BookCove › Ray Humphreys
Ray Humphreys (1893–1973) wrote short fiction for the pulp magazines, most of it Westerns for Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine, along with crime stories for the detective pulps. His stories are often set in the Colorado high country, around towns like Fairplay, Como, and Monte Vista, and he contributed to Denver Murders (1946), a collection edited by Lee Casey.
This collection gathers fourteen of his stories from 1923 to 1929, all from Western Story Magazine except one from Cowboy Stories. Most belong to his long-running comic mystery series about a small-town sheriff and the deputy everyone underestimates.
On this page: Sheriff Joe Cook and Shorty McKay · Standalone Stories
Stories are listed in order of publication. Each year is the date of the magazine issue transcribed. All are short stories.
Comic Western mysteries from a small Colorado town
Sheriff Joe Cook is an old-fashioned lawman with an election always coming up and county commissioners always fretting. His deputy, Shorty McKay, talks in slang, looks slow, and gets written off by nearly everyone, including the sheriff. Then a bank is robbed or a prisoner won’t talk, and Shorty quietly solves it with a disguise, a staged celebration, or a scheme nobody saw coming. Expect brains over gunplay, and a twist at the end.
Stagecoaches, rodeos, and range-town comedy
These have characters who appear only once, so any of them is a fine place to start. Two follow mountain stage drivers, one on the Como to Fairplay run and one forced to trade his mules for a motor bus. Elsewhere a hot-headed rancher makes a rash rustling charge, a hotel robbery is foiled with a telephone operator’s help, and a rodeo bronc rider stakes everything on a faded yellow shirt.