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Little, Bert. Bert Little was created by Clyde A. Warden and appeared in seventy stories in Western Trails from 1930 to 1938, beginning with “Colt Justice” (Western Trails, Jan. 1930).

Bert Little is a cowboy wanderer in the American southwest, particularly the area around the Rio Grande, in the years after the Civil War. He is tall, cool, lean and lithe, and is accompanied only by his horse King and his wolf-like dog Buck, as “I’m pretty much the kind that likes to be left alone.” Little is silent, grim, and nearly existentialist in his philosophy: “A man can only die once and after it’s over with, he’s got nothin’ left to bother with.” Little has an unusually good Rogues Gallery for a pulp cowboy: the Unseen One, a criminal mastermind operating from a ghost town; the Red Raiders, a marauding band of killers operating along the border; Señor Death, a mysterious masked rider; The Headless One, a glowing headless rider; the Rattler, who wears a snakeskin mask to conceal his identity; and the Black Shadow, a criminal who appears to be immortal and apparently can not be killed.

* I'm including the Bert Little stories in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because they are a surprising amount of fun. Clyde A. Warden was a competent author who wrote for the pulps over the space of about thirty years. It's no surprise that the Bert Little stories are professionally done, and that they were moderately popular and had a very solid seventy story, nine-year-long run. But what is surprising is the quality of the stories in which Little's Rogues Gallery appeared. Warden seriously upped his game for those stories, and made the individual villains memorable and effective opponents for Little. One isn't used to pulp Westerns in which the hero has a Rogues Gallery like something out of a comic book, but the Little stories do, and all to the better. Shame Warden didn't last long enough to write Westerns for the actual comics of the 1950s and 1960s--he would have done well there. 

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