The latest issue of the online magazine Black Horse Extra is out, devoted primarily as always the western fiction recently put out by UK publisher Robert Hale, but again, as always, branching out in many different ways.

   For example, in this, the September-November 2008 issue, the main topic is an attempt to answer the question, Can western fiction also be noir?

    If I’d been asked before reading this issue, except for a tendency for traditional westerns most often to have happy endings, my answer would have been yes, of course. Happily I’m reinforced in that opinion by James Reasoner’s comments about one of his current favorite western authors, Lewis Patten (1915-1981) in a review of Rope Law (Gold Medal, 1956), about which he says in part:

    “… as the posse waits for nightfall so they can close in, Patten backtracks to fill in the story of what brought the characters to this point, and it’s a years-long saga of drunkenness, prostitution, robbery, and murder worthy of any of the more contemporary Gold Medal’s. Sex serves as the motivation for most of this, and while the scenes aren’t graphic, there are quite a few of them for a traditional western published in 1956.”

   Chap O’Keefe (aka Keith Chapman, who leaves comments here under one or the other of each of the two names every once in a while) follows with story descriptions of several of Patten’s other books, one or two of which I’ve read myself, reviews of which I really ought to post here sometime soon. Chap points out in each of them what in his opinion makes them noir, including the imagery of the writing.

    From Giant on Horseback (Ace,1964) for example; “Rain fell, gently drizzling, shining on the slicker worn by the stationmaster, dripping softly from the eaves of the weather-beaten, yellow-frame station. The train hissed patiently as it waited for the passenger to alight. . . .”

   Concerning “happy endings,” James suggests that authors were constrained into doing so by editors, and Chap follows up by pointing out that editors still have great influence in that direction today.

   In that regard, he goes into specific detail with a behind-the-scenes look at what his editors wanted (and didn’t want) in two of his own most recent books, A Gunfight Too Many and Misfit Lil Cleans Up, both published by Hale under their Black Horse imprint, which makes for very interesting reading.

   If you’re a fan if either western or noir fiction, you’ll want to read the whole issue yourself. And I haven’t even begun to mention any of the other interviews and news items it contains. (How old is Ernest Borgnine? And what western movie is he going to be in next??)

RICHARD S. WHEELER – The Witness.

Signet, paperback original; 1st printing, July 2000.

   If you’re as old as I am, you might remember radio programs such as Suspense, Inner Sanctum or The Whistler, all of which opened with an all-seeing, all-knowing narrator — The Man in Black, Raymond, or the never named Whistler. These fine gentlemen were never part of the story, or if so, it was seldom, but it was their wry comments that always spurred the listener’s interest onward.

   In The Witness, it’s western postmaster Horatio Bates, the Observer, who tells this story and makes a small but still significant role in it — the first of others to come, perhaps. Who knows more what goes on in small towns such as Paradise, Colorado, circa 1890, than the man through whose offices all the mail flows?

   Bank accountants are also privy to many secrets, and Daniel Knott is no exception. Amos Burch, the banker, founder of the town and its primary benefactor, is the man who Knott sees late at night, in his office, with a woman, not his wife.

   Knott is promoted, no quid pro quo stated, but it’s certainly understood. But when Amos Burch’s wife seeks a divorce, she needs a witness. And an honest man.

   Burch, being a desperate man, turns to desperate measures. What follows is a small but powerful morality tale, the issues being honor, honesty and justice — and not all of them seem to be compatible with each other.

   It’s also an old-fashioned sort of tale, flawed only by one character’s reaction to an ensuing development, one quite opposite to what I had expected. But given a tiny measure of suspended disbelief, here’s a book that can be read (if not devoured) in an evening’s time.

[UPDATE] 07-15-08. I’m not sure whether a book called Restitution (Signet, 2001) is the next book in the series or not, but it has the same cover design and mentions The Witness on the front cover. Whether there were others, I do not know.

