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W. C. Tuttle (1883–1969) was born in Glendive, Montana, and knew the cattle country he wrote about firsthand. He drew cartoons for a Montana newspaper before turning to fiction, and went on to sell more than a thousand stories to the pulp magazines, along with dozens of novels and stories for more than fifty films. His main market was Adventure, whose readers voted him the magazine’s most popular writer in 1930. A lifelong baseball fan, he later served as president of the Pacific Coast League.
This collection gathers more than a hundred of his stories from 1915 to 1930. Piperock came first: the comic series began in 1915, five years before the first Hashknife story, and ran alongside the Paradise stories in Adventure through 1921. The standalone stories show his reach beyond Adventure, into Short Stories and Western Story Magazine.
On this page: Hashknife Hartley and Sleepy Stevens · Piperock · Paradise and the Cross J Ranch · Sheriffs, Deputies, and Other Short Series · Standalone Stories
Stories are listed in order of publication. Each year is the date of the magazine issue transcribed. Longer works are marked nv novelette, na novella, n novel; all others are short stories.
Western mysteries with Tuttle’s most famous pair
Two drifting cowboys ride into a range town, find murder, rustling, or a crooked land deal already underway, and work out who’s behind it. Hashknife is the tall, thoughtful one who can’t leave a puzzle alone; Sleepy is his easygoing partner who grumbles about it and backs him up anyway. In many of these stories the local trouble is set up first and the pair ride in partway through, so stay with the opening chapters.
Slapstick comedy from a Montana town that never learns
Most of these are told by Ike Harper in his own cowboy dialect, and most of the trouble starts with his partner, Magpie Simpkins, and his latest big idea, whether that’s a holiday celebration, a newspaper, a scientific expedition, or a scheme to put Piperock on the map. Dirty Shirt Jones and a cast of town regulars help things go wrong. Read these for the voice and the escalating disasters, not for gunfights.
More comedy from Piperock’s neighbor in Yaller Rock County
The cowhands of the Cross J are a talkative bunch: Muley Bowles writes poetry, Telescope Tolliver insists on his fine Kentucky family, Chuck Warner can’t tell the truth, and narrator Hen Peck tries to keep track of all of them. Expect tall tales, romantic misadventures, and plans that unravel. Fans of the Piperock stories should start here next, and a few stories cross between the two towns.
Recurring characters who appear only a few times
Most of these follow small-town lawmen: Sheriff Brick Davidson and Deputy Silent Slade of Sun Dog County, the whittling Sheriff Buck Brady of Mojave Wells, and Skeeter Bill Sarg, a cowboy who ends up wearing a badge. Also here are Dobie Dalton’s comic letters to his friend Hank and single appearances by Sad Sontag and Cultus Collins. Each group works well read together, in order.
One-off tales of the range, the desert, and the border
These have characters who appear only once, so any of them is a fine place to start. The range is wide: gamblers in desert mining towns, Mexican border ranches, an escaped convict in deep snow, a former Mountie in Montana, a Christmas homecoming, and a few comic pieces, including one about duck hunting. Tuttle’s straight dramatic side shows here more than anywhere else.