TOM W. BLACKBURN – Short Grass. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1947. Paperback reprints include: Bantam 207, November 1948; Bantam 1164, September 1953, Dell 7980, April 1973; Dell 17980, June 1979.

   For no good reason I can think of, Tom Blackburn (1913–1992) is not included in the second edition of 20th Century Western Writers, and he should be. I am surprised that he is not. He was a prolific writer of westerns for the pulps, hardcovers, paperbacks, movies and a number of 50s and 60s TV series. His career began perhaps with “Wagontongue’s Last Town-Tamer” which appears in Star Western, February 1940, his earliest entry in the online FictionMags Index.

   His wikipedia entry appears here, where you will learn that he may be best remembered as the person who wrote the lyrics to “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” Among several other TV series he wrote for are Maverick, Bronco, and Daniel Boone. It’s quite a résumé.

   And as a western, Short Grass is quite a novel, impressive in both its exposition and impact, with (in my opinion) as much emphasis on “novel” as “western,” and perhaps more. It starts out in flurry of action, and it barely ever lets up – perhaps only in the middle, with an ending that if properly filmed, would be a humdinger of a movie. (I’ll get back to this shortly.)

   Steve Llewellyn is the primary protagonist, a wandering cowpoke – if not gunman, a drifter whose past we never learn much about – and an innocent bystander, if you will, who gets caught up in a shooting incident in a saloon between two other fellows. He’s wounded and – we’ve read this before – is soon found by a woman who takes him home to recover.

   Things happen fast in this book. Other westerns may draw the next step out for any number of chapters, but Steve doesn’t wait nearly that long. He kisses Sharon Lynch on page 36, and in the Dell paperback I read, there still are almost 200 pages yet to come. The course of romance does not come easily, though. Steve believes in the use of his gun. Sharon does not. She does believe violence is the solution to anything. Not a good combination, and once she sees what Steve is capable of, she rejects him, and they part.

   As a synopsis, this is too short and far too easy. The two are adults, and their behavior, their thoughts, their actions, their problems, are those of adults. When they meet later, in Kansas, not Texas, five years have passed, Steve has become a homesteader, Sharon has remarried (to a man too weak for her) and the local marshal (Ord Keown) has an eye on her.

   Besides the complications a love triangle (well, yes, a quadrangle) can bring, the past that both Steve and Sharon have fled comes back to haunt them again in the form of rancher Hal Fenton. The latter is someone would not mind gaining some revenge as well as some open range for his cattle he and his men have brought up for market from Texas.

   This is a tale with several twists and turns in it, surprisingly so, but it is the people involved that make the story so memorable. These are real people with real problems, and this being a western, only violence, sudden death and a fast and bloody shootout at the end can salvage any hope for them – the ones who survive, that is.

   I suggested earlier that this movie would make a humdinger of a movie. I have not seen it yet, but I have it on order. The film that was made of this book is entitled Short Grass (Allied Artists, 1950), and the screenplay was written by none other than Mr. Blackburn himself. The names of the characters are the same, and the plot summary on IMDB suggests that very few changes were made. Rod Cameron stars as Llewellyn, Cathy Downs as Sharon Lynch, Johnny Mack Brown as Sheriff Ord Keown, with Morris Ankrum as Hal Fenton. I’ll report on my findings later. With stars like these, I’m hoping for the best.

NORMAN A. FOX – Long Lightning. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1953. Dell 783, paperback, 1954; several later printings. First published as the short novel “Wire to Warlock,” Zane Grey’s Western Magazine, December 1952.

   For those of you always on the lookout for hard-boiled fiction to read, and you have no a priori objections to reading a western, here’s one you might want to hunt down. There are some solid “tough guy” aspects to this 50-year-old novel that may be worth your attention, largely due to the highly individualistic nature of its main protagonist, Holt Brandon, construction chief for the Mountain Telegraph Company. In this book, not only must he get the job done on time, but he has to fight for his life all the while he’s doing so.