MAX BRAND – The Outlaw Redeemer.

Leisure; paperback reprint, March 2004. Hardcover edition: Five Star, 2000.

   In one way or another, most traditional westerns have elements of crime fiction inherently built into their plot structure, and naturally I wouldn’t have brought it up if both of the short novels in the case at hand, The Outlaw Redeemer, did not abundantly qualify, but in different ways.

   In “The Last Irving,” which takes place in the more recent Old West – there is electricity in Irvington, and the characters drive proudly around in flivvers – the heir to the non-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 life’s savings. This a 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, “The Outlaw Redeemer,” comes with some unexpected surprises, however, making it by far the more enjoyable one of the two.

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

   Their efforts directed against each other are the stuff that legends are made of – 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 – oh, yes, there is a girl, and of course she comes between them. But first, from page 118, after he has requested that she make breakfast for him, a request she cannot refuse:

   Nell is not, however, emphasis not, your usual western heroine. As 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 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. “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 some substantial way, I like the original titles better.

  Steve

   I have now updated the blackhorsewesterns.com site with the June-August offerings. You may find it of general interest, since various topics like library distribution and author rewards are touched upon in the content, and these apply as much to mystery as other light fiction.

         Best as always,

            Keith (aka Chap O’Keefe)

   Thanks, Keith. I recommend the site highly to everyone who’s reading this, especially if you’re interested at all in the current state of genre fiction. Topics include:

1. The present market for western fiction. (Black Horse, an imprint of the UK publisher Robert Hale, is one of the few lines still committed to westerns, putting out 8 to 10 a month.)

2. Plot or Not? A long panel discussion by several Black Horse writers concerning how much plotting should be done ahead of time.

3. News and events in the world of western fiction.

4. An interview with Ray Foster, who as Jack Giles, had to regain most of his memory after a stroke before he could start writing again.

   One telling (and rather discouraging) paragraph came up in the panel discussion, which I’ll quote in full:

    “Most fiction writers are back to being, like many Victorian forerunners, hobbyists, part-timers. As BHW publisher John Hale has pointed out, ‘I am only too well aware of the low rewards to authors on these westerns, particularly in the light of continuing inflation. However, the sad fact is that if we had to pay more we would have to stop publishing them. Writing westerns for us really has to be regarded as a labour of love.'”

NORMAN DANIELS – The Deadly Ride.

Lancer; paperback reprint, no date stated but stated elsewhere to be 1968. Original title: The Marshal of Winter Gap, as by Peter Grady (Avalon Books, hc, 1962); paperback reprint: Airmont Books, 1963.

   I’m not too sure of the date for the hardcover edition, which I found online in several places, since the copyright date given in this Lancer edition is 1963. A trifling matter, I suppose, and I guess it ought to bother me more than it does.

   Nor have I done much research into the western fiction that Norman Daniels wrote. I found two more he did as by Peter Grady, but his overall output – hundreds of books, mostly mysteries, but romances too, including gothics as by Dorothy Daniels – is too large for me to start sorting out which is which right now. Suffice it to say, I’m sure, Daniels could write anything that someone paid him to do, beginning in the era of the pulp magazines, and for the most part he made it come it out right and professionally done.

   This western at hand is a perfect example of that. It’s slight and in the beginning a not very promising story of a rancher who used to be a gunman, emphasis on the “used to be,” especially now that he has a nine-year-old son.

   But when his wife is killed by a stray bullet in the lawless town of Winter Gap, he’s sorely tempted to revert to his old ways, which doesn’t quite do. Prodded on, though, by the urging of Louise Amister, whose father was the last marshal the town ever had, what he does do is appoint himself town marshal, daring any of the rougher elements in town to tell him no.

   Characterization is slim – I’ve outlined about 80% of it already – but there’s just enough here, along with a surprise or two, and a semi-sappy, soapy sort of ending, to make for a couple of hours of reading and a story that’s surprisingly hard to put down.

