Down by the Rio Grande

THE WONDERFUL COUNTRY (387 pp.]--Tom Lea--Little, Brown ($3.75).

Tom Lea of El Paso is a good painter and a good writer. He loves his native Southwest, is steeped in its history and traditions. In his first novel, The Brave Bulls (TIME, April 25, 1949), he was an artist writing exactly and movingly about another art: bullfighting. He was also a surprisingly good novelist exploring the range of courage, despair and fear in the heart of a brave man.

In his new book, The Wonderful Country, Author Lea comes a cropper at that traditionally exacting hurdle, novel No. 2, Because The Wonderful Country is an honest book written with obvious care and even reserved passion, it is easy to respect it and wait with interest for No. 3. Lea's wonderful country is, of course, the Southwest, in particular "where Texas and New Mexico meet Chihuahua and Sonora." The time is a few years after the Civil War, and the hero is a young gun-toter named Martin Brady, who has expatriated himself to Mexico for a good reason: at 14 he killed a man back in Texas. Brady is more Mexican than gringo now, a hard, quiet, mercenary gunman who works for a Mexican landowner. But he has a hankering for Texas and can never forget where home is. He makes it home for good, finally, as a Texas Ranger, but not until after enough Indian fighting and other assorted acts of violence to satisfy a Zane Grey fan.

Author Lea has really written a good old-fashioned western, full of dead-shot marksmanship and a man's love for his horse. Neither Brady nor anyone else in the book is a successfully developed character, but with all its weaknesses The Wonderful Country is still a western plus. What is extra comes in Author Lea's fine descriptive writing, a love for the West that is conveyed with grace and dignity, an authentic sense of place.

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