Pages

Saturday 28 April 2018

Edmund Collier - Great stories from West magazine

[I recently came across Great Stories of the West, edited by Edmund Collier. This is a selection from West magazine, which was edited by Collier, and it contains the following stories.
Story title
Author
Magazine
Issue
The Aska-Damn Dog
Raymond S. Spears
West
Jul 22 1931
Sheriff’s Son
James Clarke
West
Jun 1935
Pud Ackley, Cowboy
Walt Coburn
West
Jan 1933
A Lady Comes to Paradise
Edmund Ware
West
May 1933
Lin of Pistol Gap
West
May 14 1930
Minding Their Own Business
Raymond S. Spears
West
Jul 1935
A Corner in Horses
Stewart Edward White
West
Mar 1934
Finder Is Keeper
West
Jul 1933
One-Man Mule
Rollin Brown
West
Aug 1933
Champs at the Chuckabug
S. Omar Barker
West
Jan 1935
Drake Feeds the Buzzards
W.H.B. Kent
West
May 1935
Brockle-Face
West
Jun 11 1930
The Parson
West
Jan 1935
The Man with Nerve
Stewart Edward White
West
Sep 1933

Covers of issues of West magazine from which stories were included in Great Stories of the West ed. Edmund Collier
Covers of West issues from which stories were included in Great Stories of the West ed. Edmund Collier

I found the introduction interesting as it was a recollection by Collier of some memories of editing West. Sharing it with you.]
Perhaps the pulps are no great loss. Nevertheless they were the seed bed for many writers who went on to fame and fortune. And West was one of the best. It was started in 1926 at the request of the American News Company when Street and Smith left them to do their own distributing and American News wanted a Western to replace S. & S.’s Western Story.

Doubleday was a natural for the job. Some years before, they had taken over on a printing bill a slick-paper magazine called Short Stories. It had a wonderful list of authors of the literary kind, but few readers. Under the able editorship of Harry E. Maule, who turned it into a general adventure magazine, Short Stories hit the jackpot. With such writers as Kenneth Roberts, Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, Clarence E. Mulford, Erle Stanley Gardner with his early Perry Mason stories, and many others of like quality, Short Stories was a leader till pulp magazines were given their final death blow by television.

When West came along—also under Harry Maule’s direction—it was in a particularly good position because it could get the spin-off of Western writers from Short Stories as well as from Doubleday’s book department, which published many of the pulp-paper authors in hardcover books.

In those days, though the reader wanted plenty of action and a dramatic story, he didn’t demand as much blood, thunder and killing as later filled the pulps and perhaps contributed to their replacement by TV. He liked atmosphere as well as action, but what he valued most was a character he could follow from issue to issue. Hopalong Cassidy, Sad Sontag, Ben Pickering, Bat Jennison, Slivers Cassidy, Black John Smith, Wild River Ben and Pokeasy Jones were real and unforgettable characters to hundreds of thousands of readers who probably seldom noticed the names of their creators.

My own first contact with Western fiction was when, as an adolescent, I read Owen Wister’s The Virginian. When I came to the end I turned back to page one and read it all through again. That was well over fifty years ago. Since then the West has held for me a strong appeal.

Somehow I managed to see some of it first hand—cavalry on the border in Arizona, cow ranches in Montana and California, a wheat ranch in Oregon, construction camps, redwood and yellow-pine camps, Forest Service in the High Sierras—whatever I could do to see the West in the rough, satisfied my youth.

All this, no doubt, gave me a rather special point of view when, largely through chance, I found myself sitting at an editorial desk with the heady responsibility of choosing what stories should be bought and which should not ... a heady responsibility indeed, that sometimes—literally—especially in the depression, meant life or death for an author; and certainly meant life or death for the magazine.

Till I went to work on pulp magazines, I had never really been conscious of the violence and gunfighting that one has to admit account for most of their popularity. I knew the feel of a horse between my legs and an axe in my hands. I knew the glory of sunset over the desert, the excitement of getting cattle across a flooded creek, the taste of cold mountain water after a long day in the dust of a trail herd—but it happened that where I worked I had heard no talk of guns and gunfighting, in which there appeared to be no interest. Interest lay more in how to avoid running a pound of meat off a valuable steer.
...
In West, at least while I was editing it, there was always this tension—the need to satisfy the demand for action and gunfighting and the desire to portray Western atmosphere and character and the pioneer spirit.

The present collection, I think, represents this tension. Though editors and writers knew they couldn’t give up the “rough stuff’ without losing their audience, they were always reaching for the stars, and sometimes caught one. Stories of such technical excellence as Sheriff’s Son by James Clarke or A Lady Comes to Paradise by Edmund Ware could hold their own in any company.

Raymond S. Spears, author of The Aska-Damn Dog, was Conservation Director of the American Trappers Association and a learned ecologist. He had traveled the length and breadth of the land with a knapsack on his back and had more authentic detail at his fingertips than any man I have ever known. He was a natural storyteller, and in view of his other activities, incredibly prolific. His Minding Their Own Business is one of a series featuring in thin disguise Butch Cassidy and “The Wild Bunch" whom he knew personally.

