Famous Western, August 1950
Though it’s lean on detail, the cover of this issue of Famous Western packs a wallop. Sparingly rendered here is the explosive excitement of John Lackland’s short entry, “Kansas Tornado,” but “Gun Ghost Rider” by Allan K. Echols (pay no attention to that cover credit) was my favorite.
While many knew there’d been trouble at Mercedes Valley those many months ago, few knew who was really behind it or that Texas trainman Jim Rideout barely escaped with his life. As the tale begins, Rideout is riding herd on a string of cattle with old Bob Colby, an honest man—one Jim Rideout doesn’t want to disappoint. But as the men approach the new rail town of Kiowa, Rideout has yet to confess his past, and waiting for him there in the saloon, having just partnered with local cattle buyer Ben Dusenberry, is none other than Charlie Bryce, a guy who knows about Mercedes Valley. You know he’s bad just by his description: outthrust jaw, blonde mustache, and cold blue eyes.
Well, the straight dope on Bryce is he was once Rideout’s right hand man, helping out with a herd of consignment cattle. Secretly, he plotted with rustlers and one moonlit night, split the herd and ran the cattle away, tossing a few gunshots toward Rideout in the process. Naturally enough, Rideout was blamed for the loss.
But you can’t keep a good fellar down.
Anyhow, people had been convinced of Bryce’s story that I had pulled a
fast one on them, and I never did get enough proof it was Bryce to make
anybody believe me. So, I got disgusted and left that part of the
country to start over where I’d have a fair chance.
With that kind of back-story, when eyeball to eyeball in a saloon, there’s nothing left for the two men to do but fight. It’s a terrific, visceral scene full of “pistoned punches” and “heavy blows that thudded and hurt.” In the end, Bryce goes
for a gun, there’s a struggle, the gun goes off…and Bryce tumbles to the floor, wounded, but not mortally so.
Cleared by the law and with Bryce on the mend, Rideout takes Bob Colby and they press on with their livestock past Kiowa to Fairfax. It’s a repentant Ben Dusenberry who shows up that night in their camp, sorry for his professional entanglement with Bryce and scared for his life. He fears he’s worth more to his partner dead than alive.
The men stay awake guarding the herd, and it’s not long until Bryce and his men show. In an eerie reenactment of the Mercedes Valley rustling, Rideout again sees Bryce across a moonlit plain. It’s a cinematic climax if ever there was one.
Then the cursing Bryce jumped from his own animal and started running
directly toward Rideout, as though his rage at the man who had publicly
whipped him and who knew the truth about him, were so great that it had
destroyed all caution. He shot twice more as he ran, and his second
bullet nicked Rideout in the leg, but left him standing.And Rideout shot him once and he fell to the ground on his back. He
rolled over and got up slowly, and turned around on unsteady feet, and
lifted his gun.And then Rideout shot him again, just as Bryce fired.
“Gun Ghost Rider” was as action packed and tough as they come, and its author, Allan K. Echols, penned dozens and dozens of pulp adventures and was given the extra credit under this story’s title: “The Author of Blood on the Star.”
While asking a question about Echols on the Yahoo Western Pulps group, I was tripped up by a mistake on the book’s cover. “Three-Way Chance,” a whimsical story about an unlucky prospector by C.H. Cogswell is erroneously attributed to Echols, while Cogswell gets the byline for “Gun Ghost Rider.”
Also in this issue, I liked Chuck Martin’s light-hearted “Pistol Manners” and Charles Ackeley’s “Staff of Life.”
The other cover stories are worth the price of admission too (fifteen cents in 1950, seven bucks out of my pocket today), but I’ll admit to skipping the non-fiction entries this time. (There are three: “Indians?” by The Lawdog ; “Bar-Room Bonanza,” a True Fact Feature by Lee Baldwin; and “Cowboy Swindler from Abilene” by Harold Gluck, the true fact story of a confidence man from the West.)
Famous Western is a pulp magazine sporting the blue Double-Action Magazine diamond produced by Columbia Publications.
on March 18, 2010 at 7:43 am
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I just know there’s lots of great stuff in these old pulps. I’ve got a few around, but mostly SF ones. I like that there are some presses doing reprints of some of this stuff these days. This one sounds worth a reprint.
on March 18, 2010 at 10:25 am
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FAMOUS WESTERN was actually one of the bottom rung pulps but as your review shows, even this low paying market could print enjoyable fiction. By 1950, one of the best western magazines was dead; WESTERN STORY had died in 1949. Many of the top paying Popular Publication titles like DIME WESTERN and STAR WESTERN were starting to have circulation troubles. They started to use reprints and cut pages,etc. By the mid fifties just about every western had bit the dust, except for RANCH ROMANCES, which somehow survived until 1971.
on March 18, 2010 at 4:46 pm
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Looks like he’s riding side saddle.
on March 19, 2010 at 4:00 pm
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I’ve got some old lee floren – don’t know if it was a house name used by one or many authors. Interesting post.