Pre-Beowulj

RAIDERS or SPANISH PEAKS -- Zane Grey--Harper ($2.50).

Critic Thomas King Whipple, who usually writes weighty essays on modern poetry and highbrow fiction, once took a critic's holiday and made a searching analysis of the works of Zane Grey in The Saturday Review of Literature. At that time the prolific Western-story writer had turned out 33 books, with a total sale of about 10,000,000 copies. After thoughtfully picking them to little bits, Professor Whipple concluded that their enormous popularity did not constitute a serious reflection on U. S. taste. Zane Grey's tireless riders of the purple sage, lone star rangers and wanderers of the wasteland, he decided, were interesting for a curious reason: They were like the heroes of some folk tale that had never quite got written. Nobody would compare the stories of Zane Grey to Beowulf, but before Beowulf there were probably generations of crude popular storytellers, handing on the same legends, gradually refining them, until eventually a poet appeared who could organize them into a unified work. Zane Grey's novels, Professor Whipple said, are such primitive legends of the old West--repetitious as folk tales, filled with bloody action and two-dimensional characters, but genuine stories nevertheless.

Last week Zane Grey published his 59th book. His total sales now reach about 13,000,000, and his most popular novel, Riders of the Purple Sage, adds up through its many reprintings to 750,000. As in most Zane Grey stories, much of the action in Raiders of Spanish Peaks depends on somebody overhearing somebody else--apparently in the old West there was an eavesdropper crouching behind every clump of sage brush. Also like most Zane Grey stories, the newest one begins with a bang. Hiding out after killing a man, tall, grey-eyed Laramie Nelson observes some gunmen ride into his grove, tie a rope around the neck of a 20-year- old cowboy and throw it over the branch of a tree. "I cain't fool about heah an' see yu hang thet boy," drawls Laramie. The next 327 pages tell how Laramie and the cowboy become close friends, how they rescue another cowpuncher, and how the three then hide out on a Colorado ranch owned by an Eastern tenderfoot named Lindsay. On this ranch there are three beautiful daughters, surrounded by mean, sneaking, fast-shooting, cattle-rustling, horse-stealing desperadoes.

Laramie restrains his itching trigger finger until all the cattle on the ranch have been stolen and a madcap Lindsay girl abducted. Then the slaughter is terrific. Partly confirming Professor Whippie's thesis are strange philosophical asides that interrupt the gun play and suggest that even popular romancers are sometimes troubled by the moral of their tales. Staring at the dangling body of a rustler he has just lynched, Laramie reflects: "It [lynching] was a common practice, inaugurated ... in order to intimidate cowpunchers going wrong. Not greatly had it succeeded."

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