LOUIS L’AMOUR – Off the Mangrove Coast.

Bantam hardcover; First Edition, May 2000. [Paperback reprint: Bantam, May 2001.]

   Louis L’Amour is likely to be one of the three most well-known western writers of all time. I’d place Zane Grey and Max Brand ahead of him, but you could argue with me. Of the nine stories brought together in this latest collection, however, only one takes place in the old West, and it’s perhaps the only one that could safely be considered “historical.”

   There are two boxing stories, one about a private eye, and another about an insurance investigator in a tight spot. None of these, including the western, are worthy of more note than this. A better one is a short little tale about a longshoreman who meets his match at checkers, and a good one is an interesting vignette that takes place in a French café after World War II.

   The two best stories are the title story, about diving for treasure in the South China Sea, and a longer one about hunting for diamonds in the jungles of Borneo, infested with headhunters.

   The time these stories take place is unclear, perhaps in the 1940s, perhaps as early as the 1920s. L’Amour pulpy, rough-hewn writing style is uneven, sometimes full of cliches and worn-out plot devices, sometime lyrical and imbued with a strong sense of what it takes to be a man. But if he hadn’t written these particular works, they’d have never been published again, I regret to say. The old pulp magazines are filled with stories just like these, gone and mostly forgotten, remembered only by a handful of enthusiasts who still collect them.

POSTSCRIPT: As one of those selfsame enthusiasts, I really would have liked to known where these stories first appeared. There is no bibliographical information provided at all.

       — June 2000. This review first appeared in The Historical Novels Review. It may have been very slightly revised since then.

[UPDATE] 02-20-08.    The final tagline explains why the emphasis in the review is on the “historical” content, and not so much on the detective stories that happen to be in the collection.

   The book is included in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, though, and here’s a list of the stories which (for reasons of space) I didn’t include when I first wrote the review. A couple of the magazines where the stories first appeared are given, and I’ll repeat them here:

      The Cross and the Candle
      The Diamond of Jeru
      Fighters Should Be Hungry, Popular Sports Magazine, February 1949
      * It’s Your Move, The Tanager, February 1939
      Off the Mangrove Coast
      The Rounds Don’t Matter
      Secret of Silver Springs
      Time of Terror
      The Unexpected Corpse, G-Men Detective, November 1948

   * This story is not one of those for which CFIV lists the original source. I just came across this one somewhere else myself. My copy of The Louis L’Amour Companion is not handy, I’m sorry to say, and in fact is nowhere to be found. It’s been almost eight years since I wrote this review, so obviously I haven’t been suffering from any unrequited urgency, but if you can fill in the details, I’d certainly appreciate it.

   If I were able to rewrite the review for the blog right now, I’d make sure to identify the stories more clearly with the contents, but I didn’t at the time, and I can’t. All I can tell you about the book is what you’ve already just read. L’Amour is not one of my favorite western writers, but in case it wasn’t entirely clear, I enjoyed this collection.

[UPDATE #2] 02-21-08. Robert Teague of the WesternPulps Yahoo group has supplied me with a couple of story sources:

    “The Rounds Don’t Matter” was first printed in Thrilling Adventures Feb 42

    “Secret of Silver Springs” Range Rider Western Nov 49

   Four more to go, keeping in mind, as others have pointed out, that titles may have been changed, and some of the stories may have appeared for the first time in this (much) later collection.

[UPDATE #3] 03-03-08. Excerpted from a pair of email messages sent me by Juri Nummelin:

Hi Steve,

   I finally pulled out my copy of Weinberg’s L’Amour Companion, and it does seem that the four stories have been previously unpublished. I can’t find them on the checklist Weinberg provides. Well, of course the titles may have been altered. There are short descriptions of the short stories in Weinberg’s book, so if you have synopses of the stories in the book, I can compare them to Weinberg’s.

