Download Riding the Pulp Trail AudioBook Free
Most fans of Western fiction know Paul S. Powers among the foundation authors of the famous pulp magazine of the 1930s and 1940s, Wild West Weekly, where his popular characters Sonny Tabor, Kid Wolf, Freckles Malone, and Johnny Forty-five appeared for 15 years. Less popular is the career Powers had after Wild West Weekly stopped publication in 1943. Powers continued to create for the best of the Western fiction magazines throughout the 1940s. Now, here for the first time, are 12 Paul Powers stories written in the years after his Wild West Weekly career. Six of these were published in the primary western pulp magazines of the time. The other six, never published before, were uncovered by Powers' granddaughter Laurie in 2009 2009. All of the stories in this collection reflect a fresh style that Powers had to look at in the early 1940s. His earlier Wild West Weekly style was geared toward its adolescent audience and packed with the "blood and thunder" that was indicative of the pulp Westerns throughout that period. Writing stories for Wild West Weekly was a highly lucrative trade for my grandfather, but he had to change course and relearn his craft when the traditional style was no longer popular. No longer were heroes to be the semi-super human cowboys who survived a huge selection of bullet wounds and shoot targets with jaw dropping speed and accuracy. They were now to be more mature and sometimes with a darker look on life. Heroes that for years were clean-cut, highly moral, and almost puritan in their habits were replaced by lead characters who drank, smoked, and swore. But Powers rose to the duty and continued to obtain his stories published through the 1940s and in to the early 1950s. These 12 stories are representative of this era; they lead to an outstanding assortment of frontier stories that represent the glory many years of the Western short story and the best of Powers' prolific pulp career.
