ve never been a big fan of Overholser’s work and this one didn’t convert me.

Overall, this is a good issue of EXCITING WESTERN, although I wouldn’t say it’s one of the best I’ve read. With a slightly below average but still entertaining Tombstone and Speedy yarn, a good but not outstanding Navajo Tom Raine story, and better than expected tales by Lee Bond (under his own name) and Ben Frank, it’s worth reading if you have a copy on your shelves.

Review: Shane and Jonah #1: Gun Law at Hangman's Creek - Cole Shelton (Roger Norris-Green)

I’ve been a fan of Australian Westerns ever since I read the American editions of Len Meares’ Larry and Stretch books and Big Jim books (Larry and Streak and Nevada Jim in the Bantam editions I read in high school). But for a long time, few of them were readily available in the United States. In addition to those “Marshal McCoy” books (the pen-name on the original Australian editions was Marshall Grover), Leisure did some double-volume reprints by various Australian authors, but that’s about it. Now, of course, in the e-book era, we have access to many, many more of these books, thanks in large part to the fine folks at Piccadilly Publishing and Bold Venture Press.

Which brings us to Shane and Jonah, a long-running series by “Cole Shelton”, who was really Roger Norris-Green, who is not only still alive and writing, thankfully, but is also my Facebook friend. Another friend and fellow author, Brent Towns, recently recommended the Shane and Jonah books to me, so I checked out the first one, GUN LAW AT HANGMAN’S CREEK.

Shane is Shane Preston, once a happily married rancher, but when his wife is brutally murdered by outlaws, he becomes a deadly hired gun to support himself as he searches for the killers. This is back-story, and by the time this book opens, Shane has settled the score with all but one of his quarry, but he’ll continue the search for as long as it takes.

His sidekick is Jonah Jones, a pudgy, white-bearded old-timer who saved Shane’s life when he was wounded. The two of them drift through the West, sometimes working as hired guns, sometimes as bounty hunters. In GUN LAW AT HANGMAN’S CREEK, they’re summoned to the settlement of the title to serve as town taming lawmen, since Hangman’s Creek has been taken over by a corrupt, vicious saloon owner and the gun-wolves who work for him. Shane doesn’t want to just wipe out the bad guys, he wants to rally the decent citizens of the town behind him so they won’t allow anyone to run roughshod over them again.

That’s the extent of the plot, and while it’s pretty traditional, the story plays out in fine fashion thanks to Norris-Green’s deft touch with character, his appealing protagonists, and some top-notch action scenes. He does a good job of capturing the setting, too, and everything comes across as suitably authentic. GUN LAW AT HANGMAN’S CREEK is a fast, satisfying read, just the sort of thing I’m looking for in a Western. I plan to read more of the Shane and Jonah series, so I’m glad they’re being reprinted. This one is available in an e-book edition from Piccadilly Publishing and a double-volume paperback edition from Bold Venture Press. By the way, I couldn’t find an image of the original edition from Cleveland Publishing in Australia or when it came out, so if any of you have either of those things, please let me know and I’ll add it to the post. 

Review: Taming the Nueces Strip: The Story of McNelly's Rangers - George Durham as told to Clyde Wantland

I mentioned the other day that I sometimes read Western history books, and here’s a good example. As research for the second Johnny Colt novel (currently being written), I just read TAMING THE NUECES STRIP: THE STORY OF McNELLY’S RANGERS by George Durham as told to Clyde Wantland.

Durham was a member of Captain Leander McNelly’s Special Force of Texas Rangers that was sent to the Nueces Strip are of Texas, between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, to clean out the rustlers and outlaws plaguing the area in the 1870s. Years later, Durham told the story to journalist Wantland, who turned the old Ranger’s reminiscences into this book first published in 1962.

And it’s a great yarn, not the least bit dry and academic. Most of it, in fact, reads like a novel, and I had a fine time reading it. I’m pretty sure I read it when I was in college for the Life and Literature of the Southwest course I took, and I knew quite a bit about McNelly and his Rangers from other research over the years, but that didn’t prepare me for the vividness and sense of authenticity found in this account. It’s a fine example of Texana and Western history, and if you’re interested in those subjects, I give it a very high recommendation. TAMING THE NUECES STRIP is still in print in e-book and paperback editions.