   I seem to remember that “The Diamond of Jeru” was made into a film in the early 2000’s. Yes, I was right.

   From IMDB: http://akas.imdb.com/title/tt0282441/

   It says that the film is based on L’Amour’s novel, but you can’t really be sure about what Imdb says. It says however that the screen story was written by Beau L’Amour. Maybe this was an unproduced treatment Beau has found in his father’s archives. In that case it would be only sensible and polite to provide that info on a foreword or some such.

   You can add to the info Robert Teague already provided you with: “Secret of Silver Springs,” Range Riders Magazine, as by Jim Mayo, January 1950

   By the way, Robert Sampson has a pretty good article on L’Amour’s detective stories in Weinberg’s book. He makes the stories sound good.

                — Juri

       >>> My reply:

   Thanks, Juri, even if Weinberg’s book didn’t supply a lot more information. When I come across my copy of Off the Mangrove Coast again, I’ll see if I can’t supply the synopses you suggested.

   I was totally unaware that “The Diamond of Jeru” had been made into a movie. It was made for cable (USA Network) and is available on DVD. So far, though, all of the copies I’ve seen offered online have been very expensive, but I’ll keep looking. The movie starred Billy Zane, Paris Jefferson, and Keith Carradine, with Jackson Raine and Khoa Do. According to IMBD, it’s “the story of an American scientist and his wife who hire an ex-pat war veteran to act as a guide on a journey up an unchartered Borneo river in search of diamonds.” Reviewers on IMDB have mixed opinions about the movie, to say the least.

   By the way, there’s one synopsis right there.

   As for L’Amour’s detective stories, I enjoyed the one collection of them that I read quite a bit. On the other hand, once again there was nothing in them that knocked my socks off. I’m sure any reader of the detective pulps could come up with a selection of stories from any other pulp writer equally as good, if not better.

Dear Steve,

   I am aware of “Gun-Witch of Hoodoo Range” by Emmett McDowell [mentioned in the comments posted after my last letter to you] and even have read it. The title, supplied by Fiction House, was derived from “Gun-Witch from Wyoming” by Les Savage, Jr., in Lariat Story Magazine (11/47). Based on the underlying correspondence, Malcolm Reiss was desperate to get another Señorita Scorpion story from Savage, and this was meant as an interim attempt to keep interest in the character because Savage at the time was writing his first novel.

   Savage’s first three Señorita Scorpion stories do work as a trio of interrelated stories, similar to the trios of short novels Max Brand had written for Western Story Magazine, and for this reason could be combined into a stand-along book as we did initially. After “Secret of the Santiago,” Savage no longer wanted to do more stories, and only “The Curse of Montezuma” preserved the principal characters introduced in the first three short novels. After the fourth story, Savage introduced other characters, excluded Chisos Owens as he went along, and the sixth story even has a first-person narrator who is a new character to the series. For this reason, among others, we never thought it a good idea to collect these later four stories into a single volume.

   The ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FRONTIER AND WESTERN FICTION (McGraw-Hill, 1983) is the primary reason Golden West Literary Agency came into being. Bill Regier, then director of the University of Nebraska Press, in 1989 proposed that Vicki and I prepare a second edition of this reference book. We set about contacting Western writers or their estates to update our bibliographies. We also added several authors who were not included in the first edition.

   T.V. Olsen, who I had known for years, urged me to include Les Savage, Jr., and lamented he had not been included in the first edition. He felt Savage was one of the most talented Western writers and deserved an entry. I read a number of Savage’s stories and agreed. I then contacted Marian R. Savage, Les’s widow, for biographical and bibliographical information. She pleaded with me to find an agent for Les’s work.

   The same thing happened with L. P. Holmes’s son. Lew Holmes had died after the first edition came out and he had been most helpful with his entry. Contacting New York agents, I was amazed that no one wanted to represent a deceased author unless he had been a client while alive. In the end we had such a number of client estates that needed representation that we founded Golden West to represent them. T.V. Olsen became our first living client.

