Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Rustlers Three - Buck Billings


When the law makes things too hot in Montana for notorious rustler Wild Will Wilson, he drifts down to the West Texas cowtown of El Centro and forces his way into a rustling ring masterminded by railroad superintendent T.K. “Track” Zuter. (This isn’t a spoiler; Zuter’s villainy is revealed right away.) Wilson proves his bona fides by wide-looping some cattle from the nearby Diamond A Ranch, owned by Jim Blair. Then Wilson comes up with an even more audacious scheme to swipe some cattle right of the very railroad cars in which they’re being shipped. Along the way, he also romances Marjorie Blair, the beautiful daughter of Jim Blair.

Then, halfway through this book, the author pulls off a nice plot twist in which it turns out hardly anything is what it appeared to be. This development would be even more effective if the dust jacket copy hadn’t given it away, but even so, it works well and plunges the reader into a rather dizzying array of complications, double-crosses, and hidden identities.

RUSTLERS THREE was published in hardback by Arcadia House in 1943 under the name Buck Billings. As far as I know, it was never reprinted, at least not under that title and by-line. Buck Billings is a pseudonym that’s been connected to prolific pulpsters Claude Rister and A. Leslie Scott, but there’s no definitive list of who wrote what. A friend of mine and I have been trying to figure that out, but it’s a daunting task involving a lot of guesswork and speculation. For example, there’s a long novella entitled “Rustlers Three” that was published in the November 1939 issue of the pulp magazine WEST under the house-name Sam Brant. This could well be the source of the Arcadia House novel. I haven’t been able to lay my hands on a copy of that issue or find a scan of it in order to compare. Neither Rister nor Scott have been known to write under the Sam Brant name, but in the world of pulp magazine house-names, almost anything is possible.

The best I can do as far as authorship of RUSTLERS THREE goes is to make an educated guess. Most of this novel reads like it was written by A. Leslie Scott, who had a fairly distinctive style. But some of it doesn’t read like Scott. He had a habit of taking one of his pulp novels, rewriting it, and adding material from a short story in order to make the yarn long enough for book publication. Something like that happens in RUSTLERS THREE, but I have to wonder if someone else (maybe Scott’s wife Lily, who wrote for the love pulps) did the actual combining and rewriting to produce the Arcadia House version of the novel. That’s some of the pure speculation I mentioned above. The one thing I can say with relative certainty is that the book wasn’t written by Claude Rister. I’m no expert on his work, but it seems very different in style to me.

But to get to the most important question, is RUSTLERS THREE any good? Well, yeah, it is. It’s a fast-moving tale with a likable protagonist and some good action scenes. It could have used a little more action, to be honest, but what’s there is exciting and well-written. I raced through this book and had a good time reading it. If you’re a fan of traditional Westerns from the Thirties and Forties, it’s worth reading if you come across a copy, which, admittedly, is likely to be pretty uncommon these days.

Monday, March 25, 2024

Sexton Blake: The Green Jester - Donald Stuart


“The Green Jester”, a Sexton Blake novella by Donald Stuart, appeared originally in UNION JACK #1379, March 22, 1930, and was reprinted in the collection SEXTON BLAKE WINS, which is where I read it. It’s a very entertaining yarn in which a mysterious killer sends warning limericks to his intended victims on cards that bear a drawing of a sinister jester dressed in green. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t take long for the press to dub this unknown murderer The Green Jester. The great detective Sexton Blake and his friend Inspector Coutts are soon on the case as well, trying to discover a connection between the seemingly unrelated victims. They’re almost in time to prevent one of the murders, arriving at the country estate of a retired doctor who has received one of the grim warnings, but The Green Jester has beaten them to the punch and has left behind more grisly handiwork. The chase isn’t over, though, as Blake continues trying to untangle this deadly scheme.

This is one of those proverbial ripping yarns, as Stuart keeps the story moving along at a fast pace with storms, midnight chases, and plenty of action. In his introductory comments, Jack Adrian, the editor of SEXTON BLAKE WINS, mentions that Donald Stuart was heavily influenced by the work of Edgar Wallace. Now, I’m very, very far from an expert on Wallace, having read exactly one of his novels, but even so, “The Green Jester” sounds like a Wallace title to me, so I’m sure Adrian is right. That just makes me want to read even more by Stuart, and Wallace, because I sure enjoyed this one.

