SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: FEUD'S END

"Feud's End" by E. Hoffmann Price  (from Spicy Western Stories, July 1937; reprinted in Skeleton Creek Feud and Others:  The Simon Bolivar Grimes Collection, Book 2, 1999; there are a number of collections of tales from this series available from various companies -- this story may well be included in one of more of them)

Simon Bolivar Grimes was E. Hoffman Price's answer to Robert E. Howard's popular characters Breckinridge Elkins and Pike Bearfield, larger than life western heroes long on strength and short on brains.  But Grimes wasn't as naive as Howard's characters, nor did he have as many mythic qualities.  One thing he did have that Howard's characters did not have was a healthy libido.  that's because the first fifteen of the Grimes adventures appeared in Spicy Western Stories -- the name of the magazine tells its all.  The next five tales appeared in Speed Western Stories -- basically the same magazine retitled to appease the more prudish newsstands.  The twenty-first (and Final) Simon Bolivar grimes story appeared in Fighting Western for June 1946, a title from the same publisher as Spicy Western and Speed Western, with covers that did little to differentiate Fighting Western from the other two.

A few brief words about the "spicy" pulps:  they promised much but delivered little.  The stories tended to feature young women in various states of undress and in various romantic situations.  Sometimes the women were libidinous, and often were mere innocents whose clothes were tattered or removed through no fault of their own.  What little sex there was is merely hinted at.  The illustrations for the stories were line drawings of voluptuous women, often in see through negligees, or remarkably see-through underwear (the type with frilly lace).  The average reader could put down the magazine with a moderate feeling of hubba-hubba, but not with the impending fear of the flames of hell awaiting him for reading such material.  Many of the "spicy" magazines had titles such as French capers, French Follies, French Night Life Scandals, La Paree Stories, Paris Follies, Paris Frolics, Paris Gayety, Paris Nights, Paris Revels, or La Parisienne -- because we all known  what the French are like.  Other titles were more blatant, such as 1926-7's Sex Stories.  Then there titles such as Saucy Movie Tales, Saucy Romantic Adventures, Saucy Stories, and Spicy-Adventure Stories, Spicy Detective Stories, Spicy Mystery Stories, Spicy Screen Stories, Spicy Stories, and -- of course -- Spicy Western Stories.  There was a market for this sort of thing.  And one of the most accomplished writers of the spicy story was E. Hoffmann Price.

Price (1899-1988) was a pulp writer extraordinaire who also contributed hundreds of tales to the science fiction, horror, crime, fantasy, western, and adventure magazines.  Noted as a fiend and collaborator of H. P. Lovecraft, Hoffman was also known for his adventures stories with Oriental settings.  Price was a soldier, "champion fencer and boxer, amateur Orientalist, and a student of the Arabic language."  Writer Jack Williamson called him a "real live soldier of fortune."  Price was also an astrologer, a practicing Buddhist, and a Theosophist.

His rollicking, horny hero Simon Bolivar Grimes was a Southern mountain man transferred to Texas to look after his Uncle's ranch in Skeleton Creek.  When "Feud's End," Simon is preparing with several other ranchers to pool their herds for a cattle drive to Kansas.  Well, not quite, we open as Simon is enjoying the embraces of  sexy Susie Wrinkled-Meat, the daughter of his Uncle Carter's Spanish cook and a late Comanche chief.  Susie is helping him get over his doomed romance with  equally-sexy Melinda Patton, whose father Grimes had killed the night before they were to be married.  Melinda's father, it turned out, was the low-down, dirty head of a rustling gang.  Killing Melinda's father did put a kibosh on their wedding plans.

Outside of town, near the river, he saw a large group of cattle,  they were marked BB and were a herd belonging to a man named Bart Bailey, who had heard of the pool drive and hoped to join his herd with the drive.  Grimes noticed two things: first, Bailey's voluptuous wife was bathing naked in the nearby river, and skulking in the background, trying to avoid being seen by Grimes, was Lem Potts, the shyster lawyer who had been the sole crooked survivor of the gunfight in which Melinda's father was killed.

Susie had snuck out to Grimes' camp for a few more hours of passion.  Ad Grimes rode her back to the ranch they were ambushed on both sides.  Grimes killed on of the ambushers, but the other got away, but nor before Grimes determined it was Lem Potts.  Since Grimes saw Potts at Bailey's camp he figured the two were in cahoots and up to no good, so Grimes voted against Bailey joining the pool drive.  Later, he finds out that Potts was holing up at Melinda's ranch.  He goes there at night and learns that Melinda has taken Potts as her new lover and that they are plotting to kill Grimes.  He figure that, since Melinda and Potts are plotting together, he must be mistaken about Bailey and he goes to Bailey's hotel to apologize.  There he meet the not-really-dressed Mrs. Bailey, who clamps on to him with caresses and kisses until Bailey shows up with the sheriff.  Turns out that bailey had his wife try to seduce Grimes to blackmail him into letting Bailey join the cattle drive.

The cattle drive starts and Susie has once again snuck out to be with Grimes the first night.  Suddenly, the camp is attacked.  Bailey has planned to have his men kill everyone else in the drive and claim the cattle for himself.  Grimes manages to turn the attack around but not before the cattle stampede and Grimes and Susie (who has been shot in the attack) are trapped by hundreds of panicked future pot roasts.  With no hope for escape, Grimes and Susie prepare for the worse, then...

Well, of course there's a then...

In the end, Simon Bolivar Grimes may be getting back together with Melinda.  Poor Susie!

A fast-moving tale with a moderately complicated plot.  Grimes is an engaging lunk-headed hero, just the type of hero to cleanse your palate after reading more sophisticated stories.

I will be reading more of Mr. Grimes.