Ernest Haycox, whose Lin of Pistol Gap is one of his most exciting productions, became the top Western writer for Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. Doubleday and others published his novels in book form. His early death unfortunately deprived us of the opportunity to read the great Western literature that it was his ambition to write.

B. M. Bower and Chip of the Flying U need no introduction. With Hopalong Cassidy and the Virginian, Chip was one of the three most famous characters in Western fiction.

Walt Coburn was a cowboy and rancher set afoot by a World War I wound. His love of ranch life and ranch people was immeasurable, and he spent the rest of his life trying to show them as they really were. That he succeeded is evidenced in Pud Ackley, Cowboy.

James B. Hendryx, whose rollicking Black John Smith stories are always a delight, outdid himself in The Parson. Though his stories are pure fun, they benefit from the feeling of authenticity that comes from firsthand experience. Hendryx took part in the Klondike gold rush and soaked up enough material for a lifetime of fiction writing.

Bennett Foster is another genuine Westerner whose skilled writing gains body from his background. S. Omar Barker, also steeped in Western tradition, is another who went on to the “slicks.” His humor never fails and his inventiveness is amazing. His expert craftsmanship is there but never intrudes—a professional from “who lit the chunk.”

Though Drake Feeds the Buzzards by W. H. B. Kent may suffer slightly from being one of a trilogy, it is complete in itself, and shows well the author’s individual style and extraordinary power of dramatic intensity.

Stewart Edward White’s The Man with Nerve is without doubt one of the best Western short stories ever written.

These few gleanings we hope will remind old pulp fans of days of good reading and convince newcomers that there was "gold in those hills.”

As Stephen Vincent Benet expressed it in Western Star 

There is a wilderness we walk alone
However well-companioned, and a place
Where the dry wind blows over the dry bone
And sunlight is a devil in the face,
The sandstorm and the empty water-hole
And the dead body, driven by its soul...

But, where the ragged acres still resist
And nothing but the stoneboat gets a crop,
Where the black butte stands up like a clenched fist
Against the evening, and the signboards stop,
Something remains, obscure to understand,
But living, and a genius of the land.

You can buy the book @ Amazon or AbeBooks. EBay didn't have a copy for sale at the time this article was written.

Saturday 21 April 2018

Helen Wismer - pulp editor

Helen Wismer was a pulp editor at the time this article was published. She would go on to marry James Thurber, and be the main force behind his writing career in the final 26 years of his life. This article appeared in the June 24, 1933 issue of the El Paso Herald, 2 years before she met Thurber.

Helen Wismer, pulp editor c. 1933
Helen Wismer, pulp editor c. 1933


Slender, delicate, feminine as a bride's bouquet, Helen Wismer edits gutsy, two gun, he-man pulps for Magazine Publishers, Inc., in her boudoir office at 67 W. 44th St.  
 
"those hell-ships struck nine times—yet no one had seen them.. and before he died suddenly, mysteriously — he had only time to babble of green death ships — and scream out a startling warning..." This, from "Flying Aces," is a sample of her muscular muse; and several sonnet sequences from Ronald Elbank that beguiled her in her violet days as a sweet young thing at Mount Holyoke College.  
 
Selects Stories  
 
Besides "Flying Aces" she is also editorially responsible for the gory heroics of "Sky Birds." For these she selects the stories, haggles the authors, needles their stuff when they get too lah-de-dah, (sometimes they write "darn" for "damn") and corrects their terminology in the technics of aircraft and machine guns—her two expert topics.  
 
For this she gave up the lavender life of the Ladies Aid, her father being the Rev. Dr. E. L. Wismer, pastor at the First Congregational Church, Newport. His daughter's career, of which he was ignorant until recently, first amazed, now amuses him.  
 
Likes the Job  
 
Miss Wismer sees no contrast in her early life as violet by a mossy manse in Bristol, Conn., where she was bred, to the Tarzan types she now shoulders into print. Meek, and exceedingly mild, she whispers, argumentative, gently, as though coyly rejecting gallantry in a garden tete-a-tete. "There is no reason why a woman shouldn't edit a man's magazine as well as a love magazine. After all, the masculinity of the stories is the concern of the authors. It is my job to see that their scripts follow standards of structure and action. Feminine reaction in writing, if there is such a thing, doesn't mean anything here. It is a matter or technique." 
 
"I like my job," she went on, her dark luminous eyes lighting up. "The 'pulps' as they are called, need no justification. The occasional criticism of the so-called sophisticates is incorrect." 