And if you’ll allow me an infrequent bit of blatant self-promotion, JOHNNY COLT #2: BLOOD ON THE BORDER will be along presently from Dusty Saddle Productions.

Review: Kid Colt, Outlaw #106, September 1962

I was feeling nostalgic, so I bought all the issues available on Kindle of KID COLT, OUTLAW, one of my favorite Western comic books when I was a kid. The first one I read, eager to see if it held up, was #106, with a cover date of September 1962. The cover art is by Jack Kirby with inks by Dick Ayers, a combination I always loved.

As usual, the Kid Colt story in this issue was written by Stan Lee with art by Jack Keller. In “The Circus of Crime!”, our hero Kid Colt (an outlaw unjustly accused of a crime and forced to go on the run) is being chased by a posse when he throws in with a traveling circus in order to elude pursuit. The owner of the circus seems a little too eager to shelter a wanted outlaw, but we quickly discover there’s a reason for that: the circus performers are all outlaws, too, and use their travels to cover up their bank robbing spree! Well, the Kid’s not going to put up with this, of course, so we get some nice scenes of him clashing with the strongman, the knife thrower, the acrobats, the tightrope walker, etc. In the end, he brings the owlhoots to justice and rides off before the local law can corral him. Lee’s script moves along nicely, as they always did, and other than constantly misspelling Abilene as Abiline, it comes across as reasonably authentic for a Western yarn. I always liked Jack Keller’s art when I was a kid, but it seems a little inconsistent to me now with some excellent panels and some that are rather crude and sketchy. But I still found it enjoyable.

The lead story has 13 pages, and it’s followed by a couple of 5-page backup stories. “The Black Mask”, again written by Lee but with art by Dick Ayers this time, is a pretty traditional tale about a lawman trying to track down a masked bandit. Even though it’s only 5 pages, it has a couple of minor plot twists in it. Ayers’ art is really good, too, reminding me of Joe Kubert in places. I don’t know what sort of reputation Ayers has these days as an artist, but I loved his long run on SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS and consider him Kirby’s second-best inker from those days, behind Joe Sinnott.

The issue wraps up with a 5-page Kid Colt story, again by Lee and Keller, called “Fury at Fort Tioga”. The Kid is captured and winds up at a fort under attack by Apaches. He comes up with a novel way of ending the attack. This is kind of an oddball story and I’m not sure I buy the plot, but it’s the kind of ending you don’t see often in a Western comic book from those days.

Overall, I enjoyed this issue quite a bit. It’s nice to read a simple, well-told comic book story that has a beginning, middle, and end and no need to read the previous 400 issues to know what’s going on. If you’re hankerin’ to give the Kid a try, you can find the e-book edition on Amazon.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western Magazine, April 1948

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, ragged edges and all. That’s one tough-lookin’ hombre on the cover! I think it was painted by Robert Stanley, but I’m not sure about that.

Walt Coburn leads off the issue, as he so often did, with a novelette called “Law of the Lawless”. The Table of Contents may refer to it as a novel, but it’s about 10,000 words, I’d say. And man, does Coburn pack a lot of back-story in those words, also as usual. Most of the story takes place at the outlaw hideout known as Hole-in-the-Wall, and it consists of tense verbal clashes between two owlhoots who share some history. There’s a neglected wife, a crippled kid, an attempted suicide, hidden loot from a bank robbery, and a sinister bounty hunter who has already wiped out all of the gang led by one of the main characters. Yeah, this is melodramatic stuff, but nobody did it better than Coburn. This suspenseful opening leads up to a couple of fine action scenes that provide a satisfying conclusion. I’ve been told that by this time in his career, the editors at Popular Publications were rewriting Coburn’s stories pretty heavily because his drinking caused him to turn in unpublishable manuscripts, and that may well be true. But the complex plot, the emotional torment some of the characters go through, and the sense of frontier authenticity are pure Coburn, as far as I can tell. It’s not a perfect story—there are a couple of continuity errors that can probably be chalked up to the above-mentioned boozing—but I loved it anyway. It’s just a real gut-punch of a hardboiled Western yarn.

