Found Pages: The Remarkable Harold Ernest (“Darcy Glinto”) Kelly, 1899–1969.

Steve Holland, The Trials of Hank Janson, Telos, 2004

Steve Holland, The Mushroom Jungle: a history of postwar paperback publishing, Zeon, 1993

Maurice Flanagan, British Gangster and Exploitation Paperbacks of the Postwar Years, Zeon, 1997

Allen J. Hubin, Crime Fiction IV: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1749–2000 (CD-ROM, Locus Press)

Peter Haining, “The Chilling of Hotsy; the Brit Pulps,” The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines, Prion, 2000

Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 1957

I went to Al Hubin’s bibliography with my list of title-page authors and noted down the names of the publishers, whom I then looked up in his section on Publishers, coming upon the names of further authors and works while I did so.

I haven’t tried to ascertain who the actual publishers behind some of the names were. For that and for other historical information, go to Steve Holland’s The Mushroom Jungle and The Trials of Hank Janson. Also chapter 8 of Peter Haining’s The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines.

A respectful tip of the hat to Binyamin Zeev Immanuel, whom Steve Holland calls “the driving force behind Scion,” born in Latvia in 1907 and coming to England in 1933 with reportedly only three pounds (maybe two hundred in present-day terms) to his name.

• Ace—Macey
• Moring—Janson, Ryland
• Alliance—Hervey
• Archer— Angelo, Morelli, Storme, Gene Ross, Vane, Vincent
• Art Publicity—Markham
• Baker—Buxton,
• Beacon— Sarto, De Bekker
• Bear Hudson—Firth
• Brown Watson—Hickman, Reubens, Richards , Standish
• Burmont—Trenton
• Comyns—Ambler, Clinten, Mark Shayne, Steel
• Cooper—Grey, Howard, Al Morelli
• CurtisWarren—Storme
• Curzon— Ellison, Firth, Lamond
• Dragon—Karta, Linton
• Self—Banarto, Boyd, Costello, Nolan, Lavelle
• Everybody’s—Toler
• Frances—Capelli, Clinten, Janson, Linton, Shelton
• Galliard—Trenton
• Gannet—Casson, Boyce, Cagson, Casson, Diamond, Drayton, Hudson, Kellan, Logan, Rigan
• Gaywood—Foster, Schneider, Trenton
• Swan— Dudley-Smith
• Gifford—Firth, Laye, Warren
• Grammond—Roland Vane
• Hamilton Stafford— Bogar, Carni, Carson, Ellison, Firth, Johnson, Hornby Hutton Kirby, Mantz, McCracken, Morgan, Rank
• Hampton—Hervey
• Harborough—Angelo, Morelli, Ross, Storme
• Hollyfield—Macey
• Hughes—Firth, Lazenby
• Instructive Arts—Standish
• Jssmit—Bateson, Gordon Shayne
• Kaye—Capelli, Carter, Grecco, Janson, Markham, Wingrave
• Ken—Carson, Dallas, Logan, Rigan
• Leisure Library—Morelli, Ross, Storme
• Merit—Ambler, Barnes
• Milestone—Ambler, Angel, Bocca, Cairo, Dark, Delaney, Della, Drayton, Farrell, Garroway, Karta, Perelli, Sarto, Spade
• Modern Fiction—Buxton, Gordon, Griff, Spencer, Hervey, Karta, Rogan, Vane, Vogel
• Muir-Watson—Fearn, Karta, King, Spencer, Vogel, Zore
• New Fiction—Janson
• Panther—Bogar, Carson, Morgan
• Paget--Mack
• Park Trading--Mann
• Phoenix—Vane
• Progressive Press—Trenton
• Robin Hood—Glinto, Prentiss
• Scion—Ambler, Angel, Borelli, Bocca, Cairo, Cello, Coburn, Drayton, Hansen, Karta, Linton, Lugar, Medusa, Norman, Paradise, Perelli, Shannon, Spade, Usher,Vogel
• Spencer—Baroni, Diamond, Ellison, Madison, Marlowe, Rogers
• Sporting World—Trenton
• Stokes—Capelli
• Swan—Elliott
• Tempest—Della, Lisle, Perelli
• Top Fiction—Janson
• Turton—Janson
• Universal Publishing—Bogar
• Ward and Hitchon—Janson
• Warren—Baroni, David, Max Gordon, Brett Vane, Winter
• World Distributors—Dale Bogard, Rod Callahan

In Roland Vane’s Pick-Up Girl (1952) there’s “A Message to Our Readers” from Lewis Thompson, Editor.

