RANCH ROMANCES: The Angry Men

This ranch romance from the First May 1956 number begins with the hero discovering a suicide.

His eyes stamped every detail in his mind, so that it would be there whenever he might need it. He saw the pattern of drying blood, spread out grotesquely over the rough-hewn planks of the floor. There was not much left of Rowley's face.
"It's murder, Sheriff," someone said.

No one's disputing that Rowley shot himself, but most people in town feel that Ed Landry, the big storekeeper, drove his onetime competitor and present debtor to do it with sharp business practices. Sheriff Jim Gordon spends most of this novella trying to keep Landry from getting shot or lynched, but Landry hardly seems to deserve the lawman's solicitude. He lets Jim know that he's going to take over the bank that holds the mortgage on Jim's little spread, which will give him extra leverage on the sheriff.  Over the course of the story we'll learn that while Landry may be evil, he's not crooked. That is, it isn't him who's using violence to advance his interests. "He wanted money and power," the true villain of the piece explains, "but he didn't want it like I do....Folks thought he was hard, but it was mostly me that did his dirty work for him. And most of the time he didn't even know." Jim must expose this villain while rescuing Landry from the townspeople's misguided fury, and at the same time he has to choose between Landry's daughter Bethe and Jeannie Rae, whose brother tries to kill Landry. In short, it's the stuff of the typical western of the period, whether in pulp or paperback, with a few extra touches that make it a Ranch Romance. "It was a wild and exciting response that she stirred," Cotton writes of Jeannie, "a response that sent blood running hotly through him and made his heart pound crazily." The fact is, you probably could find a line like that in many a western that didn't bill itself as a romance. It came with the territory. Of the two women, it's Bethe who performs a feat worthy of a Ranch Romances cover heroine by snatching a gun from the villain's holster while his back is turned, but she's just a little too brazen for Jim's tastes, and she doesn't make his blood run as hot as the more stern Jeannie, who does get to hold a rifle on our hero for a while. He probably liked it.

Will Cotton was a latecomer to pulps in either sense of the term. He didn't publish his first story until 1951, when he was 39. He mostly wrote westerns but also did some detective stories as well as at least one novel in that genre, The Night Was Made For Murder. Nearly half his magazine output appeared in Ranch Romances, but that's understandable at a time when there were fewer and fewer alternatives for a short-form western writer. His last story for that mighty mag appeared in 1959, after it had shriveled from biweekly to quarterly. I found my first encounter with Cotton efficiently entertaining and relatively original in its refusal to make the greedy shopkeeper into the villain of the piece. "The Angry Men" and the First May 1956 issue are part of the unz.org trove, misidentified as a May 1954 issue. You can sample Cotton's story through this link.

RANCH ROMANCES: "Why don't you want to live, Joe?"

H. A. DeRosso is considered one of the darker authors of that mid-century period when western fiction, mirroring western movies, took on a more "adult" tone. He published his first pulp story in 1941; his last, posthumously published western stories appeared in Ranch Romances. DeRosso turned up frequently there, Ranch Romances being a market that probably ever western writer tried for. He also appeared at least once in Popular Publications' sweeter, gentler rival publication, Rangeland Romances, which tells me that DeRosso knew how to tailor his style to particular markets. How much did his stuff have to be tailored to Ranch Romances? "The Gun Rider" (First November Number, 1955) suggests that it was simply a matter of adding a happy ending to a pretty grim tale.