   There are two obstacles, the first being Mountain’s main competitor, Consolidated, and they do not hesitate in hiring local gunmen to make sure Holt’s crew do not make their deadline. Second, and not insignificantly, is Colonel Templeton, the owner of the Montana land they must cross, an elderly gentleman from the South who imagines that the War Between the States is still going on, and still fighting imaginary battles in his mind.

   Holt Brandon plays his cards strictly by the book, and his loyalty to his boss, Sam Whitcomb is never in question. The world of financial matters is beyond him, but what he’s fully aware of is this: If they do not get the wires strung to Warlock from Salish on time, all is lost for Mountain Telegraph.

   Here’s a quote that demonstrates that Fox knew exactly what he was writing about, from page 113:

   To add some variety to the plot, Holt is not shy around women, but he is caught by surprise when he finds himself the focus of attention of two of them: Gail, the daughter of his boss, and Ellen Templeton, the colonel’s daughter. It is clear which of them he will end up with, if either is to be the case, but that he will lose both of them is a definite possibility, and what Fox does is make sure the reader does not lose sight of that.

   So — here’s a western that’s a trifle clumsy when it comes to affairs of the heart, perhaps, but not– ever — when it comes to matters of loyalty and pride, and other qualities that men have, or they’re supposed to.

[UPDATE] 09-07-12.   I’ve made no attempt to obtain an exact count of the western novels written by Norman Fox (1910-1960), but if he’d been able to live longer, I’m sure he’d have written a lot more than the roughly 30 or so I’ve quickly come up with.

   He was a pulpster as well, with nearly a full page of entries already listed for him in the online FictionMags index, a list still under construction. The first of these, by the way, is “The Strange Quest” (Cowboy Stories, June 1934).

   The photo of him comes from the back cover of one the hardcovers I own by him. What’s unusual about it is that it was taken by fellow western and adventure writer, Dan Cushman. I’d love to know more about when, where and why.

  KENNETH FOWLER – Jackals’ Gold. Doubleday, hardcover, 1980. Dell, reprint paperback, June 1981.

   I have a few of Fowler’s westerns in paperback, but until I started to do some research about him before writing this review, I did not realize how even more prolific he was writing short stories for the pulps in the 1940s, mostly for titles such as Dime Western, Star Western, New Western, .44 Western, and so on. Of special note in that regard, he was the editor for the first two of these magazines between 1944 and 1946.

   He seems to have written only ten western novels, though, two under the pen name Clark Brooker. The first was Outcast of Murder Mesa, a Gold Medal paperback original under his own name in 1954. Jackals’ Gold was his final novel, published when he was 80, though perhaps it was written earlier, as there is no sign of age at the helm of the rough and tumble western adventure it is.

   It begins as the story of Rachel Carr, who poses as the widow of Brad Gamble, a prospector who hit it rich then died, leaving his wife a small fortune in gold. Unknown to her, however, is that the dead man had two partners, two men whom he pulled a fast one on, and two men who want the gold back.

   Gold, according to the author — and who am I to disagree? — does strange things to people. Added to the mix are several other mysterious riders who follow Rachel and her two “guardians” as they head back to Salt Lake City in a small wagon, or who sniff out their hidden cache along the way.

   It’s a tough trip, and Fowler tells it well, even as the major point of view changes to that of Caine Joritt, one of the dead man’s two former partners — see above — who finds himself keeping a much closer eye on Rachel than he expected. Fist fights, gun shots in the night, crashing rivers and sudden violent death are the order of the day, with little to no dialogue to slow things down even an inch in most of the book’s final eighty pages. Good stuff, and interesting characters, too.

GILES A. LUTZ – Relentless Gun. Gold Medal 804, paperback original; 1st printing, September 1958. Numerous later printings.

   I own over 30 paperback westerns by Giles Lutz under his own name, and perhaps as many – if not more – which were published under several pen names he used, including Gene Thompson, Reese Sullivan, Hunter Ingram and Alex Hawk. (Some of these I did not know about until now, when I started looking up some information about him.)

