Mark Price was a writer of pulp Western fiction active in the late 1920s. His story A Perfect Gentleman appeared in The Popular Magazine, the Street & Smith weekly, in December 1929. It is a comic Western narrated by a young drifter who rides into the town of Oakwood under the assumed name Joe Smith, concealing his identity as Trigger Caswell, a card sharp and gunslinger being hunted by vigilantes. To catch the eye of Carol Hoyt he stages a fall from his trick pony; mistaking his restraint for virtue, she declares him the first true gentleman she has met, and he sets about living up to an impossible standard while she is persecuted by the crooked boss of the local gambling hall. The strain eventually breaks, his real nature surfaces in a rigged poker game and a brawl, and the story closes on the irony that the perfect gentleman was a misreading from the start. No biographical record is documented for him beyond this magazine credit. He is not to be confused with later writers of the same name, among them the British retail executive and life peer who writes on workplace culture.
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