As I mentioned last week, Tom W. Blackburn was a very dependable Western author. His story in this issue, “A Matter of Quick Buryin’”, is about a government investigator trying to break up a ring of thieves that’s been selling stolen horses to the army. Reluctantly, he winds up with a colorful sidekick in a drunken ex-preacher. The ending in this one seems a little rushed to me, but other than that it’s excellent and is still very good overall.

In addition to being a pulp writer, William Chamberlain was in the army and in fact had a long, successful career there, retiring as a general. So it’s not surprising that his numerous Western and adventure yarns for various pulps usually had some sort of military connection. “Mount Up, You Sons of Glory!”, his story in this issue, is a cavalry tale about a campaign against the Sioux in Dakota Territory in the dead of winter. It uses the standard plot of a new, heavy-handed commanding officer ignoring the advice of his more seasoned junior officers, but Chamberlain’s straightforward, effective prose, his sense of realism, and a very poignant ending elevate this to something more than the ordinary.

I’ve come to appreciate C. William Harrison as one of the better Western pulpsters. His short tale in this issue, “Too Tough to Tame”, is about a young man whose father was an outlaw, and when he’s unjustly accused of a crime, he decides he’ll go ahead and follow the owlhoot trail. There are a couple of twists in this one, one that I saw coming and one I didn’t, and that makes for a very good story.

When he wasn’t writing classic comic book scripts in the Forties, Gardner F. Fox was writing Westerns and science fiction stories for the pulps, just as he would soon be turning out dozens of paperback original novels during the Fifties and Sixties while continuing his comics career. “The Town That Bullets Built” in this issue is about a lawman who has retired but keeps getting drawn back into trouble. Fox was a fine storyteller and keeps this one moving along briskly with well-drawn characters until a couple of very good action scenes wrap things up and bring the story to a heartwarming and satisfying conclusion. I haven’t read that many of Fox’s Westerns, but this is certainly a good one.

Peter Dawson was one of the most dependable Western writers of the Twentieth Century. In real life, he was Jonathan Glidden, brother of Frederick Glidden, also known as highly successful Western writer Luke Short. I’d hate to have to pick between the two of them as far as which one was the better writer. The Peter Dawson novella in this issue, “Hell’s Free for Nesters!” is excellent. Against his better judgment, a drifting cowboy helps a nester girl whose wagon is stuck in a river, and that lands him in the middle of a range war, a land swindle, and a murder for which he’s blamed. Just top-notch stuff all the way around, with plenty of action, good characters, and polished writing.

Also on that list of most dependable Western writers of the Twentieth Century is Clifton Adams, who nearly always turned in really fine yarns. As an Oklahoma writer, Adams was very familiar with the oil industry there and wrote a number of stories and novels set in the early days of that business. “Boss of Purgatory’s Pipeline”, Adams’ novelette in this issue, finds a range detective becoming an oilfield detective when his client, the owner of an oil pipeline suffering from sabotage, is murdered before the protagonist even arrives on the scene. The mystery is a good one and fairly complex for a story of this length, and as always, Adams’ writing is very, very good, carrying the reader along at a swift pace. This is a terrific story.

In fact, this is a terrific issue, one of the best Western pulps I’ve ever read. If you own some issues of DIME WESTERN, I’d advise you to check your shelves for this one, because it’s definitely worth reading.

Review: Tex: Challenge at the Old Mission - Pasquale Ruju, Sergio Tisselli, Luca Barbieri, Walter Venturi

Tex Willer is the hero of a very long-running Italian comic book series that debuted in 1948. The creation of writer Gian Luigi Bonelli and artist Aurelio Galloppini, Tex is both a Texas Ranger and an adopted member of the Navajo tribe, of which he becomes a chief known as Night Eagle. Neither of those things keeps him from gallivanting all over the West and having all sorts of adventures that have been chronicled by dozens of Italian comics creators and an occasional American, too.