   This may be the first of his “own work” that I may have read, and I enjoyed it. There is something about writing for the old pulp magazines that makes itself known right away – I can’t describe it exactly – but it has something to do with flavor and authenticity. Older western writers lived much closer to the time of the traditional western they wrote about. They grew up in it and took the life of the Old West much more for granted. Today’s western authors are excellent writers, but they’re writing about the past – a past they’re trying to recreate for readers also living in the present, far removed from the time the action of their novels is taking place.

   I hope I am making some sense of this, but whether I am or not, it’s an idea I hope to return to some day, once I’ve made my thoughts on the matter more solid than they are right now. And in any case, I was right. Once I started the book, I know Lutz had to have written for the pulps, and he did. As recorded to date in the Fiction Mags Index, he seems to have written only sports stories between 1939 and 1943. The first work western pulp fiction he did that’s currently listed there is “Square in the Saddle” a short story that appeared in Street & Smith’s Western Story, July 1945.

   As the pulps began to die out, Lutz turned to writing full length novels. The first of these, as far as I’ve been able to discover, was Fight or Run (Popular Library, 1954). From that point on, he was prolific enough to be worth doing a complete bibliography for, and maybe I will someday.

   Whether Relentless Gun was typical of his work, I can’t presently say, but it’s the one I just read. Dave Enders is the hero in this one, a guy who works for the law but doesn’t necessarily hang around in any one spot for very long. He’s heading for Tucson at the beginning of this one, to help out the sheriff there who needs his help in tracking down Miguel Blanco, a Mexican who’s the head of a gang wreaking havoc on the town.

   It turns out that the Blanco’s brother was the innocent victim of a lynching mob, and he is targeting members of the mob only for revenge – making him not entirely the total outlaw the townspeople think he is. Nor is Enders himself a man without faults. He’s a man with his own strengths and weaknesses, which he realizes, and which Lutz makes the reader realize too.

   There is one other complication – well, there are several, even though the book is only 144 pages long. But the one I’ll tell you about is the presence of Kate Lykens in town, a woman Enders has loved and lost before. She’s now the singer in the bar owned by Amos Busby, a man with wealth and some power in town, and you knew before I say anything more that the two men are not destined to be friends, didn’t you?

   Surprisingly enough there is some detective work to be done, and Enders is up to that job too, as well as tracking Miguel Blanco down. There is also a lot of action in the same amount of pages, and some surprisingly brutal deaths. There is also not a lot of wasted wordage; the story itself is a lean and sometimes mean one. It wasn’t the Spur Award winner for that year, nor was it probably even in the running, but it’s a solid piece of work.

WILLIAM COLT MacDONALD – Bad Man’s Return. Ace Double D-2, paperback reprint, no date [1952]. (Published dos-à-dos with Bloody Hoofs, by J. Edward Leithead.) First published in West Magazine, September 1946. Hardcover edition: Doubleday, 1947.

   Over the years there have been a lot of mystery writers named MacDonald (or Macdonald, McDonald, or even Mcdonald), and some of them were quite well-known, and still are. But if you’re a mystery fan only, William Colt MacDonald may be one you don’t recognize. If I were to tell you that he wrote a lot of westerns, though, maybe you’d place the name.

   He was the creator of “The Three Mesquiteers,” among others, intrepid cowpoke adventurers in a long line of B-western movies, and this is one of the novels they were in as well.

   Some of MacDonald’s western are listed in Hubin, although not this one. Most of the ones that are listed feature a western detective named Gregory Quist, but I have a feeling that more of them could easily be acceptable.

   The connection between between western fiction and detective stories is a solid one. My own feeling is that as many as 95% of all western stories contain crime, mystery or detective elements of one form or another. They come in various guises, and sometimes you have to look sharply, but if you look carefully, I think you’ll find that most westerns are nothing more (or less) than yesterday’s detective stories.

   And what’s more, not only should Al Hubin know about this one, but Bob Adey should, too. That’s right, this is a locked-room mystery, and it’s not in Adey’s book either.