   Until 1994 we still planned on doing the second edition, but Bill Regier had left Nebraska, and with the launch of the Five Star Westerns, our hardcover Western fiction series co-published by Thorndike Press, then a division of Macmillan, we no longer had the time to work on the second edition. Now it would be impossible to do it simply because there still is no time.

   We edit and co-publish twenty-four new Western titles a year in the Five Star Westerns and three new Western titles in the Circle V Westerns. Some of the material we prepared for entries in the second edition has been used instead as Forewords to Five Star Westerns editions, for example that which I wrote for RANGE OF NO RETURN: A WESTERN DUO by D.B. Newton, with a Foreword by Jon Tuska. [Dec 2005].

   In the end, I think this decision not to continue with the second edition was the right one. We both changed from the passive rôle of being literary historians to the active rôle of being publishers of and agents for Western fiction in the present and future.

   All Savage would have had would have been a first-time entry in the second edition. Instead, we have been doing one and two new books by him every year, beginning with FIRE DANCE AT SPIDER ROCK by Les Savage, Jr. with a Foreword by T.V. Olsen [Nov 1995]. Instead of being a footnote in the literary history of the Western story in the 1940s and 1950s, Les Savage’s work is being read and enjoyed by readers who were not alive when he was, and so has won a longevity for himself that his early death would otherwise have precluded.

   We have also introduced new authors to readers of Westerns and represent some of the most talented of the current generation such as Johnny D. Boggs, Stephen Overholser, and William A. Luckey. We have restored many of Zane Grey’s finest Western stories in authentic texts based on his holographic manuscripts and have several yet to go; we publish six new Max Brand titles a year (some of these also restorations), have launched publishing programs for Will Henry, Frank Bonham, Lauran Paine, Ray Hogan, T.T. Flynn, Peter Dawson, Robert J. Horton, Dane Coolidge, Lewis B. Patten, Wayne D. Overholser – the list goes on and on. Almost six hundred Western titles are sold by Golden West every year worldwide.

WILLIAM R. COX – Death on Location. Signet S2158, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1962.

    It begins with a baseball game, the championship series of the Las Vegas Strip Baseball League, which if you think about it, sounds like a lot of fun. Besides being a reformed gambler, however, Tom Kincaid is a shoestring movie producer as well, and when he moves his crew upstate to start filming an adventure epic starring his live-in girl friend, he unknowingly carries the dirt of big city dope traffic with him.

    The detection is a flabby effort, to tell the truth. The solution to the murder of the leading lady’s stand-in seems to flop out of its hidey closet of its own accord, but the message is that the movie business is really just plain hard work. The logistics of making a movie are staggering, to put it mildly, and they’re put together by honest, industrious people. Under the sophistication, folks, they’re just like us.    (C)

   
[UPDATE] 02-11-08. Cox was another paperback writer in the 1950s and 60s who began his career in the pulps, writing mysteries like this one — I’m almost positive that Tom Kincaid appeared in his short stories long before he started showing up in full-length novels — but Cox wrote a ton of westerns and sports fiction as well. Short or long, magazine or paperback, it didn’t seem to matter. The only books he wrote that appeared in hardcover, though, while he was alive, were sports stories for boys, with titles like Trouble at Second Base and Rookie in the Back Court.

   When there was a lull in writing books and short stores, Cox did TV screenplays, shows like Bonanza, Wagon Train and Tales of Wells Fargo, but according to IMDB, an episode of Route 66 as well, among many others.

   There were a couple of interesting characters to be found in his western paperback fiction. First was a guy called Cemetery Jones, about whom I know little more than his name, and second, although this may not count, after William Ard died, Cox wrote a bunch of the “Buchanan” books under the Jonas Ward byline.