In the spirit of full disclosure, this is also one of the rare occasions where I was ahead of Blake on figuring out who The Green Jester was, although there was one angle I didn’t have nailed down. Still, I felt pretty good about my deductions.

The cover image above is from Mark Hodder’s invaluable website Blakiana. If you’re a Sexton Blake fan and haven’t visited there, you should check it out right away.

I’ve enjoyed every story so far in SEXTON BLAKE WINS. It’s a fine collection.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, December 2, 1939


I'm pretty sure I've read this issue of ARGOSY, but it was at least twenty years ago, probably longer, and I don't recall anything about it except the nice Rudolph Belarski cover and that I really enjoyed Frank Richardson Pierce's timber novella. Pierce was just about the best at that kind of yarn. Also in this issue are stories by Jim Kjelgaard, Carl Rathjen, Alexander Key, and Robert W. Cochran, plus serial installments by Robert Carse, Johnston McCulley, and Jonathan Stagge (actually the same guys who wrote mysteries under the pseudonyms Patrick Quentin and Q. Patrick, at least part of the time; who wrote what under those names is pretty complicated). ARGOSY always had great covers and great writers. If it just weren't for all those blasted serials . . .   

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Spicy Western Stories, September 1939



The cover of this issue of SPICY WESTERN STORIES is credited to Delos Palmer in the Fictionmags Index, and I don't doubt that's right, but Allan Anderson must have seen this cover at some point and been impressed by it. At first glance, I sure took it for Anderson's work. This issue includes stories by some Spicy stalwarts: E. Hoffmann Price, James P. Olsen (writing as James A. Lawson), Edwin Truett Long (writing as Luke Terry), and Laurence Donovan (twice, once as himself and once as Phil Strange). There's also a story by house-name Ken Cooper, and two by little-known authors Hart Williams (his only credit in the FMI) and Alf Foote (only two stories listed in the FMI). My hunch is that those last two were pseudonyms, but really, who knows? Not me, that's for sure. This issue doesn't appear to be on-line, so if you don't own a copy (I don't), you'll have to be content with looking at the cover. But at least it's a good cover.

UPDATE: I've discovered belatedly that I've posted this cover before, several years ago. I've been posting pulp covers on the weekends for well over a decade now, so I suppose it's inevitable that a rerun creeps in by accident now and then. As I said above, though, it's a good cover, so I'm going to leave it here. Anyway, this post has a little more information in it than the original one did.

Friday, March 22, 2024

A Rough Edges Rerun: Barb Wire - Walt Coburn


(This post appeared in a somewhat different form on May 20, 2008.)

Walt Coburn has to be one of the most inconsistent Western writers I’ve ever encountered. STIRRUP HIGH, his fictionalized memoir of growing up on one of the largest cattle ranches in Montana during the early 20th Century, is one of the best books of its type that I’ve read. Many of his hundreds of stories published in the Western pulps are excellent. But at the same time, many of his stories are terrible, mostly from the late Forties on, when he began having more of a problem with alcohol. And his novels, to me, are seldom as good as his shorter works, because the longer length provides more of an opportunity for his weaknesses to surface.

BARB WIRE, one of Coburn’s early novels, is a mess. Highly entertaining in places, but still a mess. The plot is a simple one: A villain from back east encourages farmers to move into ranching country, knowing this will provoke a cattlemen vs. nesters range war, after which, when both sides are wiped out, the bad guy can move in and take over. Certainly that plot wasn’t as old in 1931, when the book came out, as it is now, but it had whiskers even then.


BARB WIRE is set in the 20th Century, complete with telephones and cars, and that allows Coburn to indulge in one of his favorite themes, the passing of the Old West and the end of ranch life as the old-timers knew it. The other dominant theme in his work is the resurfacing of complications that have tragic origins in the past. Coburn can give Ross Macdonald a run for his money when it comes to this element of his plots.

