Saturday, April 07, 2012

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Star Western, December 1933

Pulp art dealer and STAR WESTERN collector Steve Kennedy sent me some fine cover scans from issues he owns, so I'll be featuring them in this series from time to time. This one is from the third issue of the magazine, December 1933. T.T. Flynn, one of my favorite Western authors, had a story featured on the cover of the very first issue of STAR WESTERN, and he's back this issue with the fine novella "Satan's Deputy", which was reprinted in one of the Leisure Books paperback collections of his work (sorry I don't recall which one -- but they're all good). I'm not familiar with Wallace K. Norman, who also made this cover, but Ray Nafziger, Art Lawson, and George C. Henderson were all solidly entertaining pulp authors. The guy on the cover reminds me of William S. Hart. It strikes me as unusual to see a wounded, possibly even dead horse on a Western pulp cover. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that didn't show up very often.

2 comments:

Walker Martin said...

James is right about "Satan's Deputy" appearing in one of the Leisure paperbacks. It appeared in October 2003 with the title HELL'S CANON. Jon Tuska compiled over a dozen T.T. Flynn western collections, just about all of them containing three to five long novelets.

Each story usually has an interesting short introduction giving some details. Tuska says that Flynn was paid $365 on acceptance. For 1933 this was a very large sum of money, at least $5000 in today's money. It was his 16th story of the year, so he was making good money writing for the pulps.

Anonymous said...

I really liked the cover art on the early Star Western pulps (1933-1937) I only own 1 in my collection at this time (December 1936 issue) with a story by Luke Short titled "Buckshot Freighter" and a great Norman Saunders cover. I'm currently trying to fill a bunch of gaps in my Luke Short collection.

For those that might be interested here is a link to whats currently in my Luke Short pulp collection.

http://www.louislamourcollector.com/id663.html

-Tom Daniels