I own a couple dozen issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY, but the
August 27, 1938 issue isn’t among them. It’s available on the Internet Archive,
though, and I picked it to read for a reason which I’ll get around to. The
cover is by the legendary Norman Saunders, and it’s a good one illustrating the
lead novella, “The Cougar’s Claws”.
That novella features Pete Rice, and that’s the reason I read this one. A
little background for those of you unfamiliar with the character: Inspired by
the success of THE SHADOW and DOC SAVAGE, in 1933 the good folks at Street
& Smith decided to launch a Western hero pulp. The result was PETE RICE
MAGAZINE. The title character is the two-fisted, fast-shootin’ sheriff of
Trinchera County, Arizona, who's assisted by two deputies, scrawny little
Misery Hicks (who does double duty as the barber of Buffalo Gap, the county
seat) and Teeny Butler, who, in keeping with the nicknaming tradition of pulp
characters, is well over six feet tall and weighs 300 pounds. The gimmick of
the series, if you can call it that, is that while it has all the Western
trappings, it’s set in the modern day, putting it in firmly in the same camp as
the Western B-movies of the times starring Gene Autry and others. These Pete
Rice novels, and they were full-length novels, were written by veteran pulpster
Ben Conlon under the pseudonym Austin Gridley.
Well, PETE RICE MAGAZINE was not a raging success. It ran for 31 issues,
approximately two and a half years. I read one of the novels years ago and
don’t remember much about it except that I wasn’t impressed and didn’t seek out
any more of the series. But . . . after Pete’s own magazine was cancelled, the
character moved to WILD WEST WEEKLY, where he starred in 21 more novellas and
novelettes. Or did he? You see, the stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY are no longer
set in the modern day but take place in the Old West, which prompted a recent
discussion between me and a friend about the idea that the Pete Rice in the
WILD WEST WEEKLY stories is actually the father or grandfather of the Pete Rice
who starred in his own magazine. That seems feasible, other than the fact that
in WILD WEST WEEKLY, Misery and Teeny are still Pete’s deputies, and claiming
that those characters are also an earlier generation seems like quite a stretch
to me. I suspect that in real life, nobody at Street & Smith ever gave the
change in time period a second thought other than maybe instructing Conlon to
make the stories actual Westerns in hopes that they would help sell WILD WEST
WEEKLY. It’s a safe bet that none of the pulp writers and editors dreamed
anybody would still be talking about this stuff nearly a century down the road!
Anyway, another difference in the characters in PETE RICE MAGAZINE and WILD
WEST WEEKLY is that in the later incarnation, Austin Gridley became a
house-name. Ben Conlon continued to write some of the stories, but other
authors contributed Pete Rice yarns, too, including Paul S. Powers, who teamed
Pete with his popular character Sonny Tabor, leading to a joint byline of
Austin Gridley and Ward Stevens (Powers’ pseudonym); Ronald Oliphant, who
penned a crossover between Pete and Billy West of the Circle J, under the names
Austin Gridley and Cleve Endicott (the house-name on the Circle J series); Lee
Bond; and the extremely prolific Laurence Donovan, who also ghosted some Doc
Savage novels for Street & Smith. The Pete Rice story in this issue of WILD
WEST WEEKLY I just read, “The Cougar’s Claws”, is Donovan’s first Pete Rice
story.
And after my lukewarm at best reaction to the other Pete Rice yarn I read, I
was pleasantly surprised to discover that I really enjoyed this one. The Cougar
is the leader of an outlaw gang plaguing Trinchera County and has come up with
a really grisly way of disposing of his enemies: he wraps them in green
bullhide and then lets the sun dry it out so that it shrinks and crushes the
victims to death. Pete and his deputies clash several times with the Cougar and
his gang, escape from some death traps, and finally expose the real mastermind
behind all the villainy. There are some clever twists and Donovan was always
really good with action, of which there is plenty. I found Pete and his
deputies likable and had a fine time reading this novella. I’ll be on the
lookout for more of the Pete Rice issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY.
I think the novelette “Gunsmoke Tornado” is the earliest story I’ve ever read
by Dudley Dean McGaughey, the real name of Dean Owen, who gets the credit for
this one. I’ve read quite a few of McGaughey’s pulp novels from the Forties and
a bunch of paperbacks from the Fifties and Sixties, but “Gunsmoke Tornado” was
only his ninth published story. It’s a good one, too, about a drifting young
cowhand who signs on with a ranch crew where he faces some hazing. That might
have been a story in itself, but there’s more going on than that, and before
you know it, our young hero finds himself in danger up to his neck because of a
feud between rival ranches. McGaughey’s work has a nice hardboiled tone to it
and this story is no exception. Plenty
of tough action makes this one a winner.