According to Peter Haining, several British publishers made their products seem more authentic by putting an American price on the front cover. I had better therefore say that the following were among the putatively New York-based Leisure Library offerings.

On some covers the British price is partly overlapped by the American, as if the latter was added when the book was reprinted n the States.

I was delighted to hear from theatre practitioner and visual artist Luci Gorell Barnes about her father Michael Barnes (1925–1982), who wrote forty or more junglies as Ricky Drayton, Frank Hanson, Karl Medusa, Johnny Cello, Max Clinten, Hyman Zore, Whitney Brown, and himself and later went into film work. The following recollections come from her e-mails.

It’s good to be reminded that being able to earn a living from one’s writing, back in those still barely post-wartime-austerity years of diminished options and frustrated expectations, could be exciting, particularly if one could get out of Britain, especially to sunshine lands adjoining the Med. Which wasn’t easy to do, since as late as 1953 there were draconian currency restrictions on what you could take out with you.

America, that land of hope for innumerable refugees, was still slowly vetting applications for admission to ensure that subversives and indigents weren’t admitted. Gian-Carlo Menotti’s poignant opera of exclusion The Consul appeared in 1950.

Here are the films from which it was taken… “Earthbound” (Wyndham Standing, 1922); “From Dusk to Dawn” with Florence Vidor (a honey of a telepathic and dual-personality film in 1926); “The Outsider,” Bernard Goetzske, in 1924 (spiritualistic stuff very well done); “Atlantide” (forget artists and dates); the recent “Man Who Changed his Mind,” Karloff; “The Lost City,” 15-episode serial with Juanita Hansen and Geo Cheseborn (a film years before its time by the way and ranging around 1921); and “San Francisco.”

(Philip Harbottle, The Multi-Man; A biographic and bibliographic study of JOHN RUSSELL FEARN (1908–60), 1968, pp.4–5. I have regularized Fearn’s punctuation.)

Presumably the same kind of thing could go on in the writing of Westerns.

The cover is cheapie and print and margins so small that the book averages about six hundred words a page. But in fact it’s a lively and ingenious narrative in which cowpoke Larry Day, escaping after being sentenced to hang for a murder he hadn’t even heard about, is in a car accident (yes) which leaves him identified as rich young rancher Gary Elliott, a look-alike who had in fact committed the murder, and whom the sheriff pursuing Lary had shot in the belief that he was Lary If you see what I mean.

Claiming amnesia, Lary now has to cope with (a) bitter ranchers bent on destroying Elliott for his ruthless land-grabbing, (b) ruthless allies and henchmen of Elliott who still have the momentum of his predations, and (c) individuals who have their doubts about his identity, including a decent doctor who knows that he doesn’t have Gary’s body, a nice woman with whom he’s into a relationships that she couldn’t have had with the real Gary, and, near the end, the revenge-seeking father of the girl whom Gary murdered. As for the Law, it’s a toss-up as to whether he’ll be hanged as Lary or Gary. So, as he tries to preserve the masquerade while figuring out and subverting Gary’s Machiavellian game-plan, he’s jinking through a minefield, in a narrative rich in chasing, ambushing, betraying, and miscellaneous gunning. It’s all good un-clichéd entertainment, with a nifty quick resolution of the problem of the illegality of the agreements that he signs as Gary.

Plenty of up and down, and back and forth, and bang-bang, and plotting and figgerin’, in mostly rugged terrain. Honorable outlaw, the dandyinsh Silver Kid, aka Solo Strant, hunted by Marshal Max Reed for a killing he didn’t do, teams up with faux-gentleman crook Pretty Floyd Chase, while trying on the side to discover who’s really behind the serious criminality in the area and clear his name.

Odd terms, some of them familiar words used differently.

Had actual author T.W. Ford known the region or simply, on whichever side of the Atlantic, owned a good glossary of American slang?