   Thanks to Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, here’s a list of all of the Tom Kincaid novels. Someone else will have to help me out on the pulp stories Kincaid appeared in. I can’t find any reference to specific titles or dates, but I’m positive I’ve read one or two of them over the years.

         Hell to Pay. Signet, 1958.
         Murder in Vegas. Signet, 1960.
         Death on Location. Signet, 1962.

   William R. Cox died in 1988, at the age of 87. Here’s a link to his obituary in the New York Times.

Dear Steve

   There were originally seven Señorita Scorpion stories. The first three were first collected in THE LEGEND OF SEÑORITA SCORPION (Circle V Westerns, 1996). The fourth story was collected in THE RETURN OF SEÑORITA SCORPION (Circle V Westerns, 1997). The sixth story was collected in THE LASH OF SEÑORITA SCORPION (Circle V Westerns, 1998). These were large print editions.

   Only the first collection of three stories appeared in a standard print hardcover: THE LEGEND OF SEÑORITA SCORPION (Gunsmoke, 2003) published in the Gunsmoke series distributed worldwide by BBC Audiobooks Ltd. The reason we stopped the stories from appearing in this Circle V Western series is that they began to appear in Les Savage, Jr., trios published in the Five Star Westerns. They now have all appeared in such Five Star trios.

   Here are the seven stories in terms of first restored appearances in the Five Star Westerns:

    “Brand of the Gallows-Ghost” by Les Savage, Jr. in Action Stories (Winter, 45) was originally titled by the author “The Brand of Penasco” and was collected under this title in THE SHADOW IN RENEGADE BASIN (Five Star Westerns, 2000).

    “The Sting of Señorita Scorpion” by Les Savage, Jr. in Action Stories (Winter, 49) was originally titled by the author “Scorpion’s Return” but was collected under its magazine title in THE STING OF SEÑORITA SCORPION (Five Star Westerns, 2000).

    “Señorita Scorpion” by Les Savage, Jr. in Action Stories (Spring, 44) was originally titled by the author “Death ’Rods the Big Thicket Bunch” but was collected under its magazine title in THE DEVIL’S CORRAL (Five Star Westerns, 2003).

    “The Brand of Señorita Scopion” by Les Savage, Jr. in Action Stories (Summer, 44) was originally titled by the author “Señorita Six-Gun” but was collected under its magazine title in THE BEAST IN CAÑADA DIABLO (Five Star Westerns, 2004).

    “Secret of Santiago” by Les Savage, Jr. in Action Stories (Winter, 44) was originally titled by the author “Secret of the Santiago” and was collected under this title in TRAIL OF THE SILVER SADDLE (Five Star Westerns, 2005).

    “The Curse of Montezuma” by Les Savage, Jr. in Action Stories (Spring, 45) was originally titled by the author “Six-Gun Serpent God” but was collected under its magazine title in THE CURSE OF MONTEZUMA (Five Star Westerns, 2006).

    “Lash of the Six-Gun Queen” by Les Savage, Jr. in Action Stories (Winter, 47) was originally titled by the author “The Return of Señorita Scorpion” but was collected under the title “The Lash of Señorita Scorpion” in WOLVES OF THE SUNDOWN TRAIL (Five Star Westerns, 2007).

   There is a lot of background on each story in the head notes in these various collections. Savage was not as fond of these stories as was Malcolm Reiss at Fiction House, and hence his writing of them was somewhat sporadic. Although he expanded several of his short novels for magazines into book-length novels, he never went back to do so with any of these stories, nor did he try to weld them together into collections the way we have done.

NOTE: These cover images came from Phil Stephensen-Payne’s mammoth Galactic Central website, a source that every Fiction Magazine collector should absolutely know about.

[UPDATE] 02-08-07. Turns out that someone has done a list, as I suspected, even though I still haven’t seen it. And not only that, but there’s a story missing in Jon’s list above, but that’s because Les Savage didn’t write it.

