While I’m not a fan of westerns (or western pulps), I wanted to get more information on the various western pulp heroes, so I picked up a copy of Nick Carr‘s The Western Pulp Hero.
Wooda Nick Carr (1923-2020) was a prolific researcher of the pulps, who wrote many articles on them, several collected in a few books that I’ve reviewed here. The Western Pulp Hero was originally published by Starmont House in 1989 in its Popular Culture Studies series. It has since been reprinted by Wildside Press/Borgo Press, which is the edition I have.
Clocking in at around 135 pages, this work is a great introduction to this area of pulp. We start off with a great preface by Ryerson Johnson, who in addition to writing a trio of Doc Savage novels, also wrote quite a few western and detective pulps. He gives a good overview of writing for the pulps and the western pulps in particular, and helps explain what separates “pulp fiction” from other kinds. He notes a few of his western serial characters, a couple of whom are included here.
Carr then provides a brief overview before we get into the meat of things, the heroes themselves. This work covers about 50 western pulp heroes. While there are a few that everyone has heard of, such as Zorro and the Lone Ranger, there are several that hopefully most have heard of such Pete Rice, Senorita Scorpion, The Masked Rider, and more, most likely as many of these have been reprinted by various publishers such as Steeger Books and Bold Venture Press, though there are many who have not be reprinted.
Each one gets a three- or four-page overview, with examples of covers and interior artwork, though about a dozen get much briefer looks of a paragraph or two. Sadly, there are no index or listing of their stories, though these should be available online from sources like Galactic Central.
In addition, we get some information on a trio of western pulp artists: Norman Saunders, Walter Baumhofer, and Robert G. Harris.
My main issue is with the reproduction. The quality is just a little above a photocopy of the original book, and the art reproduction is hurt the most by this. I wish that the text had been improved, with the artwork and photos replaced with better scans, either good grayscale scans or even a selection in color. But the cost of doing this sadly is probably not justified. And I’d like to see the work expanded with listings of stories for each character, perhaps as an expanded edition.