Starts out as a near-replay of My Darling Clementine. But Clementine, whom Doc Holiday has left back East, doesn’t appear, nor is his consumption conspicuous, and Pop Clanton is away on a trip, and departures from the movie increase. Doc operates (successfully) on Virgil Earp, not Chihuaha (here Nuala), after a four-page hand-to-hand fight with Clem Clanton. Antagonism culminate in a wild shootout in town by a lot of characters, and Doc rides off at the end, abandoning Naula in the questionable hope that she’ll transfer her devotion to Virgil.

The two cowboys on the cover have no connection with what’s inside. The novel’s about mountain men and fur traders back before the Civil War, with no hints of its being in the making.

Crack-shot Lon Blackman, seriously down on his luck, acquires one of the very rare new Colt six-shooters and allows former buddy Walter North to talk him into becoming a gunslinger for the monopolistic Missouri Fur Company, who send him off in a team under pitiless Henry McCracken to “discourage” trappers who’ve been trying to dispose of their furs for more than the pittance paid by the company. The resulting cruelties sicken him, and he escapes into the hills as McCracken’s Indian allies get ready to burn him at the stake. His campaign against McCracken’s gang escalates as more of the Company’s victims and enemies join him. He starts his own company, and the Company’s fort is destroyed by Indians on his own side after cold-eyed visiting Company bigwigs have, as they think, got him in their power.

This is nothing much. Chet Laker, on his way to visit innocently with old friend Seth Holt, comes upon a coach-wreck and what looks the kidnapping of passenger Claire Trevoy. He spends most of the rest of the novel arguing, sometimes at gunpoint, with lawmen and others who think that he and Claire are part of Seth’s outlaw operation and involved in the disappearance of fifty-thousand dollars in gold. Really just a Who’s-doing-it? stretched. Foden was better as Brett Vane and other toughies in the Jungle.

This is nothing much either. At the outset a coach carrying $200,000 in gold is buried under an avalanche started by a prospector’s careless blasting. Fifteen years later, ranch-daughter Flora Mackenzie talks visiting Dick Crespin and faithful Indian friend Black Moon into going off with herself and feisty Aunt Belinda to try and find the coach. Believing that they know the location, Mexican outlaw Vanquera sets them to work for him, with painful deaths awaiting them if they delay. (He’s already tried a little torture on Flora.) He ends up falling from a height, leaving Flora and her father with his recovered $200,000 and a mine-to-be.

I don’t know why a locomotive engine dominates the cover.

Fearn, who used fourteen pseudonyms, wrote a lot of books and apparently is best reputed for his science fiction.

I see that the book is copyrighted by P.J. Harbottle.

Handsome arrogant Dana Rank, boss of the imperially expanding Slash-R ranch, is injured in a coach accident and has his hawk-like nose smashed by his segundo Will Keene, who’s appropriating the ranch. Unrecognizable by the authorities, and rejected by fiancée Lucinda, who marries Keene, he joins under another name with the enemies of Slash-R, particularly young rancher Maury Lewes and hired gun Andy Beaker, the latter figuring out after a bit who he is and extorting $5000 in hush-money. Both the re-shaped Slash-R team and the Rank-haters want him dead over his own name. But at least new schoolmarm Elvira Hill has seen through to his real and improved self and helps him.

Brad Morrison arrives in Thunder Bend looking deadbeat and wanting to do some prospecting. Jeff Willard and prospector “Old Timer” are friendly. Rancher Black Joe Rutter is not. Brad is in fact a marshal sent by the authorities in Drew City to investigate the smuggling of unregistered gold. Brad, Old Timer, and singer Betty Tarrant hunt for the mystery mine. Turns out that the operation is being run by beautiful Nariza, a “pure Mexican Aztec,” who tries to entomb Brad in the mine and burn Betty alive.

Wells Gardner Darton hadn’t been put out of business by the heavy fines levied six years previously for their publication of Lady—Don’t Turn Over and the remarkable Road Floozie.

Listed on the back of the dustcover are Westerns by Clem Edmunds, Bill Watson, Tom J. Hopkins, Abel Shott, Frederick Bechdolt, Chuck Martin, Charles Stoddard, and Edward Churchill.

You know, given that this was only three years after the end of the War, and with tight currency restrictions, it would seem natural to have used home-grown authors. Fearn and Churchill, certainly, were British.

This one surely has to be British.

