Grey Rides On--and On

HORSE HEAVEN HILL (216 pp.)--Zone Grey--Harper ($3.50).

Shortly before his death in 1939, Zane Grey wrote to Harper & Bros., his publishers, to say that he had three manuscripts ready for publication. Harper is still publishing them--at the rate of one a year. By the time half a dozen posthumous novels of the early West had appeared, intramural smiles flickered through the book business. How long could Harper keep Grey alive? The explanation, say Harper editors, is really quite simple. Their man was so prolific--writing longhand on a lap board at the rate of 100,000 words a month--that no publisher could have hoped to keep pace. Grey's attic yielded so many leftover manuscripts that Harper's will be able to maintain its practice of putting out an annual Zane Grey novel "for the next several years."

Buttermilk Sky. Horse Heaven Hill, "the new 1959 Zane Grey novel," will bring instant recognition from the fans of such vintage Grey as Wild Horse Mesa and Riders of the Purple Sage. The prose clomps along on two-by-four stilts ("There was completed in his mind a resolve to go down into Idaho, when opportunity afforded"), and the dialogue echoes a tin-plated ear ("If you think I'm wonderful and if I think you're wonderful--it's all really very wonderful, isn't it?"). Instead of speaking their lines, characters "vouchsafe" them; they wash and shave in morning "ablutions." A well-adjusted cowpoke qualifies as "that worthy."

That worthy is involved in a plot that would turn almost any sky to buttermilk. Out in the state of Washington, rich, square-shooting Stanley Weston is engaged to Marigold Wade, a rancher's daughter. But Marigold keeps putting off the wedding so she can continue a flirtation with her father's foreman, handsome Kurd Blanding. Along from Idaho comes Marigold's cousin, a young lovely named Lark Burrell, and Stanley soon realizes that he is falling in love with her.

This anguished quadrangle frames a landscape full of cactus and wild horses. Cowboy Blanding is a wild-horse wrangler on the side. He and some mercenary Indians trap mustangs and sell them for chicken feed. Business looks good when Blanding traps thousands of mustangs in a natural amphitheater; but he reckons without Stanley and Lark, who might have been the founding father and mother of the Walla Walla S.P.C.A.

Not to Kill. Lark burns a brush fence and frees the mustangs. That should be enough to make bullets fly, but there is a special ethic in this far, far western. In battle, as in love, no one shoots to kill. "You could shoot Blanding," Lark urges Stanley. "Oh, I don't mean kill him. You could just shoot his leg off." Bloodlessly the climax peters out, and not even wild horses could drag much response out of anyone but a dyed-in-the-saddle Grey fan.

Zane Grey published 44 novels while he lived. Horse Heaven Hill is No. 63, and graves the same message as all the rest on the writer's literary headstone: Here lies Zane Grey, a romantic dentist from Zanesville, Ohio, who went West as a young man. There he became a master at extracting the purple from the sage.

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