Sonny Tabor made his debut as a Western character in a story titled "The Eleventh Notch" published in 1929. In this introductory story, it is quickly established that Tabor is an outlaw pursued for the reward being offered for his capture. In "Sonny Tabor's Gun School," Tabor is captured with another outlaw and sentenced to hang. In "Border Blackbirds," Tabor is handcuffed to a lawman and they are left in the desert without food, water, or horses. In "Kid Wolf Rounds Up Sonny Tabor," Kid Wolf captures Tabor only to discover that Tabor is innocent. Now Kid Wolf must get Sonny out of jail and find the guilty party.
Paul Sylvester Powers was a prolific and well-known pulp Western writer whose characters enraptured an entire generation of Wild West Weekly readers during the Great Depression.
Paul S. Powers (1905-1971) was a writer of Western pulp fiction during the 1920s through the 1940s. He also wrote stories of several other genres, including horror, detective, noir, and even romance. Several of his very first stories were published in WEIRD TALES in 1925-26. He was also the author of the novel DOC DILLAHAY, published by Macmillan Company in 1949. He was also a rare book collector and known expert on Western Americana.
Paul was born in 1905 in Little River, Kansas. His father, John Harold Powers, was the town physician. Dr. Powers hoped that his son would follow in his footsteps, but Paul had different aspirations and decided that he wanted to be a writer early in life. He eventually dropped out of high school and began a lifetime of restless wandering across the Southwest. In his late teens, as he struggled to get his early stories accepted for publication, Paul hopped between Kansas and Colorado. As he wandered in the ghost towns in Central City and Blackhawk, Colorado, he accumulated valuable material for later stories and met several unforgettable characters along the way.
From 1928 to 1943, Paul pounded out 12,000 word blood and thunder novelettes every week for WILD WEST WEEKLY, one of America's most popular pulp Western magazines. Many of the stories were published under his pseudonym Ward M. Stevens, but occasionally stories were published under his own name. Many of the stories featured his wildly popular characters Sonny Tabor, Kid Wolf, and Johnny Forty-five, Freckles Malone, and King Kolt. Paul wrote approximately 440 stories for WILD WEST WEEKLY.
In 1943, WILD WEST WEEKLY stopped circulation. Afterwards, Paul wrote short stories for other Western magazines, including WESTERN STORY MAGAZINE, THIRLLING WESTERN, EXCITING WESTERN, RIO KID WESTERN, TEXAS RANGERS and RANGE RIDERS MAGAZINE. In 1943, Paul wrote a memoir, PULP WRITER: TWENTY YEARS IN THE AMERICAN GRUB STREET, about his career as a pulp fiction writer. It appears that Paul sent it out to just one publisher for consideration, who rejected it due to the lack of interest in pulp fiction at that point in time. Paul put the manuscript away.
After the end of Wild West Weekly, Paul decided to take on his dream of a lifetime: a full-length novel. He proceeded to write DOC DILLAHAY, a Western based in Arizona in the 1880s with a protagonist, John Dillahay, that was fashioned after Paul's own father. In 1949, Doc Dillahay was published by the Macmillan Company.
Paul Powers died in 1971. His personal papers, which included the PULP WRITER manuscript, were packed away in two boxes and stored in his daughter Pat's attic. In 1999, 28 years after his death and 56 years after it was written, the manuscript was rediscovered by Pat and Paul's granddaughter Laurie. Also found were over 150 letters between Paul and his editors at WILD WEST WEEKLY, a few unpublished short stories, correspondence from other pulp writers, and over a dozen letters from his son Jack during the last years of his life.
PULP WRITER was published by The University of Nebraska Press in 2007. It includes a prologue and epilogue written by Laurie that detail her family history, finding the manuscript and a introduction to pulp fiction magazines, the phenomenon of publishing of the early 20th century.
In 2011, Laurie published 12 of Paul's western stories in a new collection, RIDING THE PULP TRAIL. These stories are a sampling of Paul's western style in the years after WILD WEST WEEKLY ended. It includes six stories that were published in magazines such as EXCITING WESTERN and THRILLING RANCH STORIES, and six brand new stories that have never been published before.
Another collection, DESERT JUSTICE, is a collection of Sonny Tabor stories and is available either by Amazon sellers or in large print.