In Bonanza Platte, Colonel Devereaux and his band of ex-Confederates can’t get their silver ore (a Southern gennum mining?) smelted because Yankee Nate Emerson, who lost two sons in the War, won’t let them use his ore smelter. Attempts at sending it elsewhere are bushwacked.

Enter handsome, slim, steel-and-leather Smoky (!) Stover, trick-shot display artist, who tangles in Phoebe’s saloon with big wicked stubble-chinned crackshot Travis and is actually ex-Captain Stover, whose brother was killed in one of the bushwackings (organized by Travis). He’s also (our hero?) wanted by the Army for fifty thousand stolen dollars!,After some this-and-that, including Travis murdering Nate after Smoky persuades him to open his plant to Devereaux, Smoky and Devereaux’s miners occupy the plant and for ten pages fight off a furious attack by Apaches (?), followed up by Travis and his gang, with the U.S. cavalry turning up when they’re almost out of ammo.

But that’s not all, folks. Travis is after the stolen dollars himself, and Devereaux’s gutsy young son Len intervenes, bang-bang, on Smoky’s side, Smoky being surprisingly incompetent when it comes to entering rooms without checking to see who’s standing behind the door. Smoky is no John Wayne, though not becoming Jimmy Stewart as Destry.

He can shoot coins from between a saloon girl’s spread fingers at forty (!) paces. But in one of the several fights with Travis and associates we have:

Subsequently,

Also,

Slim, handsome Western heroes do not howl, mock like that, or look around wildly. Burly hirsute Travis, on the other hand, is every bit as vicious as one could hope for in a villain.

What with the ease of disposing of bodies, the weakness of the Law, and the wide spaces in which no one will hear the cries and groans of the tortured, I wonder whether villains may not be more villainous in Westerns than in Toughies?

Sixteen-year-old schoolkid Red (Redman) Paine is hassled at school because his dad is outlaw Big Red Paine. When Paine is killed, Red, anxious to go straight, is used as cheap labour by sour uncle John Groot, taken on as innocent companion by (un)reformed outlaw Ed Chess, savagely beaten in jail by old outlaw-hater Jud Tentrus, given a job as deputy in Red Hat by Sheriff Lott, allowed by Lott to get away under a cloud, and then framed for a jailbreak organized by Lott.

Up till then the pattern has been rather leadenly mechanical, a series of small episodes in which Red tries in vain to live down the stigma of being Big Red’s son. Things pick up a little after he hooks up—an outlaw now himself —with likable Laughing Bill Dornan and Doc Sills, saves plucky auburn-haired Peggy Dana from being murdered in wide-open Bridger (domain of Sheriff Adam Blair), learns from her of a mysterious gang of Vigilantes turned bad, and, along with Bill, Doc, and Tetrus, who has turned up again, wipes it out, including its actual boss, Blair.

Red’s a lightning-fast and dead-accurate shot, by the way, who can balance a cartridge on the back of his hand, draw his gun with that hand, and hit a spot at fifteen paces before the falling cartridge hits the ground. Glenn Ford does something similar in The Fastest Gun Alive (1956). After breaking into the Vigilantes’ headquarters in a castle-like hacienda,

An interesting novel could have been built around that.

Among the rescued peace officers is brother John, not heard of since he exited from Uncle Groot’s. Red and Peggy are tight. Red’s back in from the cold.

Odd words, or familiar words used oddly:

Were Clay and Abel Shott using the same glossary of regionalisms? Were they maybe the same person?

I dismiss elsewhere the attribution of this to Harold Kelly. No way.

This shortish narrative of how Steve Martin (the, uh, Whistling Ranger) arrives in Paradise, Texas, with his new bride Jean and mysterious killings ensue of which he is suspected doesn’t have a single fresh detail or turn of phrase in it anywhere. All is cliché.

There are also virtual “Western” impossibilities, like:

• —a Ranger’s word not being accepted by a sheriff who has no reason to believe that he’s gone crooked;
• —Martin’s bullet hitting the muzzle of an opponent’s revolver (OK, unlikely);
• —a word written on dead men’s foreheads in acid looking as though it had been hot-iron branded;
• —Martin’s prissy wife saying, “I’ll make a gentleman of you yet if it’s the last thing I do. Ranger or no Ranger, you’re going to learn the way to behave. Now put those guns away and stop acting like a spoilt child”;
• —Martin slapping the dude baddy’s face and then allowing the baddy time to knee and sock him.

