On "Riders of the Purple Sage" by Zane Grey **

Imagine your spouse, who you dearly love, was having an affair for the past three years and that your best friend knew and decided to kill your spouse and the lover to avenge you without your knowledge. Imagine that you learned of the spouse's death and later learned that your best friend had killed the spouse (but that you don't know about the affair). How would you feel about your best friend? Imagine that ten minutes later, you learn that the spouse had been having an affair? Would that instantly absolve feelings and restore your friendship? Such calamities and sudden revelations of truth are the making of Grey

s book. Not those exact sort of revelations but ones like it--ones, dare I say, even more ridiculous. Here, plot takes precedent over feeling, character development, and logic. As such, this classic western seemed much like I usually imagined genre fiction being growing up; having now read a number of classic genre works, however, I've found that most are actually well written in almost every way. Not so here.

The riders are those who guard the cow herds of Jane Witherspoon, who of late lost her father, who was a rich man and from whom she inherited well. She is supposed to marry a man named Tull, as per the convention and command of the Mormon overseers of her local town. Her refusal has created a ruckus. What's more, she's been sort of carrying on with a non-Mormon named Venders, one of the few riders who hasn't quit her because of Mormon hostility and loyalty. As the book opens, Venders has been caught by Tull's men and is about to be beaten. In rides Lassiter to the rescue, a famous Mormon killer (that is, a man who kills Mormons). He's looking for a woman or the person who killed her, in order to seek revenge, but he just happens also to save Venders.

Jane had seemed to be into Venders, but saved, Venders goes off to save one of her herds, and Lassiter and Jane fall in. So much for the other seeming budding relationship. In fact, Venders ends up finding another gal, via a shootout with some rustlers, and spends most of the rest of the novel with her. Jane continues to lose cows to Tull and his group, who are intent on making her pay for not cowtowing to her Mormon overseers, and eventually things come to a head. I won't bespoil the rest of it, since plot "surprises" is pretty much all this book has.

Well, and this. Grey is pretty masterful at describing the landscape. That was the one redeeming factor--all those long passages about the scrub and the cliffs and the sage and the sunsets against them. It's a same such a setting had to be wasted on such an inane story.