This is a pulp that I own and read recently, and as usual in those cases, the scan is from the actual issue I read. DIME WESTERN, like all the Popular Publications Western pulps, was a consistently entertaining magazine, and this issue is no exception.
Tom W. Blackburn was one of the heroes of my childhood, although I didn’t know that at the time. I say that because he wrote the scripts for the Davy Crockett episodes of THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY that featured Fess Parker. There was no bigger fan of Davy Crockett in the early Sixties, when those shows were being rerun on a regular basis, than I was. I sang the theme song all the time, too, and Blackburn wrote those iconic lyrics. In recent years I’ve read some of his pulp stories and liked them. His novelette that leads off this issue, “Quest of the Thirty Dead”, is an excellent hardboiled Western yarn about a bounty hunter tracking down the members of an outlaw gang who raided a town and burned down a hotel as a distraction while they looted the banks, resulting in thirty fatalities. There are a few plot twists and plenty of action in this one, and it comes to a very satisfying conclusion.
J.H. Holland is an author I’m not familiar with. His short story, “Get Up and Fight Again!” is next in this issue. It’s set right after the Civil War and concerns a former Union soldier who goes west to find the sister of a friend who died in the Andersonville prison camp. Naturally enough, the sister is having trouble with the local range hog, and the ex-soldier takes up her cause. Holland seems to have been a real person but didn’t publish much. This is the first story of his listed in the Fictionmags Index. It’s fairly well written but never generates much suspense, and the ending seems rushed, as if Holland was too inexperienced to know how to develop the situation. It has some nice bits of action and description, though.
Dean Owen’s stories are always good. “A Brave Man Dies But Once”, set in Virginia City, Nevada, during the silver boom, is narrated by traveling cigar salesman Sam Kincaid, who is more than he seems. A crisis forces him to make a choice about which way his life is going to go, and not surprisingly, it all leads to the satisfying conclusion of an excellent tale.
By this point in Walt Coburn’s career as a writer and a two-fisted drinker, rumor has it that his manuscripts were heavily rewritten by editors, so it’s impossible to say how much of the novella “Hell With a Running Iron!” is Coburn’s work and how much came from some Popular Publications staffer. Most of it, however, reads like Coburn to me. The plot is fairly simple for one of his yarns—big ranching syndicate frames a small rancher for rustling so it can gobble up his spread—but as usual Coburn has a large cast of characters with a lot of back-story. Sometimes Coburn throws in so many elements his stories don’t really have a chance of making sense, but thankfully that’s not the case here. It’s a good story with some nice action and the undeniable sense of authenticity that you find in most of Coburn’s work. Not in the top rank of his efforts, but for the late Forties, not bad at all.
George C. Appell had a nice career writing for the pulps, slicks, and digests from the mid-Forties on through the Sixties, as well as producing a number of novels. His story “Last Roll Call” concerns the aftermath of the Battle of the Little Big Horn and a couple of soldiers from the 7th Cavalry who may have survived the massacre. It’s a good plot, and Appell writes very well. I’ve seen a lot of his work around but haven’t read much of it. Based on this story, I probably should.
I started reading Frank Bonham’s juvenile novels when I was a kid, with no knowledge of his career as a writer for the Western pulps. He did a lot of stories with unusual protagonists, and “Payment Past Due” is one of them. The hero is a doctor from the East with a dark secret in his past who heads west to make a new start. Eventually, of course, that secret will come out and the doctor will have to find out if he’s as good with a six-gun as he is with a scalpel. Bonham is another writer whose work is just about always good, and I enjoyed this story quite a bit.
Every so often I run across a pulp story written by someone I’ve actually met. That’s the case with Thomas Thompson’s “The Hangin’ Plague Hits Tonto Basin”. Thompson was at the WWA convention in Fort Worth in 1986 and I got to say hello to him there. I don’t remember much about it except that he was pleasant enough and looked a lot like the actor Al Lewis, who played Grandpa Munster. He was the story editor on BONANZA for many years, so I was a fan of his work there, but I’m not sure I’ve ever read any of his pulp stories before this one. I’ll definitely be looking for them from now on, though, because “The Hangin’ Plague Hits Tonto Basin” is maybe the best story in this issue of DIME WESTERN. It’s a variation on the old sheepmen-versus-local-cattle-baron plot, with an ex-con caught in the middle, but it’s very well written with a great hardboiled tone and plenty of action. I really enjoyed it and want to read more by Thompson, soon.
That wraps up this issue of DIME WESTERN, and it’s a very good one, with only one weak story (and it’s not terrible) and the others ranging from good to excellent. That’s not surprising, given DIME WESTERN’s consistent quality. If you have any issues or come across some, chances are they’ll be well worth reading.