Recently I backed a Kickstarter for a collection of hardcover Tex Willer graphic novels translated into English. The boxed set of six volumes is beautiful. I’ve just read the first one, TEX: CHALLENGE AT THE OLD MISSION, written by Pasquale Ruju with art by Sergio Tisselli. In this story, Tex and his sidekick Kit Carson (who is also a Texas Ranger; historical accuracy is not something with which this series greatly concerns itself) are in Arizona to rescue a white woman named Patricia Graves from the Apaches who have taken her captive. Patricia is the wife of an army colonel who broke a treaty with the Apaches, and the chief, Octavio, kidnapped her as a means of taking revenge on the colonel.

However, there’s more to the story than that, as there usually is, and although Tex and Kit succeed in freeing Patricia after a stand-off at the old mission of the title, that’s not the end. Things do come to a satisfying conclusion, though.

Tisselli’s impressionistic artwork isn’t the sort that usually appeals to me, but I have to admit, I like it. It has a strong sense of storytelling and dramatic action. Ruju’s terse, understated script is effective. The combination makes for an enjoyable Western yarn.

This volume includes a bonus short story entitled “A Rag Horse”, written by Luca Barbieri with art by Walter Venturi. I liked this one even better. It’s a simple tale about Tex tracking down the killers of a family of settlers in New Mexico. Venturi’s artwork is much more traditional than Tisselli’s, and Barbieri’s script is even leaner than Ruju’s, with many wordless panels. The poignant story works very well.

I guess you could call these Spaghetti Western comics. The tone is certainly similar to Spaghetti Western movies. I happen to like those, so it’s no surprise I enjoyed this book and look forward to reading the others in the set. It appears that backing the Kickstarter was the only way to get these limited editions, but other Tex graphic novels are available on the website of the publisher, Epicenter Comics.

Review: Faith and a Fast Gun - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

FAITH AND A FAST GUN is another adventure of hard-luck range detective Joshua Dillard, who’s in Del Rio to visit the grave of his late wife when he finds himself drawn into a clash between the daughter of a murdered rancher and the cattle baron responsible for the man’s death. Faith Hartnett’s brother Dick won a herd of longhorns from ruthless rancher Lyte Grumman, who rules Del Rio with an iron fist, then left with the cattle on a trail drive to Montana. Faith wants to head north, too, and rejoin her brother, but Grumman wants to prevent that. Even though it’s not Joshua’s trouble, he decides to help Faith get away from Grumman and be reunited with her brother.

Well-written though it is, with good characters and some nice hardboiled action, this is a pretty standard beginning for a Western novel. But old pro Chap O’Keefe (actually Keith Chapman, as many of you already know) is just luring the reader in before springing some great twists in the plot. Those twists don’t come fast and furious, as they do in some books. The sense that something isn’t quite right builds at a more deliberate but very effective pace, picking up steam as the storyline moves from Texas to Montana and winds up in a stunning climax that’s more like something out of Greek tragedy than a traditional Western.

This is a fine novel, with O’Keefe working solidly in the tradition of noirish Western authors such as Lewis B. Patten, H.A. De Rosso, and Dean Owen. Joshua Dillard is a very appealing, tough but flawed hero, and the other characters are drawn vividly as well. If you’re a Western fan and haven’t tried a Chap O’Keefe novel yet, you really should.

(This review was written about an earlier edition of this novel, but nothing has changed except that there's a new edition with an excellent cover and a fine bonus article "No Trail to Fortune" that discusses some of the editorial resistance FAITH AND A FAST GUN got from its original publisher, Robert Hale, as well as the ever-changing and challenging landscape of writing and publishing. I'm always interested in anything Keith Chapman has to say on this subject, since he's been in this crazy business longer than almost anyone. This is one of the best of the Joshua Dillard series, and I highly recommend it. It's available in e-book and paperback editions on Amazon, as well as all the other platforms, and you can find links to those here.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Frontier Stories, Winter 1944

I featured this issue of FRONTIER STORIES several years ago, but I’ve since acquired a copy and just read it. Unfortunately, that copy is completely coverless, including the spine, but I’m not a fan of that Sidney Reisenberg cover anyway and all the pages are complete and easily readable, so I’m all right with that. Once again, the scan is from the Fictionmags Index, but my comments below are new.