   To tell you the truth, I haven’t really read as many westerns as I have mystery stories, so I can’t say that this is generally so, but it’s my impression that westerns have their own code of telling, their own sense of formal structure.

   Where I think the story is leading up to as the climax can often not be the case at all. Westerns seem to spread out plotwise in a good many directions, even more than spy or adventure thrillers do, and usually head off completely opposite from the one I think they ought to be taking.

   Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, but most of the time I give in and let the author lead me where I will.

   In this case, for example, I’d have thought the capture of the killer who frames Barry Hesman for the killing of Tucson Smith would be what the final chapter would be all about. But no, somehow that’s a matter that’s settled long before then. By that time the story has gone on to other things, most notably the saving of Anne Callister’s ranch for her. It seemed anti-climactic to me, but I guess it wasn’t for me to say.

   As for the locked room, it takes our heroes the full novel before they work it out, but no long-time reader of detective stories will be at all surprised by what [WARNING: Quickie Plot Alert] a piece of rawhide and some bear grease will do.

[UPDATE] 01-15-12.   The last “Three Mesquiteers” movie appeared in 1943, and it’s easy to find a complete list of them online (here, for example). But I do not have a list of the books they appeared in, I’m sorry to say; the last one I have a record of is The Galloping Ghost, which was published in 1952.

   I also do not know what to make of my review above, where I say that Tucson Smith, one of the three original members of the group, was killed, and it was his murder that had to be solved. More than that, at this time it is a mystery to me.

[UPDATE] 01-18-12.   Thanks to David Smith, who reminded me that a list of Three Mesquiteer novels appeared in the WesternPulps group on Yahoo last June, and to Phil Stephensen-Payne for pointing out that two of the trio’s tales were serialized in the pulp magazines, as you’ll see below. (Taken from the online FictionMags Index.)

Restless Guns (with only Tucson and Stony) (1929)

Law Of The Forty-Fives (1933) aka Sunrise Guns

Powdersmoke Range (1934)

Riders of the Whistling Skull (1934)

The Singing Scorpion (1934) aka Ambush at Scorpion Valley

Ghost-Town Gold (1935) aka The Town That God Forgot

Bullets for Buckaroos (1936) aka Bullet Trail

The Three Mesquiteers (1944)

Bad Man’s Return (1947)

Powdersmoke Justice (1949)

Mesquiteer Mavericks (1950)

The Galloping Ghost (1955)

The Three Mesquiteers (serial) Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine Jun 29 1935, etc.

Cactus Cavaliers (serial) Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine Oct 26 1935, etc. [Name of hardcover edition, if any, unknown.]

[UPDATE] 01-20-12.   Thanks to “Alan in London” for providing the titles of four more appearances of the Mesquiteers, including the one from 1929 which featured only two of them. Besides adding them to the list above, I’ve changed the dates for a few others, based on the data I found in Twentieth Century Western Writers. When I get the chance, I’ll do some original research on this and make sure sure everything’s as correct as it can be.

THE MYSTERY OF THE HOODED HORSEMEN. Grand National, 1937. Tex Ritter, White Flash, Iris Meredith, Horace Murphy, Charles King, Heber Snow, Ray Whitley and the Range Ramblers. Director: Ray Taylor.

   The Mystery of the Hooded Horsemen doesn’t have much Mystery, but it does have a lot of hooded horsemen, charging across the dusty trails of Gower Gulch with commendable energy.

   This is, in fact, a rather ambitious undertaking for a “B” Western, with some vigorous stunting and tricky camerawork in the many Chase scenes.

   It stars Tex Ritter, so it’s not much on subtlety, and anyone who’s seen more than one of these will spot the Secret Heavy as soon as he looks up from his card game and flashes his oily smile, but director Ray Taylor plays the familiar melody without a trace of contempt, and manages to wrap it up just like it was fresh goods.

   I should add that Mystery features one of the earliest appearances of that ultimate Cult Actor, Hank Worden, here billed as Heber Snow, and playing a dumb deputy with the disarming quirkiness that would endear him to my generation.