Jose Gomez, aka "Joe," is a hired gun for Senor Merriman, a corrupt rancher who dominates Dona Luz County with the votes of a Mexican community he keeps poor, ignorant and dependent. Merriman has sent Jose to his home town of San Onofre to hunt down Paul Vincent, a newspaperman making trouble with his investigative journalism. Jose finds himself a pariah, despised as a murderer even by his own mother, even though he claims to kill only in defense of Senor Merriman. The only sympathetic person in town is Erin Day, the pretty Anglo schoolteacher who's had a crush on Jose since they met. She tries to set "Joe" straight about Merriman by showing him the exposes Vincent has published, only to discover that Jose, to his own shame, can read neither English nor Spanish. To his further shame, he discovers that his own mother had been harboring Vincent, and so have most of the townspeople. He tries to cover up for her when Merriman and his bigoted sheriff show up in San Onofre, only to be warned that he can be framed for murder, for a killing that had saved Merriman's life, if he doesn't find the newsman. Finding his own situation increasingly hopeless, he helps Vincent get out of town by shooting two of Merriman's men and prepares for his own death. He figures Merriman has an airtight frame set up, and he figures that Erin, whom he'd pined for silently, thinking himself unfit for her, loves Vincent. Erin isn't so sure about that last part. She urges Jose to leave town until Vincent can clear his name and ruin Merriman, and despairs when he stays in San Onofre. "Why don't you want to live?" she asks, and while he says it's because the frame-up makes flight pointless, she figures out that he means to sacrifice himself, the big dummy, so she can go off with Vincent. "I know now why you helped Paul, why you came back, why you don't want to live," she says, "But I want you to." But she runs out of time to convince him to leave.

She began to cry softly.
"Please don't cry, Erin. Don't let me remember you the last time crying."
Outside Crabtree shouted, "Cobarde. Hijo de puto. Come on out, greaser."
"I'll do my best, Erin. I know how to use a gun good and I'll do my best. Tell my mother --" He did not finish.
"Tell her what, Joe?"
"Nothing."
He wanted to tell Erin good-bye but there was something too final in the words. They choked in his throat. So he touched her head again, the golden hair, and then he was throwing the door open and running out.

Maybe in a different magazine, or in something published a few years earlier Jose does get killed, and Erin does go off with Paul Vincent. Here, he kills his men, gasps "Erin, querida, Erin" with "what he was sure would be his last breath," and then wakes up in bed, recovering from his wounds. Erin will not only marry him, but will teach him to read and write. "Something filled his eyes, something like tears," DeRosso writes, "and he could not understand this because he had never been happy." But he's happy now. Despite that, it isn't quite prime Ranch Romances stuff. Erin's no action woman like you got on the covers so often, and DeRosso, in an effort to differentiate Jose speaking Spanish to his mother and other villagers and English to Erin, renders most of his hero's dialogue in that stilted fashion -- no contractions, no slang -- that 20th century writers from Ernest Hemingway to Pearl S. Buck and on down used to convey foreigners speaking their native tongue. Still, DeRosso can definitely create a mood and does so here pretty effortlessly. Whether the end of his story contradicts its mood was really for its target audience to decide.

The unz.org scan of this issue of Ranch Romances breaks "The Gun Rider" into two parts." Start here and continue with this link to a typical bit of  S. Omar Barker doggerel. On a tangent, you'll notice at the end of the story a promo for Robert Cummings' (ghost-written?) review of the upcoming Randolph Scott-Angela Lansbury picture My Gun Commands. If you've never heard of such a film, that's because the Joseph H. Lewis film was renamed A Lawless Street at the time of its release.

RANCH ROMANCES: The courtship of Jim Bannister

Joseph Chadwick was a prolific pulp writer during the 1940s and 1950s. His "Girl For No Man's Land" was the lead novelette in the 1953 First August Number of Ranch Romances. At 37 dense pages it's a pretty substantial piece of work, and this length gives us a better idea of the balance writers tried to strike between romance and mayhem in this most popular of western pulps.

Jim Bannister has resigned from the Texas Rangers to conduct a personal manhunt for Matt Duane, an escaped convict he more or less let escape. Duane was the only member of an outlaw gang to be captured after a robbery in which Bannister's mentor was killed. The search takes him into "No Man's Land," aka the "Neutral Strip," a piece of "forgotten" territory bordering five states. Bannister expects to meet strange characters here, but the real surprise is when he stumbles upon a woman bathing in a creek. "In all my years as a Ranger, nothing like this had ever happened to me!" he narrates. While he gapes at the spectacle, the woman dives to the bank, finds her rifle and opens fire at him. I bet that happened to him before! This is Bannister's first meeting with Janet Cameron, daughter of a rancher and girlfriend of Matt Duane. Bannister doesn't know that yet at their first more formal meeting, but he suspects that the Camerons know where Duane is and mean to warn him that someone's after him. Chadwick is good at showing his hero's thought processes as Jim tries to decide whether a Mexican ranch hand has been sent to Duane's hideout to warn him, or whether the Mexican was meant to distract him from Duane's presence at the ranch. He confronts Janet a second time and notices that she's got dishes for two in her sink. When Duane finally appears to confirm Jim's suspicions, Janet snatches the gun from Jim's holster to leave him helpless. But she won't let Duane shoot the unarmed man and a melee results