Les Savage Jr. is one of my favorite Western writers. His mountain man novella “Queen of the Long Rifles” leads off this issue. That title is somewhat deceptive, and I suspect editor Malcolm Reiss may have come up with it. The story features a strong female character in Mira Phillips, the daughter of a trading post owner in the Big Horn Mountains during the fur trapping era. The actual protagonist is Batteau Severn, a French-Canadian trapper who clashes with a ruthless New Englander trying to take over the fur trade. This winds up as an out-and-out war between the two factions, which provides Savage with the opportunity for plenty of big, sweeping action scenes, as well as some brutal fistfights and one-on-one showdowns. This is a terrific story, full of excitement and a vividly portrayed, historically accurate setting. Batteau is a tough and very likable hero, Mira is a fine heroine, there are several top-notch sidekicks, some thoroughly despicable villains, and several surprisingly poignant moments. Savage could just write the heck out of a yarn like this. I loved it.

Tom W. Blackburn was also a consistently excellent Western author. His novelette “Devil’s Cache” starts with a freighter following the trail of whoever stole four of his horses. Not very far along, though, the story takes an abrupt turn and appears momentarily that it’s about to turn into a lost race yarn. That’s not how things play out, but the plot is still fairly off-beat for a Western pulp tale. This one is very well-written and I enjoyed it a lot, too.

Sometimes reading a pulp is educational. “Red Reckoning” is about a stagecoach trying to make it across the country to San Francisco before a ship can sail around South America and reach the same destination. An enormous wager is riding on the outcome. The protagonist is a frontier scout hired to help the stagecoach make the journey safely. Naturally, there’s a lot of trouble and treachery along the way, as well as romance with the daughter of the stagecoach line owner who made the bet. It’s a well-written yarn that moves along at a nice pace. I had never heard of the authors, Frankie-Lee Weed and Kelly Masters, so I did a little research on them, and that’s where the educational part comes in. My first thought was that they might be a husband-and-wife writing team, but nope, turns out they were just occasional writing partners who had much more prolific careers on their own. Kelly Masters published a few stories under his real name, but most of his work, which consisted mainly of slick magazine stories and boys’ adventure novels, was published under the pseudonym Zachary Ball. A couple of his novels were adapted as episodes of the original Walt Disney TV show. Frankie-Lee Weed published quite a few stories in the Western romance and love pulps under her real name, as well as the pseudonym Saliee O’Brien. Under the O’Brien name she went on to publish numerous historical romance novels in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. I remember seeing those books when they were new. So both authors went on to bigger (not necessarily better) things but got their start in the pulps.

Curtis Bishop was a Texas newspaper reporter who followed the rodeo circuit while also writing scores of Western and sports stories for various pulps, along with a number of juvenile sports novels and some well-regarded Western novels. I haven’t read much by him, but everything I’ve read has been very good. So I expected to enjoy “Turning Trails”, his novelette in this issue set in Texas during the days right after the Civil War. It starts off strong with a former Confederate officer having left his home and headed west after the war, as many actually did. He arrives in San Antonio and gets mixed up in the clash between the beautiful blond owner of a nearby ranch and the brutal, corrupt Reconstruction authorities who run things in Texas at this point. Then it becomes a trail drive story as the protagonist tries to help the young woman get a herd of cattle across the Red River into Indian Territory before the crooked sheriff can seize them. Bishop writes with a nice sense of time and place, but this story goes off the rails in the second half as he makes a number of geographical errors (I mean, I understand dramatic license, but that only goes so far, especially when you’re a Texan writing about Texas), and the plot twist that fuels the story’s resolution stretches willing suspension of disbelief ’way past the breaking point. I just didn’t accept that things could ever happen that way—and I’m a guy who has no problem with, say, Jim Hatfield’s almost super heroics. So this story, despite having some good stuff in it, wound up being a major disappointment.

This issue wraps up with the novella “The Conestoga Pirate” by another of my favorite authors, Dan Cushman. It’s an important story in Cushman’s career because it introduces his series character, the good guy outlaw Comanche John, although in this story and the next one in the series, he’s called Dutch John. This story was reprinted in the Leisure Books collection NO GOLD ON BOOTHILL, but since I have the original pulp version, that’s what I read. I hadn’t read any of the Dutch/Comanche John stories until now, although I think I own them all in one form or another.

