Wild West Show

CODE OF THE WEST--Zane Grey--Harper ($2 ).

Critics pay small attention to Author Zane Grey, but hundreds of thousands of readers do. Synonymous with whooping cowpunchers, last-minute rescues, he-man lovemaking and he-man humor, his books (54, total sales in the U. S. 15,000,000) are truer to cinema than to life. The Wild West will not be dead so long as Zane Grey's yarns remain in circulation. He has never deserted, raised or lowered his standard. His signature is practically a trademark.

Code of the West--"the new 1934 Zane Grey novel"--is up to standard. The story, laid in the Tonto Basin of Arizona, starts off with high-spirited cowboy pranking, quickly settles into a fast-loping melodrama and what is known in Hollywood as love. Georgiana, a pert young Eastern girl, with "a slight tendency toward tuberculosis, and a very great leaning toward indiscriminate flirtation," comes to the Tonto to live with her sober-sided school-teaching sister, and proceeds to set the cowboys on their ears. She rolls her stockings, teaches them to "toddle," kisses all comers. Thanks to the salubrious air of Arizona and the ail-American character of the cowboy hero, she is gradually brought to her senses and restored to health--but not before the reader gets his money's worth of hard riding, bare fists and golden-hearted dialect. Author Grey keeps his story moving at a fast clip, and though many a reader will enjoy the tale chiefly for its sensation of speed, some may agree with the enthusiastic schoolmarm: "'These boys!' she soliloquized. 'How full of deviltry! Yet I like them.' "

The Author. Crabbed critics say Zane Grey is well named, that he writes only for zanies. But his queer name is not queer to Ohioans. Born in Zanesville, Ohio 59 years ago, he went to the University of Pennsylvania to learn how to be a dentist, found baseball more to his liking. After graduation he set up his office in Manhattan, played professional baseball summers. He gave up dentistry, settled down on the banks of the Delaware at Lackawaxen, Pa. to write, but finding a publisher at first was harder than pulling teeth. After five unsuccessful years he spent the last of his savings on a trip to Arizona. His first western romance (and sixth book) The Heritage of the Desert, got him a contract with Harper, started him on the affluent path that has brought him ranches in the Tonto, a house in Avalon. Calif., an estate in Altadena, Calif., leisure to indulge his favorite hobby of big-game fishing (TIME, May 14). A famed authority on the sport, he holds the world's record for the largest game fish ever caught with rod & reel--a 1,040-lb. striped marlin, caught in 1930 off Tahiti.

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