Saturday 14 April 2018

Windy City Pulp and Paper convention 2018 - photos

Visited Windy City Pulp and Paper for the fourth year running, and had a great time there. Some photos:

A few photos of the dealers' room:
Dealer's room at Windy City 2018, held in the Westin, Lombard
Dealer's room at Windy City 2018, held in the Westin, Lombard
Dave Smith of Fantasy Illustrated had his usual array of rare and unique items
Dave Smith of Fantasy Illustrated had his usual array of high grade rare and unique items



Murania Press had a table
Murania Press had a table

Adventure House had more tables and boxes, the wall of pulps was a little smaller this time
Adventure House had more tables and boxes, the wall of pulps was a little smaller this time


Weinberg Books had original art and books
Weinberg Books had original art and books

Comics as well
Comics as well

I forget whose table this was
I forget whose table this was

Another dealer offering books, art and fanzines
Another dealer offering books, art and fanzines

The art show and the art in the dealers' room, which is one of the main reasons to visit:



Anton Otto Fischer frontispiece for Skipper John of the Nimbus
Anton Otto Fischer frontispiece for Skipper John of the Nimbus

The theme this year was aviation art:

Frederick Blakeslee cover for Fighting Aces, September 1941
Frederick Blakeslee cover for Fighting Aces, September 1941

The one on the right is a George Rozen cover for Sky Fighters, Spring 1949
Right: George Rozen cover for Sky Fighters, Spring 1949


Left: George Rozen cover for Sky Fighters, Winter 1947  Right: Rudolph Belarski cover for Aces, Winter 1939/40
Left: George Rozen cover for Sky Fighters, Winter 1947
Right: Rudolph Belarski cover for Aces, Winter 1939/40

Left: George Rozen cover for Sky Fighters, Winter 1948  Right: Rudolph Belarski cover for The Lone Eagle, April 1941
Left: George Rozen cover for Sky Fighters, Winter 1948
Right: Rudolph Belarski cover for The Lone Eagle, April 1941


Art in the dealers' room:

Paperback, men's magazines and digest cover illustrations on sale
Paperback, men's magazines and digest cover illustrations on sale

Left: Walter Baumhofer sports illustration  Right: William Reusswig pulp cover painting
Left: Walter Baumhofer sports illustration
Right: William Reusswig pulp cover painting

More art from Grapefruit Moon Gallery
More art from Grapefruit Moon Gallery

Henry J. Soulen painting
Henry J. Soulen painting


H.L. Parkhurst cover for one of the "spicy" pulps
H.L. Parkhurst cover for one of the "spicy" pulps

Original illustration for Conan the Barbarian book by Robert E. Howard
Original illustration for Conan the Barbarian book by Robert E. Howard

Some unique and rare items in the dealers room and the auctions:

Short Stories 1914 July issue
Short Stories 1914 July issue, with a Sax Rohmer story in it
Unusual photo collage cover for The Popular Magazine, January 1907
Unusual photo collage cover for The Popular Magazine, January 1907
New Detective Magazine, February 1946, Moral of the story: You can't have your cake and eat it too.
New Detective Magazine, February 1946
Moral of the story: You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Robert Bloch letter to Sam Peeples, one of two in the auction
Robert Bloch letter to Sam Peeples, one of two in the auction

Early issue of Illustrated Novelets, soon to become North-West Romances
Early issue of Illustrated Novelets, soon to become North-West Romances 

Amazing Stories issue containing the first Buck Rogers story and one instalment of the Skylark of Space serial
Amazing Stories issue containing the first Buck Rogers story and one instalment of the Skylark of Space serial

Black Aces, the rarely seen, short-lived competition for Black Mask from Fiction House
Black Aces, the rarely seen, short-lived competition for Black Mask from Fiction House 

The Orchidengaarten, first fantasy magazine
The Orchidengaarten, first fantasy magazine

Other highlights


Auction material this year was from the collection of Glenn Lord, and was focused on Robert E. Howard's work. It was impressive to see Howard's lifetime body of work in Weird Tales, Action Stories, Fight Stories and Golden Fleece. I was informed by a reliable source that what we saw in the auction was the tip of the iceberg in a Texas size collection, so perhaps there will be more in future.



Talk: The secret origins of Weird Tales by John Locke - Great talk, new information on the early years of Weird Tales, the partnerships, the people and the feuds. Looking forward to the upcoming book which should have more details.

Book signing: Art of the pulps

Book signing, with all the contributors lined up to sign copies
Book signing, with all the contributors lined up to sign copies


I also met a lot of people, new to me this time were Howard Andrew Jones of Blackgate.com and John C. Hocking Malcolm Edwards and Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books from across the pond. And that's it till the next one. Thanks to Doug Ellis, John Gunnison and the rest of the organizers for doing an excellent job.

Saturday 7 April 2018

Robert Ormond Case - Western Author

One of the big 3 authors of Western Story (others being Max Brand and Robert J. Horton), it seemed in the 1920s till the mid 30s that you couldn’t pick up an issue without coming across a story by one of these three. He was a careful researcher, noted for the accuracy of detail in his entertaining stories.


Robert Ormond Case, western author, in front of a painting for his serial, Wings North, that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1938
Robert Ormond Case, western author, in front of a illustration for his serial, Wings North, that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1938