Six-Gun in Cheek by Bill Pronzini

Author:Bill Pronzini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2017-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

In 1966 one of the bottom-end paperback houses, Belmont Books, launched a short-lived series of “Two Double-Barreled Westerns” per book, after the fashion of Ace Doubles. There were three differences in the Belmont versions: The “novels” were much shorter than Ace’s, well under 40,000 words each; they were bound one after the other rather than one upside down; and they shared a split front cover instead of each having a cover of its own. Most of the Belmont doubles seem to have been originals, though some may well be unattributed reprints of pulp novellas.

Like the bulk of Ace Double Westerns, Belmont’s were tried and true bang-bangers. E. B. Mann, a moderately well regarded action writer in the ’30s and early ’40s, was responsible for nearly a dozen titles, two thirds of the total number of “Double-Barreled Westerns” published between 1966 and 1968. Others were written by Burt Arthur, Lee Floren, and the one-time “King of the Cowboy Writers,” Walt Coburn.

Easily the worst of the Belmont crop—a chunk of Yellow Peril nonsense in Western dress called BORDER TOWN—was the drooling brainchild of Coburn, perhaps devised early in his career when he was still learning his trade, or concocted out of liquor-soaked whole cloth near the end of his rather tempestuous life. It is unclear whether this 30,000-word deformity is a pulp reprint or an original.

Like Chuck Martin, Tom Roan, and other legendary crankers, Walt Coburn enjoyed both a long and a commendably prolific career. Between 1922 and 1970 he published upwards of a thousand pieces of short Western fiction and nonfiction in Argosy, Adventure, Western Story, Lariat, Dime Western, True West, Frontier Times, and dozens of other magazines; close to a hundred novels; and a couple of acclaimed histories of cowboy and ranching life in his native Montana. He was the only Western writer other than Zane Grey to have more than one magazine named after him: Walt Coburn’s Action Novels, a Fiction House publication that ran briefly in 1931, featured four of his cowboy novelettes per issue, and carried a Will Rogers quote (“I read all of Walt Coburn’s stories”) on the cover; and Walt Coburn’s Western Magazine, a Popular Publications pulp in 1949-50 that in each issue contained one long Coburn novelette, and one nonfiction reminiscence under the umbrella title “Walt’s Tally Book.”

During his heyday in the ’30s and ’40s, Coburn churned out an average of 600,000 words of Western pulp per year. (His total published wordage, by his own estimate, was nearly 20 million words.) “In all my years of fiction writing,” he claimed in his posthumously published autobiography, WALT COBURN, WESTERN WORD WRANGLER (1973), “I never rewrote a story, never missed a deadline, drunk or sober, never used an agent, but dealt directly with editors, and never used a pseudonym.” He was a prodigious drinker and allowed as how he worked many times with a bottle of whiskey beside his typewriter. (His autobiography drips with accounts of various wet escapades, a couple of Machiavellian complexity.)

About his pulp writing he stated proudly: “I went after the job as if it were a game from which I got a big kick.

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