Four in One Westerns

W. C. (Wilbur Coleman) Tuttle was born on November 11, 1883 in Glendive, the Montana Territory, the U.S., and died on June 6, 1969 in Los Angeles, California at the age of 85. He was a popular and prolific pulp writer, novelist, cartoonist, illustrator, baseball lover and semi-pro player, radio narrator, and silent film screenwriter of Westerns, producing more than 1000 magazine stories and dozens of novels. In a 1915 issue of the pulp fiction magazine Adventure, its editor Arthur S. Hoffman commented one of its selections was the funniest he had ever bought. Tuttle thought he could do better and sent in his effort which Hoffman bought. So began Tuttle’s storied story writing career. In a 1930 poll, he was voted the most popular writer at Adventure, finishing ahead of, in order, Arthur O. Friel, Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, and H. Bedford-Jones. His contributions to the Western genre were his humour and introduction of the detective story into it. His best and most well-known cowboy detective series stars the alliteratively paired Hashknife Hartley and his friend Sleepy Stevens.

William MacLeod Raine (1871-1954)

William MacLeod Raine was a British-born American novelist, born in London, the son of William and Jessie Raine. After his mother died, his family migrated from England to Arkansas when Raine was ten years old, eventually settling on a cattle ranch near the Texas-Arkansas border. In 1894, after graduating from Oberlin College, Raine left Arkansas and headed for the western U.S. He became the principal of a school in Seattle while contributing columns to a local newspaper. Later he moved to Denver, where he worked as a reporter and editorial writer for local periodicals.

At this time, he began to publish short stories, eventually becoming a full-time free-lance fiction writer, and finally finding his literary home in the novel. His earliest novels were romantic histories taking place in the English countryside. However, after spending some time with the Arizona Rangers, Raine shifted his literary focus and began to utilize the American West as a setting. The publication of Wyoming in 1908 marks the beginning of his prolific career, during which time he averaged nearly two western novels a year until his death in 1954. Though he was prolific, he was a slow, careful, conscientious worker, intent on accurate detail, and considered himself a craftsman rather than an artist.

In 1959, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

Sources: ropeandwire.com; fantasticfiction.com; wikipedia

The interestingly named Edison Tesla Marshall was born on August 28, 1894 in Rensselaer, Indiana and died on October 29, 1967 in Augusta, Georgia. He grew up in Medford, Oregon and attended the University of Oregon from 1913 to 1916. He was a novelist and short story writer, mainly of historical fiction and science fiction, and a big game hunter. His popular adventure stories appeared in Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, and Reader's Digest. He won the O. Henry Award in 1921. His novel The Isle of Retribution was made into a silent film of the same name in 1926. Other of his novels became the 1942 film, Son of Fury, with Tyrone Power, the 1954 Yankee Pasha, starring Mamie Van Doren, and in 1958, The Vikings with Kirk Douglas.