And ultimately that causes most of the problems in BARB WIRE, because Coburn crams dozens of characters into the story, all of them with at least one melodramatic connection with the other characters. You’ve got your nominal hero, rancher’s son Buck Rawlins, who’s in love with Colleen Driscoll, the daughter of Bob Driscoll, the former partner but current enemy of Dave Rawlins, Buck’s father, who were both friends with Uncle Hank Mayberry, the local banker whose son-in-law is in cahoots with the Evil Easterner. Buck thinks that Colleen is in love with Bill Murdock, whose father Angus Murdock is hated by the cattlemen because he raises sheep (you knew there had to be some sheepherders in here somewhere) and is blamed for a murder and a prairie fire really caused by, you guessed it, the henchmen of the Evil Easterner. Then you’ve got the Nighthawk, a dashing and good-hearted outlaw who used to be a cowboy but now robs trains because he hates the railroad because he blames it for the deaths of his father and brother, and of course the Nighthawk is also friends with Buck Rawlins and is opposed to the schemes of the Evil Easterner. Not to forget the psychotic gunslinger who has a hook in place of his left hand, a despised son who wants to be a preacher, and an old enemy who was thought to be dead but is really still alive and working for, who else, the Evil Easterner.


I’m sure you get the idea by now. There’s just too blasted much going on in this book, and while Coburn keeps his various plot threads under control well enough so that the reader never gets lost, after a while it’s exhausting keeping track of things. Coburn’s tendency to every so often drag in some new characters from out of left field complicates matters even more.

Despite all of that, however – or maybe because of it – the book does have an epic feel, and it’s packed full of very stirring and well-written individual scenes, too, with a lot of operatic, over-the-top action. A real sense of authenticity comes through, as well. The plot may be a little unbelievable, but the details of ranching life in Montana come across as completely realistic. All of it wraps up with a poignant and very effective ending. So if you come across a copy of BARB WIRE and decide to read it, I certainly wouldn’t advise you not to. Chances are you’ll be entertained. Just be prepared for a certain amount of goofiness as well.



Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Hell Strip - Lee Richards (Lee E. Wells)

Art by Lu Kimmel

The year is 1851, and Texas Ranger Dave Fleming is gripped by gold fever. He resigns from the Rangers and heads for Panama, intending to make his way to California and find his fortune in the goldfields. Unfortunately, through a series of misadventures, Dave winds up stranded in that tropical hellhole and goes to work for Marie Hooper, a beautiful redheaded American who owns the biggest saloon, gambling den, and bordello in Panama City. He also makes a bad enemy in Krim Paletz, the owner of a freight line who may well be the mastermind behind the outlaw gang terrorizing the whole country.

Then another former Ranger arrives in Panama, an old friend of Dave’s named Ran Runnels. Runnels, a deadly gunfighter and manhunter, has been recruited by representatives of the American, British, and French governments to bring law and order to Panama, no matter what it takes. He immediately gets Dave to sign on as his second-in-command, and they set out to track down the leaders of Panama’s criminal underworld.


HELL STRIP is a terrific book, a fast-moving blend of Western, historical, and hardboiled crime in an unusual setting. The actual author behind the Lee Richards pseudonym is the old pulpster and paperbacker Lee E. Wells. I read one of Wells’ Rio Kid pulp novels some years ago and thought it was okay, but I wasn’t impressed enough to seek out any more of his novels. Clearly, based on this Gold Medal paperback from 1955, that was a mistake. It could be that Wells just wasn’t all that well-suited to write a pulp series character. That’s been true with other authors I’ve encountered. But he sure spins a great yarn here.

In addition to the intrigue and gunplay and strong, likable protagonist, there’s a well-done romantic triangle, some harrowing scenes in a Panamanian prison, and a vivid rendering of the exotic setting. Wells even gives the reader a slight plot twist late in the book that’s effective even if it’s not really surprising, and the ending is very satisfying. This would have made a great 1950s movie with Clint Walker playing Dave, Audie Murphy as Runnels, Rhonda Fleming as Marie, and maybe John Dehner as the sinister Krim Paletz.

Even though HELL STRIP doesn’t break any new ground other than the Panama setting, Wells did such a good job spinning his yarn that it doesn’t matter. I had a wonderful time reading this book. Somewhat surprisingly, there’s an inexpensive e-book edition of it available on Amazon. If you’re a fan of hardboiled Westerns, I give it a very high recommendation.

Monday, March 18, 2024

The D.C. Man #1: Top Secret Kill - James P. Cody (Peter T. Rohrbach)


I vaguely remember seeing copies of the original editions of the D.C. Man series in used bookstores back in the Seventies, but I never bought or read any of them. I guess they just didn’t stand out enough from the many, many men’s adventure and mystery series being published then. But they resurfaced a few years ago when my friend Tom Simon of the Paperback Warrior website and podcast became interested in them and decided to find out the true identity of the author of those four novels, who was by-lined as James P. Cody. (To digress for a moment, I was asked once by a fan if I was James P. Cody, given my first name and the fact that the protagonist of my first novel is named Cody. I answered honestly that I had nothing to do with those books and hadn’t even read them.)