There’s also diction that I don’t recall seeing in any Carson or Wayne novel, such as “batwings” (in Tinhorns of the Tilted ‘K’ the term is “swing doors”). “Honest Injun,” “face fungus” (beard), “salivated” (murdered).

At least we can confidently infer from the diction that this is a genuine product of the British imagination.

A lovely clean hardcover in near-mint dust jacket.

For a bit there doesn’t seem to be enough going on. The homesteaders in Cougar Basin are upset because a threshing machine had been wrecked. And young Cal Bowman, vendor of farm equipment, doesn’t think much of their keeping on coming back to it. Even though there had been an explosion. But after a bit you realize that this is the narrative, the troubles these ten not particularly interesting farmers are having in this valley to which Bowman, encouraged by the railroad, had attracted them. To the serious annoyance of several cattle ranchers.

It becomes Job-like. There’s been a serious drought. And Cal has made the mistake of being the one who keeps up payments to the bank. And he can’t get a bank loan. And heavy rain comes when it isn’t wanted. And a sabotaged bridge collapses as a wagon and team of horses passes over it. And some farmers talk of quitting. And by now we’re getting to know who’s behind it, in a plot about land deals too complicated for me to follow, but obviously credible. By the time the principal predator is coolly talking about setting fire to the barn where the painfully gathered grain is stored, one wants to say, that’s enough, Cal is having to bear too much, without discernible hope of relief. Except that one major rancher does slowly start shifting, or so it seems, this being a situation in which a lot of figuring goes on about what someone may really be up to. There is even some quotable prose in the ten-page account of one of the arsonist on his horse after they’ve set the fire and been shot at as they rode away.

Reading without maps can be risky. You no sooner think you’ve got something figured out than something else comes along to upset things.

The margins are wretchedly narrow and the tiny print under-inked. But here Jim Bowie is firmly in control of plot, characters, textures.

But wait. Within a short while the train has terrifying jumped the rails, the coaches are wrecked, and it’s with great difficulty that a few of the passengers, including Brad and Red, are able to drag themselves out into the night and hold off, with insufficient weaponry, the Commanches who are scalping and massacring the other surviving passengers.

The slippery, sweat-stinking body of the Indian twisted like an eel, but the point of the blade got him in the belly. He shrieked as the Texan ripped upward, then crumpled as the blade slashed again, this time to his pounding heart. That’s just for starters. The main action is in and around Buffalo Flats, a town under the fist of Black Bart Drogan, who Corrigan, after knocking him out and making a deadly enemy, learns is now the husband of the girl he’d thought of as his fiancée. Drogan and his killers hang, yes, hang second-hero Red, having failed to extract from him the location of their gold find. Fortunately there are good guys for Corrigan to link with—ageless “breed” Pawnee Bill Fogarty, taciturn but competent Doc Sharrett, huge genial Mike O’Hara, foreman of the crew pushing the railroad westward, who speaks acceptable phonetic Irish, and has to cope with workers exasperated with receiving no pay for weeks.

The reason for which is the sabotaging, under Drogan’s aegis, that we encountered at the outset.

There’s good gunplay and hand-to-handing. Corrigan kills the three killers who ambush him when he comes upon Red’s suspended body (“his protruding tongue swollen and black”), aids Mike in a donnybrook with his work crew, joins Pawnee Bill in a buffalo hunt to feed the railroaders, is with Bill when they come upon the remains of a recent Indian massacre.

With such motivators things build to all-out war between the railroaders and Drogan’s gang after a document shows that he’s behind the sabotaging.

Young Elvira, whom Corrigan rescued from the train wreck and whose father, here on a visit, is a U.S. Senator, will build a happy future with Corrigan, the new U.S. marshal after the clean-up. Is the book known by aficionados? Will it ever be reprinted? It deserves to be.

Or are there lots of others as good?

Is it British? American?

Inside the back cover are ads for Westerns by Jack Byrne, Cliff Campbell, and Anson Piper.

My guess would be British.

During 1950 Scion debuted a whole mob of Gangster novel bylines, including Al Bocca, Sammy Coburn, Ross Angel, Brad Shannon, and Danny Spade. The spearhead to this new line-up was Duke Linton. (79)