Fifty Thrilling Wild West Stories

Opening

Here is the American pulp Western, lifted out of the cheap dime magazines and repackaged for the British parlour. Odhams crammed fifty stories of cowboys, sheriffs, outlaws and Mounties into one fat, flexible, gilt-stamped omnibus — and the contents list quietly includes some of the genre's true founders.

The Object

A heavy omnibus in the uniform dress of the Odhams 'Fifty' series: limp maroon rexine covers, gilt spine lettering, a gilt- and blind-embossed cowboy device on the front board. It is the matching shelf-mate of the collection's Great War and Stranger Than Fiction volumes.

The Series

One of the Odhams 'Fifty' omnibus volumes from Long Acre, London WC2. The series clustered around 1936–1938, but the Wild West title in particular seems to have been kept in print and reprinted into the 1940s and beyond — dealer catalogues date surviving copies anywhere from 1938 to about 1950 — so the precise printing of any given copy is best read off its own copyright page.

The Contents

The fifty stories are a cross-section of the inter-war Western pulp, and the by-lines are better than the cheap format suggests. They include Max Brand (Frederick Faust, the most prolific of all pulp Western writers) with Battle's End; Clarence E. Mulford, creator of Hopalong Cassidy, with Riding With the Mail; Johnston McCulley, creator of Zorro, with A Reason for Wrath; William MacLeod Raine; Eugene Cunningham; the prolific 'Will Jenkins' (Murray Leinster); the Scottish writer-adventurer R. B. Cunninghame Graham; and even a Western tale, The Marquis and Miss Sally, by O. Henry. It is, in effect, an anthology of the writers who built the modern Western, gathered before most British readers had ever seen a Hollywood one.

This Copy

Good condition, the flexible maroon binding sound and the gilt lettering bright, with shelf-wear appropriate to age. The printing date is not yet confirmed from the book itself; given the series' reprint history, the copyright page should be checked before the catalogue year is treated as final.

Why It Matters

The volume captures a small cultural border-crossing: the distinctly American pulp Western, arriving in 1930s Britain not as flimsy magazines but as a respectable-looking leather-effect omnibus for the family shelf. That it does so while quietly preserving stories by the creators of Hopalong Cassidy and Zorro — and a stray O. Henry — makes it more than filler. With its two siblings it completes a trio showing the Odhams 'Fifty' formula applied across war, wonder and the Wild West alike.

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