    Editorial Comment:   Not only can this movie be found easily on DVD (see above), it can be seen for free in its entirety (60m) on www.archive.org. (For some reason, the title on the DVD has been subtly changed.)

MAX BRAND – The Outlaw Redeemer. Leisure, paperback, March 2004. Hardcover edition: Five Star, 2000.

   One way or another, most traditional westerns have elements of crime fiction built into their plot structure, and naturally I wouldn’t have brought it up if both of the short novels contained in the case at hand, The Outlaw Redeemer, weren’t such prime examples, but in markedly different ways.

   In “The Last Irving,” which takes place in the more recent Old West (Irvington is wired for electricity, for example, and the characters drive proudly around in flivvers) the heir to the no longer existent Irving fortune, a city yokel by the name of Archibald, returns from the East to revenge himself on the two crooks who conned his Uncle Ned out of his total financial worth.

   This is the standard tall tale of a (perceived) dumb sap who (it is anticipated) comes out on top by the simple expedient of setting his two opponents one against the other.

   While there is more anticipation than there is follow-through, I can’t imagine anyone not finding the ending at least mildly satisfying. The title story which follows, however, “The Outlaw Redeemer,” comes with some real surprises, most of them quite unexpectedly so, and this is the one that’s by far the more enjoyable of the two.

   The opening is nothing less than Biblical in nature, with lots of “begat”s that trace the lineage of the tale’s two primary antagonists: (a) the pure in heart John Tipton, who becomes a Texas Ranger and whose constant quarry is (b) the brutish and devilish criminally-minded Hubert Dunleven, nicknamed either Shorty or Bunch, “both of which were derived from his physical peculiarities.”

   Their efforts as directed against each other are the stuff from which legends are made. Can a western ever be called utterly charming? Dunleven is that rarest of beings, an outlaw with a silver tongue. Take for example, this speech he makes to the beautiful Nell — and, oh, yes, there is indeed a girl, and of course she comes between them.

   Consider the eloquence to be found on page 118, after Dunleven has requested that Nell make breakfast for him, a request she cannot refuse:

   Nell is not, however, emphasis not, your usual western heroine. As are the two male protagonists of the tale, she also is flawed, and I confess – I admit it – I did not know, with several chapters remaining to go, which way the story was going to come out.

   That is it a happy ending, you may rest assured. You may also be assured that you will not know in which way it will end happily, but it will.

PostScript:   Both of the these stories first appeared in the pulp magazine, Western Story Magazine. “The Last Irving” appeared as “Not the Fastest Horse,” as by John Frederick in the November 7, 1925, issue; and “The Outlaw Redeemer” appeared as “The Man He Couldn’t Get,” as by George Owen Baxter in the February 27, 1926, issue.

   In a subtly strange but substantial way, I like the original titles better.

[UPDATE] 09-25-11.   Your mileage may vary, but although it doesn’t compare to the covers of the western paperbacks of the 1940s and 50s, I much like the cover of the Leisure book over that of the totally generic photo on the hardcover edition.

   And speaking of Leisure books, most mystery-oriented blogs have concerned themselves with the loss of the Hard Case Crime paperbacks when Dorchester went under, and rightly so. But I also miss the box of four western paperbacks that came by mail from them every month, with at least two of them almost always reprints from the pulps.

WILL COOK – Killer Behind a Badge. Avon T-867; paperback original, 1960. John Curley, large print hardcover, 1994.

   A western novel, and in only 128 pages, it packs a nifty punch. Will Cook, who also wrote as Wade Everett, James Keene, and Frank Peace, had the knack of summing up a person’s life history in just a few descriptive sentences.

   Take, for example, the first paragraph of the book:

   The power in town belongs to Jefford Lane. From page 7:

   The local law is in the hands of Manning Cordell. From page 8:

   I could go on, but these are three of the main characters, all important, if not essential, to the plot. Cordell is tough on lawbreakers, and Shannon is the only one who knows exactly how tough the Marshall is: judge, jury, and executioner, all wrapped up in one tidy package. As he explains to the faro dealer Elfrieda on page 33:

    Here’s where the title of the book comes in. From this point on, it’s a game of wits to determine who will prevail, Shannon or Cordell, and all bets are off in terms of which way this terse and concise hardboiled little novel will go.