I grabbed at her, and in the darkness I wasn't able to see what I grabbed. I got an armful of girl. She screamed and fought against me, and for a time I had my hands full. I'd never had a woman fight me before, and Janet Cameron's strength surprised me.

You get the feeling that, if anything, this makes Janet more attractive to our manhunter hero. Despite her efforts Bannister reclaims the upper hand, but offers to leave Duane be if he'll rat out his three partners. Duane does this readily while telling Bannister his hard-luck story of oppression by the banks and the big ranchers. Bannister isn't naive about rich folk so he gives Duane some benefit of the doubt. It's not until he's on the trail again, and when he encounters Will Hanks, a cunning drifter he'd met earlier in the story, that he reconsiders why Duane was so ready to rat on his partners. Hanks, who wants a piece of the outlaw bounty, plants the idea in Bannister's head that Duane has all the loot from the robbery hidden someplace. Why else would the other three be looking for Duane, as Hanks has found out? Not to give him his share, certainly; more likely to get theirs. That sends Bannister back to the Cameron ranch, only for Janet to get the drop on him with her rifle. Since this is Ranch Romances, Jim finds himself addressing Janet as "Honey," though this "surprised me as much as it did her." He keeps trying to smooth-talk her into dropping her guard, but she's unimpressed by his abrupt confession that "You've got me crazy in love with you." Planting doubts in her mind about Duane proves more effective, but disarming her only starts the next round.

I threw the rifle aside and went after her, across a comfortably furnished parlor to a desk at its far end. She jerked open a drawer and grabbed out a six-shooter. I had to strike her across the wrist with the edge of my hand in a nasty chopping blow. She shrieked with pain, dropped the revolver. I stooped to pick it up and she caught me with both hands at the shoulders and shoved hard. I fell onto my side, rolled over, scrambled up just in time to keep her from getting the gun. I caught her across the waist, and it was like taking hold of a cougar. She fought me as she had the other night, with wild fury. I picked her up, carried her squirming fiercely to a sofa, dumped her onto it. When she tried to get off it, I pinned her down by the shoulders.

What happened after that happened more by accident than by design.

I bent over and kissed her.

My lips touching her mouth did what force couldn't have done...

And so the tide turns. Janet's still in denial, insisting that she means to marry Tom Duane, but it's only a matter of time before Duane shows his true colors, confirming Bannister and Will Hanks' suspicions. The confirmation comes when the other three outlaws arrive at the ranch looking for Duane and their money. Everyone converges there for the big showdown, including the mercenary Hanks, who decides that the robbery loot is a better prize than any bounty. Bannister understandably takes care of most of the business toward the end, though Janet scores with a pot of freshly boiled coffee in an outlaw's face. Overall, "Girl For No-Man's Land" illustrates how the tone of Ranch Romances stories could turn on a dime from violence to romance, perhaps on the assumption that there was some continuity between the two. It definitely works as a western action story, and compared to what you might read in a "straight" western there's a more urgent tone to the romance scenes that doesn't really compromise the story. I wonder whether there was too much violence in Jim and Janet's encounters for some of the female readership, but I also suspect that the rough-and-ready elements of their courtship were part of Ranch Romances' enduring appeal.