   After posting a link to this blog entry on the Yahoo PulpMags group, Will Murray vaguely remembered that maybe Emmett McDowell did a Señorita Scorpion story. This rang a bell with me, too. Then Brian Earl Brown came up with the title. It’s in John DeWalt’s book Keys to Other Doors:

       “Gun-Witch of Hoodoo Range,” Action Stories, Winter 1948/1949, by Emmett McDowell.

   Thanks, gents!

[UPDATE #2.] 02-08-07. From long-time pulp fan Jerry Page, reprinted from the PulpMags group with his permission:

   For years I read only sf and fantasy pulps — I owned some non-sf pulps and had read some hero novels, Spider, Shadow, Doc, etc., but I wasn’t all that interested in pulps outside the sf field.

   Then, wondering through the dealers’ room at a convention I saw a stack of Action Stories on a table and the Winter 1947 issue caught my eye. I knew I had seen it before.

   Where? On the Winter 1947 issue of Planet Stories.

   Both covers were by Allen Anderson. The Planet cover illustrated Erik Finnel’s “Black Priestess of Varda.” The Action cover was the same figure of a woman holding a whip and being attacked by either an outlaw or Indian (I haven’t tried digging it out of the box its in so forgive me, but this is from memory).

   Obviously done from the same reference photo of the same model in the same pose. Composition and so on the same. But one was SF and the other was Western. I bought the Action Stories, took it home and compared it with the Planet Stories and confirmed what I thought I had seen. I think I bought three Actions and in each of them there was a Senorita Scorpion story by Les Savage. I read one of them and it was pretty good. I concluded Savage might be a better than average writer. So I read the others. They weren’t quite as good as the first one, but they were good.

   And that’s how I started reading pulps outside the SF field. I still think Savage is one of the better western writers. Reading him led to reading more Westerns, and I also started reading other kinds of pulps, discovering the great wealth of fiction to be found in Adventure, Black Mask and the better Air War pulps such as Wings. (Joel Townsley Rogers is one of the great pulp writers, and his best World War I stories, especially the aviation stories are close to being masterpieces.) I examined my Argosy issues I’d picked up because they contained fantastic stories, and started reading other types of fiction.

LES SAVAGE, JR. – The Shadow in Renegade Basin. Leisure Books; paperback reprint, July 2001. Hardcover edition: Five Star, March 2000.

   For those of you who may have come in late, yes, I do do reviews of westerns on this blog. I know I don’t have to explain myself, but it has been a while since one has appeared here, so what I’m going to do is to repeat the following paragraph from the last one I did, which was of Edge of the Desert by Matt Stuart (L. P. Holmes):

    “… and whether or not they’re included in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV – Al generally says no unless there’s a leading character who’s actually a detective and involved in solving a case – I have no compunction about reviewing them [westerns] here. Almost every western has a crime component of some kind, and if they don’t, I probably don’t read them. Rustling, gunfighting, horse thievery, burning out homesteaders, it’s all against the law, and therefore – when written up in book form – crime fiction.”

   But no more self-indulgent justification! Let me begin by giving you the titles of the three short novels (or long novelettes) included in this particular group of western tales, and the issues of the pulp magazines they first appeared in:

       “Plunder Trail.” Frontier Stories, Summer 1944. Savage’s original title: “Oregon Traitor Trail.”
       “Brand of Penasco.” Action Stories, Winter 1945, as “Brand of the Gallows Ghost.”
       “The Shadow in Renegade Basin.” Frontier Stories, Summer 1950, as “Tombstones for Gringos.”

   Savage had a short but prolific career as a western writer. He died in 1958 only 35 years old, but in the short time he had to live, he wrote 25 novels, the last one, Gun Shy, finished by Dudley Dean McGaughey after his death. This does not include a long list of short stories which Jon Tuska has been packaging into collections like this. (Savage’s first published short story was written when he was a mere 17.)