Tom W. Blackburn was one of the heroes of my childhood, although I didn’t know that at the time. I say that because he wrote the scripts for the Davy Crockett episodes of THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY that featured Fess Parker. There was no bigger fan of Davy Crockett in the early Sixties, when those shows were being rerun on a regular basis, than I was. I sang the theme song all the time, too, and Blackburn wrote those iconic lyrics. In recent years I’ve read some of his pulp stories and liked them. His novelette that leads off this issue, “Quest of the Thirty Dead”, is an excellent hardboiled Western yarn about a bounty hunter tracking down the members of an outlaw gang who raided a town and burned down a hotel as a distraction while they looted the banks, resulting in thirty fatalities. There are a few plot twists and plenty of action in this one, and it comes to a very satisfying conclusion.
J.H. Holland is an author I’m not familiar with. His short story, “Get Up and Fight Again!” is next in this issue. It’s set right after the Civil War and concerns a former Union soldier who goes west to find the sister of a friend who died in the Andersonville prison camp. Naturally enough, the sister is having trouble with the local range hog, and the ex-soldier takes up her cause. Holland seems to have been a real person but didn’t publish much. This is the first story of his listed in the Fictionmags Index. It’s fairly well written but never generates much suspense, and the ending seems rushed, as if Holland was too inexperienced to know how to develop the situation. It has some nice bits of action and description, though.
Dean Owen’s stories are always good. “A Brave Man Dies But Once”, set in Virginia City, Nevada, during the silver boom, is narrated by traveling cigar salesman Sam Kincaid, who is more than he seems. A crisis forces him to make a choice about which way his life is going to go, and not surprisingly, it all leads to the satisfying conclusion of an excellent tale.
By this point in Walt Coburn’s career as a writer and a two-fisted drinker, rumor has it that his manuscripts were heavily rewritten by editors, so it’s impossible to say how much of the novella “Hell With a Running Iron!” is Coburn’s work and how much came from some Popular Publications staffer. Most of it, however, reads like Coburn to me. The plot is fairly simple for one of his yarns—big ranching syndicate frames a small rancher for rustling so it can gobble up his spread—but as usual Coburn has a large cast of characters with a lot of back-story. Sometimes Coburn throws in so many elements his stories don’t really have a chance of making sense, but thankfully that’s not the case here. It’s a good story with some nice action and the undeniable sense of authenticity that you find in most of Coburn’s work. Not in the top rank of his efforts, but for the late Forties, not bad at all.
George C. Appell had a nice career writing for the pulps, slicks, and digests from the mid-Forties on through the Sixties, as well as producing a number of novels. His story “Last Roll Call” concerns the aftermath of the Battle of the Little Big Horn and a couple of soldiers from the 7th Cavalry who may have survived the massacre. It’s a good plot, and Appell writes very well. I’ve seen a lot of his work around but haven’t read much of it. Based on this story, I probably should.
I started reading Frank Bonham’s juvenile novels when I was a kid, with no knowledge of his career as a writer for the Western pulps. He did a lot of stories with unusual protagonists, and “Payment Past Due” is one of them. The hero is a doctor from the East with a dark secret in his past who heads west to make a new start. Eventually, of course, that secret will come out and the doctor will have to find out if he’s as good with a six-gun as he is with a scalpel. Bonham is another writer whose work is just about always good, and I enjoyed this story quite a bit.
Every so often I run across a pulp story written by someone I’ve actually met. That’s the case with Thomas Thompson’s “The Hangin’ Plague Hits Tonto Basin”. Thompson was at the WWA convention in Fort Worth in 1986 and I got to say hello to him there. I don’t remember much about it except that he was pleasant enough and looked a lot like the actor Al Lewis, who played Grandpa Munster. He was the story editor on BONANZA for many years, so I was a fan of his work there, but I’m not sure I’ve ever read any of his pulp stories before this one. I’ll definitely be looking for them from now on, though, because “The Hangin’ Plague Hits Tonto Basin” is maybe the best story in this issue of DIME WESTERN. It’s a variation on the old sheepmen-versus-local-cattle-baron plot, with an ex-con caught in the middle, but it’s very well written with a great hardboiled tone and plenty of action. I really enjoyed it and want to read more by Thompson, soon.
That wraps up this issue of DIME WESTERN, and it’s a very good one, with only one weak story (and it’s not terrible) and the others ranging from good to excellent. That’s not surprising, given DIME WESTERN’s consistent quality. If you have any issues or come across some, chances are they’ll be well worth reading.
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