The Violent World of RANCH ROMANCES

While Analog, a digest-sized magazine formerly known as Astounding Science Fiction, might fairly claim to be the last of the pulps, in a technical sense of the word that designation is usually reserved for a modest-sounding magazine called Ranch Romances. With apologies to Analog, Ranch Romance's record really is astounding. The pulp era ended in the 1950s, with most titles folding while a few (like Astounding) switched to a snazzier digest format. Ranch Romances, launched in 1924, continued until 1971. It was a reprints-only quarterly in its dotage, but it had continued to publish original fiction deep into the 1960s. When most pulps diminished in frequency to bimonthly or quarterly during the Fifties, Ranch Romances maintained a biweekly schedule until 1958.  But who cares about a romance pulp, right? Romance pulps are the bottom of posterity's barrel, offering none of the blood or thunder that defined pulp historically, or so we presume. But don't judge a pulp by its title. Take a look instead at the Ranch Romances collection at unz.org. It's a small sample of eleven issues, but most of them, fortunately, are from the 1950s when the Thrilling group published the magazine. I can't vouch for what it was like before Thrilling took over, but this is what it looked like in the summer of 1953.

Nothin' says lovin' like gun-totin' wimmen. I don't know whether she's protecting that poor man or is just pausing before moving on to her next target. This cover is taken from the limited unz sample, but I could have taken almost any of unz's 1950s issues to make the same point, and they're pretty typical of the magazine throughout this era. Ranch Romances would have been all over The Pulp Calendar if it hadn't dated itself by "First August Number," etc. instead of using actual dates. So who's the primary audience for such stuff? The key to Ranch Romances' success probably was that it appealed to both sexes; to women who enjoyed just plain romance and/or the female empowerment promised on the covers; to men turned on by the action and/or the female empowerment promised on the covers.

Did the stories inside live up to the covers? I'll be taking a survey of the unz Ranch Romances holdings to find out, but the first story up for examination gives its heroine a handicap that keeps her from playing a dominant role like the cover lady does, but doesn't exactly leaver her helpless.

The heroine of W. J. Reynolds' "Devil's Notch" (First August Number, 1953) is discovered by Sheriff John Bolton sitting on a rock with a busted ankle. It's a self-inflicted injury, inflicted at the insistence of her outlaw step-brother, on the assumption that the sheriff, a chivalrous gentleman, will take her somewhere to be treated before resuming his pursuit. Not satisfied with Lily Conway's handiwork, Kid Permain went to work on her ankle himself with a rock. And just to be sure that the sheriff will be distracted, the Kid sets some fires to draw Indians down on Bolton and the girl. Once the sheriff realizes that Lily's not Permain's girlfriend, he thinks he may have a chance with her, if he can treat her ankle before she dies of blood poisoning. This story's idea of a bonding experience is his treatment of her swollen ankle with hot towels soaked in boiling water. She shows character by biting her lips after the first scream, in keeping with her stoic demeanor when Bolton first found her.

Eventually they cross paths with Permain, pursued by Indians. Handicapped by her ankle, Lily gets jumped by the outlaw while trying to hold him off with a pistol. "Permain yelled triumphantly, with the meaty sound of a fist meeting soft flesh," but Lily's not out for the count. As Bolton turns his attention to Permain and drops his revolver, fearing for the girl, the girl beans her step-brother with a rock. "She threw the fist-sized missile hard, as a man would throw it," Reynolds writes approvingly. A half-page fistfight ensues between outlaw and sheriff, until Permain dives for a gun on the ground and Lily throws another to Bolton. Bang bang bang bang. After the smoke clears, we get a standard romantic finish. How standard is it? I mean no reflection on W. J. Reynolds, from whom I'd read nothing before, but the fact is, there's little to distinguish "Devil's Notch" from stories that might appear in the other western titles Thrilling published in 1953, right down to the romantic finish. It may have been that most authors always had an eye on Ranch Romances as a market, or that most authors had their eye on a female readership that didn't buy just western romance pulps -- though there certainly were plenty of those to choose from back then. I expect to find some stories, and more likely the longer novelettes that are heavier on the love stuff, but fans of just plain westerns probably needn't be scared off by the Ranch Romances name. Trust what those covers show you, I dare say.