   It gets a little choppy here and there — two cattle rustlers siding with Shannon are deposited in jail and never heard from again — but there’s a lot of tough action to go with some insightful perspective into the minds of the players.

   And the ending is doubly satisfying, quite ironic in terms of a man who, having succeeded once, follows it up by making what’s clearly a terribly wrong choice. Very nicely done, and it’s quite unexpected. If you’re a western fan, be on the lookout for this one.

[UPDATE] 07-30-11.   I have a feeling that the ending of this review was deliberately vague, so as not to any reveal significant plot points that I shouldn’t. Of course here it is, over eight years later, and I don’t remember the ending at all.

   No matter. I trust my judgment. I recommended the novel then, and I still do now.

HARRY WHITTINGTON – Drygulch Town. Ace Double F-196; paperback original, 1963. Published dos-à-dos with Prairie Raiders, also by Harry Whittington.

   No, it’s not a mystery. But perhaps you recall my predilection for the lawyer with the underdog client. You can’t beat this one for underdoggedness.

   Garrison is a lawyer in Wyoming territory, and his client has killed the only son of Bryce Carmack, who not so strangely runs the oil town of Carmack Settlement. The plea is self-defense, but only a strong-willed sheriff has already prevented an immediate hanging.

   In the opening scene Garrison is shot at from a hotel window as he rides into town. He’s offered a bribe, beaten by a mob, ambushed in an alley, his only witness dies in his arms, and — justice triumphs. The wrapup is a mite too quick, but Whittington pulls out all the stops before then.

   I was ready to plunge in with fists flying myself.

DONALD HAMILTON – Smoky Valley. Dell First Edition #18, paperback original; reprinted several times, first by Dell, then Fawcett Gold Medal.

  ● THE VIOLENT MEN. Columbia, 1955. Glenn Ford, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Dianne Foster, Brian Keith. Based on the novel Smoky Valley by Donald Hamilton. Director: Rudolph Maté.

   A while ago on this blog I mentioned a pleasing little Western called The Violent Men (Columbia, 1955), and last month I managed to seek out the book it was based on, Smoky Valley, by none other than Donald Hamilton.

   It turned out to be a fun read, and no less interesting to see how it was re-jiggered for the movie.

   Smoky Valley tells the brief story of John Parrish, a broken Civil War vet come west for his health, and it picks up just as the neighbors who nursed him to recovery are being forced off their land by a nasty rancher and his nastier son-in-law, who own that icon of the genre, The Biggest Spread In The Valley, and mean to make it bigger.

   In the way of Western good-guys, Parrish avoids conflict as long as possible and even eats a certain amount of dirt before striking back with that cool, deadly efficiency a writer like Hamilton puts across so well.

   Indeed, it’s Hamilton’s quiet-but-deadly prose that lifts this thing out of the ordinary. Hamilton knew about guns, horses and men, and he could structure a story to show off his skill with them.

   This was translated very ably to the screen in the movie; one particularly remembers Brian Keith casually loading his gun while everyone else talks about settling this thing peaceably, or Parrish (Glenn Ford) coolly murdering a gunman — both scenes straight from Hamilton’s book, tautly written and ably filmed.

   But the main difference between page and screen is Barbara Stanwyck. I don’t know what led Columbia to put Stanwyck in this film. Her character doesn’t appear in the book, but once she was in it, they had to build up a good part for her.

   And they sure did. Playing the cattle baron’s dissatisfied trophy wife (starring again with Edward G. Robinson ten years after Double Indemnity) she projects her dominant personality against a back-drop worthy of her, somehow without overbalancing the story. Neat trick, that.

   We still get the basic elements and the full flavor of Hamilton’s tight little novel, with the added attraction of a fine actress at her bitchiest, particularly in a definitive moment when she shows her love for her crippled husband by throwing his crutches in the fire as hes trying to escape a burning house.