Well, to sum up what you can read in Simon’s entertaining and informative introduction to these new reprints of the series, “James P. Cody” turned out to be Peter T. Rohrbach, a former Catholic priest from Washington, D.C., who left the priesthood, married and had a daughter, and wrote the four novels in the D.C. Man series as well as numerous works of non-fiction. Simon’s investigation into the author led, in turn, to the series being reprinted by Brash Books, and that led to me reading the first novel, TOP SECRET KILL, fifty years after it was first published.


The D.C. Man is Brian Peterson, former football player and member of Army Intelligence. Having married the daughter of a politician, he becomes a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., only to have his comfortable life shattered by tragedy when his wife and infant daughter are killed in a car crash. After a period of mourning and generally going to seed, Peterson resumes his career as a lobbyist, only he has a sideline now: he's a fixer for anybody who has an embarrassing and/or dangerous problem they need taken care of discreetly. And since he operates in Washington, there’s never a shortage of dangerous jobs for Peterson to take on. This set-up allows him to put his physical toughness and his investigative background to work.

All this is back-story, which Rohrbach takes a while to set up, but he does it painlessly enough that it’s easy to keep reading. Peterson, who narrates the story in first-person, has been a behind-the-scenes troubleshooter for a while when TOP SECRET KILL opens. After a brief sequence to set the stage and show us Peterson in action, he’s hired by a senator to investigate a leak in a committee dealing with military expenditures. This serves as a fairly low-key Macguffin, since the whole thing doesn’t really amount to any sort of earth-shaking threat, but it works well enough to get Peterson involved in some tough-guy stuff and a couple of murders. There’s also a beautiful blonde along the way to liven things up for him.

As you can tell from that description, TOP SECRET KILL is pretty much a private eye yarn in everything but name. As such, it reminds me of a couple of other tough guy series set in Washington, Stephen Marlowe’s Chester Drum novels (and Drum actually is a private eye) and the Steve Bentley novels by E. Howard Hunt writing as Robert Dietrich (Bentley is a two-fisted CPA). Rohrbach wasn’t as polished a writer as Marlowe or Hunt, but he spins this yarn in entertaining fashion and it moves along quite nicely once everything is in place. I enjoyed this one enough that I’m sure I’ll read the other novels in the series, and if you’re a fan of Seventies men’s adventure or hardboiled detective fiction, I certainly recommend getting to know the D.C. Man. This one is available in paperback and e-book editions from Amazon, as are the others in the series.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, March 1943


I like this PLANET STORIES cover by Jerome Rozen, and inside this issue are stories by some excellent writers: Leigh Brackett, Nelson S. Bond, Carl Jacobi, Ross Rocklynne, Ray Cummings, and Milton Lesser (better known these days as Stephen Marlowe). This and a bunch of other PLANET STORIES issues can be read on-line here. Would that I had time to do so!

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, October 1954


This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The art is by Sam Cherry, as usual during this era of TEXAS RANGERS. What’s a little unusual is that it depicts a scene in the issue’s lead novel, which didn’t happen often on the covers of Western pulps. I don’t know if Cherry actually read this issue’s Jim Hatfield novel or the editor or art director told him about the scene, but either way, it’s quite effective.

That lead novel, “The Deepest Grave”, is a good one, too. Texas Ranger Jim Hatfield is sent to the Big Bend area of Texas to investigate the disappearance of a young Ranger assigned to uncover the thieves behind a high-grading scheme at a gold mine. The trail leads Hatfield to the mining boomtown of LaPlata, but only after he’s ambushed and suffers an arm wound, an injury that bothers him for the remainder of this novel, which is also an unusual touch. The story barrels along with almost non-stop action and features some suspenseful scenes in a mine shaft hundreds of feet under the ground. According to the Fictionmags Index, the author of this yarn is Walker A. Tompkins, and while it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the Hatfield novels by Tompkins and the ones penned by Peter Germano, I agree that this one certainly reads like Tompkins’ work. It’s a really solid, enjoyable Jim Hatfield novel.

