Zane Grey

I spent the month of July reading two Zane Grey novels. I felt the itch for a couple of reasons. I do enjoy the occassional western movie on teevee or on the big screen. I also hadn't read a full-fledged cowboy novel since Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo sometime in the mid-90s - both were good, though the former more than the latter. But the main reason was, believe it or not, the strange karmic fact that the Zane Grey museum lies a few miles from my parents retirement home, and they live out in the sticks.

[They also live about twenty miles from Milford, PA, once home of SF writer, editor, and popularizer Damon Knight. Throughout the 50s and 60s Knight and his wife, fellow SF scribe Kate Wilhelm, resided there and held summer workshops for budding writers. SFian James Blish also lived there are participated. But since I've yet to find a house or museum or even a plaque acknowledging this in the gentrified streets of Milford, I have not ran off an a crazy tangent to digest as many books by those writers as possible. Yet ...]

So, I've been feeling this pull to browse through the Zane Grey museum. But I'd feel somewhat hypocritical if I hadn't put away any of his books beforehand. Luckily, during the beginning of the summer, one just jumped off the shelf at me while browsing the used book section of my local store. And I shelled out full price for a new copy of his most famous work.

The first book was a 1908 yarn called The Last Trail, and deals more with colonial times than the traditional Wild West. The setting's the untamed frontier of Ohio, and we're dealing with bordermen protecting settlers from the Shawnees and corrupt white men.

The new book I purchased was Grey's famous 1911 Riders of the Purple Sage. This takes place in Utah, and the main conflict is a soap opera between a good-hearted Mormon ma'am, some evil Mormon elders, and a group of unsavory rustlers within the mazelike caverns of 1870s Utah.

Verdict: OK. Not my cup of tea, but I can appreciate them.

Or rather, parts of them. Let me explain.

I think I have the formula down for a Zane Grey novel. Now, if any die-hard Zanian is reading this, please take it as it's offered, tongue-in-cheek. The man penned at least 90 books (posthumous ones still come out) and became one of the first writer millionaires by the time he reached middle age. I don't mean to disparage his credentials and accomplishments. But I must comment on these two books. I put the time in, so now the universe has to hear my cry. Or at least the eighteen to thirty unique visitors I get every day.

Boiled down, the formula for a Zane Grey novel is:


1/3 breathtakingly beautiful evocations of Old West scenery;

1/3 showdown between the good bad guys and the bad bad guys;

1/3 romance - Romance, capital-R, among the protagonists.


The man knows how to paint a picture with words. Reading his descriptions of the woods, valleys, the plains and river beds, the stone houses and forest fortresses put me there, really there, in my mind's eye. Some of the best nature writing, in my limited experience, since I read The Lord of the Rings a few months back. You really get the sense of the man's passionate love for the scenes and sights of the terrain out of our nation's past. He's able to pull you in from this angle.

In every good western tale there's a showdown. Riders begins with one, ends with one, and has a handful in the 285 intervening pages. Last Trail has it's share, too, though none as like those commonly expected by our generation. I noted, too, how much of the confrontation takes place off-page, and we only hear about it later from characters witnessing to us. While it may sound like a poor writer's cop-out, I recall thinking that Grey pulled it off, as evaluated by my suspicious mind. And I mentioned the "good bad guys", as distinct from the "bad bad guys", because every gunslinger has a checkered past, done dirty deeds cheap he's none too proud of. Those in Grey's novels are no exception.

But what struck me the most and what probably will keep me from exploring more Zane Grey is the romance aspect of his novels. I imagined some bizarre cross between aw shucks stumbling Victorian mores and bodice-ripping Danielle Steele novel covers. Riders has two main love arcs, Last Trail just one, but the latter has a prominent couple in contented marital bliss and a main character who's rugged devotion to duty kept him from cupid's arrow. Now, I'm not against love and romance and all that sort, but that's not quite my choice of escapist reading. It bugged me in a big, unexpected, unusual way.

So, LE, the Hopper, the SF buff, the amateur philosopher of the weird, grades his excursions into the literary world of Zane Grey as solid Bs. Not my bag, but I can appreciate its merit. Now I can walk through the doors of that museum with at least a little bit of knowledge, head held high, hunting for something weird or unique or comical to make a modest little blog post.