I’m familiar with Lee Bond mostly from the long-running Long Sam Littlejohn
series he wrote as backup stories in TEXAS RANGERS, but he did several series
for WILD WEST WEEKLY, including one featuring drifting cowpokes Calamity Boggs
and Shorty Stevens. Shorty is, well, short and feisty, just as you’d expect.
Calamity is tall and husky and full of doom and gloom, an extreme pessimist who
always believes the worst is about to happen, which is, I’m sure, how he got
his nickname. Bond doesn’t explain that in “Calamity Hubs a Frame-Up” in this
issue, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s easy enough to just jump right into
this yarn in which our two rambling heroes find a recently abandoned line
shack, decide to spend the night there, and wake up the next morning to find
themselves the prisoners of a posse out to hang them for murder and rustling.
As you might suppose, eventually they sort things out and everything gets
resolved in a big gunfight, as things usually do in a Lee Bond story. Bond
moves things along well and was always excellent when it comes to the action
scenes. This is the third very good story in a row in this issue.
I’ve written here before about how Elmer Kelton and I enjoyed talking about
Western pulps whenever we’d get together. I think I may have been the only one
of his friends who was a pulp fan. He told me several times that WILD WEST
WEEKLY was his favorite pulp when he was a kid growing up on a ranch in West
Texas, and Sonny Tabor was his favorite character. Paul S. Powers wrote the
Sonny Tabor series under the pseudonym Ward M. Stevens. More than 130 novelettes
and novellas between 1930 and 1943 is quite a run. Some of those stories were
crossovers featuring Sonny Tabor meeting up with other series characters from
WILD WEST WEEKLY, including Kid Wolf (also a Paul S. Powers creation), Pete
Rice, and Billy West and the Circle J outfit.
But who was Sonny Tabor? He was a good-guy outlaw, falsely accused of some
crime (I don’t know the details) and on the run from the law, blamed for every
bit of outlawry that occurs any time he’s around, and sometimes even when he’s
not. The novelette in this issue, “A Murder Brand for Sonny Tabor”, is actually
the first one I’ve read. The youngest of three brothers who own a ranch
together is gunned down, shot in the back, and the name Tabor is carved into
his forehead. The dead man’s brothers and the local law blame Sonny, of course,
and he has to uncover the real killer to clear his name of this charge, anyway,
although he’ll still be wanted for dozens of others. This is a really well-written
story and I found myself liking Sonny and rooting for him right away. I have
quite a few more issues with Sonny Tabor stories in them and I’m glad of that
because I really enjoyed this one.
I was familiar with Allan R. Bosworth as the author of several excellent
Western novels, but I’ve discovered in recent years that he also wrote scores
of stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY under house-names, as well as contributing to
the magazine under his own name. He used it on his long-running series about
freight wagon driver Shorty Masters and his sidekick Willie Wetherbee, also
known as the gunfightin’ Sonora Kid. In “A Hangin’ on Live Oak Creek”, all
Shorty and Willie want to do is run a trotline and catch themselves a mess of
catfish for fryin’ up. Instead, they find a fella who’s been lynched, but
luckily they come across him before he’s choked to death. Rescuing him puts our
heroes smack-dab in the middle of a fight between ranchers and rustlers. There’s
a nice twist in this one. I saw it coming, but that didn’t make it any less
satisfying. Also, I like the way Shorty names the mules in his team after
classical music composers. That’s a nice touch I wasn’t expecting. Another
really good story.
One of WILD WEST WEEKLY’s specialties was the series of linked novellas that
could then be combined and published as a fix-up novel. Walker A. Tompkins was
the master of this format, writing many of them for the pulp. His story in this
issue published under the house-name Philip F. Deere, “Death Rides Tombstone Trail”, is the third of six to feature a Wyoming
cowboy named Lon Cole who is in Texas working as a trail boss and also getting
mixed up in various adventures. In this one, he’s between trail drives and
takes a job as a special guard for a stagecoach carrying a shipment of gold. Of
course, the stagecoach is held up. Lon is grazed by an outlaw bullet and
knocked out so they think he’s dead and ride off leaving him there. He goes
after the varmints, of course, and discovers they’re a gang known as the Secret
Six and are led by a mysterious mastermind known as The Chief. This is nothing we
haven’t all seen before, but Tompkins is good at it. Even though the story has
a beginning, middle, and end, it’s weakened slightly by being part of a bigger whole,
but I had a good time reading it anyway. The six Lon Cole stories were combined into the novel THUNDERGUST TRAIL, published under Tompkins' real name by Phoenix Press in 1942. I own a copy of that book but haven't read it. When I get around to it, I'll have already read a chunk out of the middle of it, but I don't think that'll bother me too much.
Overall, this is one of the best Western pulps I’ve read in a long time. Every
story in this issue is very good to excellent, and several of them really make
me want to read more about the characters. If you’ve never read an issue of
WILD WEST WEEKLY, it would make a good introduction to the magazine, I think.
If you’re a long-time fan like me, it’s well worth downloading and reading.