“Half a Solid Gold Mountain” isn’t exactly a comedy, but the first-person narration has a bit of a lighthearted touch about it that works pretty well. This tale of the dangerous encounter between a prospector and a gang of Mexican bandits along the border is by Frank Scott York. I don’t know anything about the author except that he wrote about three dozen Western and detective yarns for the pulps during the mid-Fifties. This one isn’t a lost gem, but it’s enjoyable.

I don’t know anything about H.G. Ashburn, either, except that he published about a dozen stories in various Western pulps during a short career in the mid-Fifties. His story “The Last Attack” in this issue is the first of those yarns. It’s a good story about a fast gun with a bad ticker and an unusual resolution to a gunfight. I liked it.

I’ve mentioned many times that I don’t care for the Jim Hatfield novels that Roe Richmond wrote under the Jackson Cole house-name. But in recent years, I’ve come to enjoy his stand-alone Western stories under his own name. His novelette in this issue, “Pretty Devil”, is really good. Two former Confederate officers, Sid Conister and Rip Razee, left homeless and broke by the war and Reconstruction, head west to Arizona Territory so Conister can claim part-ownership in a ranch, an interest he inherited from his late wife. When they get there, they find themselves immersed in troubles right out of a Southern Gothic: lurid secrets, hidden crimes, rampaging emotions. Richmond packs enough back-story and plot into this one that it could have been a full-length novel. And actually, it might have been better at that length with more room to develop the complicated story. As is, it’s still great fun to read, and I’ll definitely be on the lookout for more stories by Richmond.

“Fight or Drift” by Giles A. Lutz is a short story about a fiddle-playing drifter with a secret. Lutz was a consistently good writer and this excellent yarn manages to be both gritty and heartwarming.

I’ve also made a number of negative comments about the work of Ben Frank. I generally find his humorous Westerns, including his long-running Doc Swap series, rather unfunny. Even so, I always give his stories a try, and in “Not the Marrying Kind”, his contribution to this issue, he proves that he can write a lightweight but fairly straightforward Western yarn. It's the tale of a young rancher who has to contend not only with a pretty blonde who has her sights set on marrying him but also an escaped outlaw who blames our protagonist for him being captured and sent to prison in the first place. It’s cleverly plotted with Frank planting some stuff early in the story that pays off later and may well be the best thing I’ve read by Ben Frank.

Overall, this is an outstanding issue of TEXAS RANGERS with not a bad story in the bunch and a good Sam Cherry cover, to boot. If you have a copy on your shelves, it’s well worth reading.

Friday, March 15, 2024

A Rough Edges Rerun: Murder on the Side - Day Keene


(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on January 23, 2009. I failed to mention in it that the cover is by the great Barye Phillips.)

At the beginning of this novel, Larry Hanson is bored. He’s bored with his job because, while he’s trained to be an engineer and works at an engineering firm, he’s stuck in a desk job instead of being out building bridges and dams. He’s bored in his marriage to a cold, uncaring wife. He’s approaching middle age and fears that life has passed him by. So when his wife is out of town caring for her sick mother and his beautiful young secretary calls him in the middle of the night because she thinks she’s just accidentally killed her old boyfriend who just got out of prison, Larry thinks that maybe he’ll finally have a little excitement in his life.

And since this is a Gold Medal novel, you know that Larry’s about to get a whole lot more excitement than he bargained for.

It’ll come as no surprise to anybody who’s read more than a few of these books that Larry soon finds himself up to his neck in trouble, of the multiple murder, on the run from the cops, illicit sex, missing money, and deadly secrets variety. Like a lot of Gold Medal protagonists, Larry’s kind of a heel and not too bright, at least at first. The plot stretches credulity almost to the breaking point a few times, but Day Keene is such a skillful author and keeps things moving so fast that the reader doesn’t really care. I didn’t, anyway.

Chances are you’ll see most of the twists and turns coming in this one, but I’ve discovered that reading a Gold Medal novel is a lot like taking a Sunday afternoon drive: the pleasure isn’t so much in where you’re going, but rather in how you get there. I’m not sure that MURDER ON THE SIDE is a book you’d hand to somebody who’s never read a Gold Medal and say, “This is what they’re like.” You’d probably need a Charles Williams or Harry Whittington or Gil Brewer novel for that. To me Day Keene’s work never quite reaches the same level of sweaty intensity that you find in a book by those other authors. It’s still incredibly entertaining and just flat-out fun to read. Highly recommended.