Something about “The Conestoga Pirate” struck me as familiar right away, and a glance at the story intro in NO GOLD ON BOOTHILL explained why. Cushman used parts of this novella in his later novel NORTH FORK TO HELL, which I read several years ago, although he dropped Dutch John from that version. In this one, Dutch John is more of a supporting character, although an important one. The protagonist is young Wils Fleming, who, along with the old-timer Bogey and the disreputable gunfighter/outlaw Dutch John, encounter a wagon train full of immigrants being duped by a group of villains pretending to be guides and scouts. This leads to drama, gunplay, ambushes, and attempted lynchings. It’s a good, fast-moving story, with a little bit of an off-kilter tone, as many of Cushman’s stories have. He wrote a lot of Western and adventure stories for the pulps that were firmly in those traditions yet just a little different at the same time. It took me a while to understand that and appreciate his work, but as I said above, he’s now one of my favorites. I guess I need to read the rest of the Comanche John stories and novels.

There are also two Western history articles in this issue, one about the outlaw Black Jack Ketchum by Harold Preece and one about the Bannock War by Fairfax Downey. As usual, I just skimmed these. I like Western history and have read a bunch of it, but when it comes to pulps, I’m there for the fiction. And despite my ultimate disappointment in Curtis Bishop’s novella, this is an excellent issue of FRONTIER STORIES overall, with outstanding yarns from Savage, Cushman, and Blackburn. If you have a copy, it’s well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Complete Western Book Magazine, August 1950

Norman Saunders provides his usual action-packed cover on this issue of COMPLETE WESTERN BOOK MAGAZINE, and as an added bonus, we get another appearance of that iconic trio: the stalwart cowboy (you can tell he's stalwart, he's wearing a red shirt), a beautiful redhead (looks more frightened than angry, but she's definitely gun-toting, although her iron is still pouched), and a beleaguered old geezer (not wounded but in recent danger of being lynched, by the looks of it). And isn't the old geezer a dead ringer for Sam Elliott? Saunders was prescient. There are only three stories in this issue, but they're by good authors: Frank P. Castle, Rod Patterson, and John Callahan. Appears to be well worth reading. I don't own a copy and scans don't appear to be on-line, but I can admire the cover.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ace-High Western Stories, January 1949

I don't own this pulp, but like most of the Western pulps from Popular Publications, this issue of ACE-HIGH WESTERN STORIES has a good bunch of authors inside and an eye-catching cover. My hunch is that Robert Stanley painted it, but I'm not sure about that. Walt Coburn leads things off, as he so often does, and also on hand are Roe Richmond, Tom Roan, William R. Cox, Eli Colter, James Shaffer, Harold F. Cruickshank, Spencer Frost (whose name isn't familiar to me), and Richard L. Nelson, who's interesting because that's a pseudonym of William L. Hamling, much more famous as an author and editor and the publisher of the science fiction digests IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES, as well the founder of the soft-core empire that included Nightstand Books, Midnight Reader, etc., books written by Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, Evan Hunter, Ben Haas, Harry Whittington, and many other legendary authors under assorted pseudonyms and house-names.

Review: Guns of Tascosa - Ryan D. Fowler

Bounty hunters Frank Nolan and Ed Cole find themselves pinning on tin stars for the first time in their adventurous lives as they agree to be the co-marshals of Tascosa, a wild new town in the Texas Panhandle. The respectable citizens are living in fear of outlaw Brett Harding and his gang, and they turn to Nolan and Cole to deliver some law and order and make Tascosa a decent place to live. The new lawmen try to rally the town behind them, but there may be more hidden dangers in Tascosa than the two long-time trail partners are aware of.

GUNS OF TASCOSA is a traditional Western in the very best sense of the term, with stalwart heroes, despicable villains, a little humor and romance, and plenty of well-written action. Author Ryan Fowler, a prolific writer under his own and other names, spins his yarn with a breakneck pace and well-developed characterization.

And then, part of the way through the book, he springs a plot twist that I didn’t see coming at all. This is always a huge bonus as far as I’m concerned because I love it when a book surprises me. Fowler also brings a sense of gritty authenticity to this tale. It’s easy to see that he knows and loves the Texas Panhandle. This is excellent reading for fans of classic Westerns, and I give it a high recommendation. It's available on Amazon.