   Enough facts. If I’ve read anything by Savage besides this one, it would have been over 50 years ago, and opinions when one is 15 old, plus or minus a couple of years, simply do not count. Which assumes that I’d remember, which I don’t, but I’m sure I did – read one, that is.

   Let’s take the two earliest ones first. I appreciate the fact the three stories were published in chronological order. It does help in putting a writer’s career in perspective. Of the first two, I’d say that at time, when Savage would have been in his early 20s, he was absolutely terrific in describing western landscapes and capturing moods, but only so-so in connecting with connecting with his characters and convincing them to come to life.

   Something else he was very good at was writing action scenes, the parts of the stories where violence kicks in, delineated blow by blow, and….

    … in “Plunder Trail,” that is exactly where the story stops dead in its tracks, at least it did for me. It’s the story of a gambler at loose ends who finds himself part of a wagon train full of homesteaders headed west. Ed Manton also finds himself getting caught up in their hopes and new lives. And when Georges Arvada and his gang strike, as is totally anticipated, it is Manton whose abilities as a leader and with a gun are needed the most.

   The last 15 pages need only be skimmed. The fight seems to go on forever, and the last page, in which Manton and Leah are finally reunited, comes both as a relief and as no surprise at all.

   Story number two, “Brand of Penasco,” is one of seven short novels Les Savage wrote about Elgera Douglas, familiarly known as Senorita Scorpion, one of the most popular characters to appear in Action Stories, says Jon Tuska in his introduction.

   Elgera is blonde and quite a pistol-packing lady, just the right combination to win the hearts of every adolescent boy and young man who might have read the magazine back in 1945. More of her background than this, however, is not given in the story itself.

   Truth in advertising. The cover shown to the right is from the Winter 1949 issue, not the one in which the story in this book appeared. Nor is the lady masked in this tale, as she is in most (if not all) of the covers she was featured on. (I just happen to think that she’s shown to her best advantage on this one.)

   I think a mistake has been made in terms of not putting all of her adventures into two volumes, say, instead of of scattering them around one at a time in other collections. The impact that she made would have been far greater, I’m sure, with her exploits being able to be read in the order they occurred, as well as the romances she had.

   It’s still a good story, but after her friend Chisos is shot and left for dead, the story seems to sag a little, caught up in too much action without enough motivation. The capture of a fellow named Penasco, an outlaw known to have been hanged many years ago but rumored to still be alive and on the loose again, is the primary focus, but the tale, populated by people named Tequila, Bighead and El Cojo, seems to go off in too many directions from there.

   It is the title story, “The Shadow in Renegade Basin,” that Jon Tuska, in his introduction to it, seems the proudest of to present. He compares it to Greek tragedy, and describes it as filled with “fratricide and incest.” No kidding. The story had to be rewritten considerably before it could be published in a pulp magazine in 1950. The restored text is supplied.

   Unfortunately I do not relate to Greek drama very well, a failure that no teacher of great literature was able to cure. The shadow in the title is that which is supplied by a sinister-looking mountain called El Renegado, and the legends that are told about it. In the rich, fertile valley at its foot, there are no farms, no ranches, no people, until the arrival of two brothers and their mother, hoping there to settle down and prosper.

   Enter Christina Velasco, who is beautiful, of course, lives alone somewhere in the area, and equally of course both brothers fall in love with her. There is also a Mexican peddler of rare birds named Pajarero and an hombre named Nacho, both of whom are also, in their differing ways, under Christina’s spell.

   As was mentioned earlier, it is no surprise that the ending was changed. And as it was originally written, the story is filled with tantalizing wisps of beautifully described countryside and fragmentary glimpses of fascinating characters who seem to have no control over the events they are in.

   It is like no pulp story I have read before, and I have no way of explaining exactly why, other than I’ve done so far.

   I also apologize for allowing this review to go on so long. Paraphrasing what I remember someone else much more famous than I having once said, I have not taken the time to make it shorter.