Review: Good, old-fashioned tales--not all westerns
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 19, 2012
I like old-fashioned westerns and I like to read those by Zane Grey. He is a particularly good writer, and many of his rip-roarin' westerns have rightly become classics. But be aware a goodly number of his books are more "prairie romance" than action-packed western, and in these there's often more huff and bluff than gunfire. Many of his books were not set in the "old west" of the past but in "modern" times, meaning contemporary to when he wrote them; these often depicted a rugged male abiding by a highly developed sense of fair-play and moral integrity (in contrast to the sneaky "villain" who did not), a chaste female heroine, misunderstanding, romance, and overall wholesomeness leading to a happy ending. Several works in this collection--though they  may be set in the western states--are not what we would normally call "westerns," and others are baseball stories and nonfiction accounts of fishing and camping. Sadly the majority of his greatest westerns are not yet inexpensively or freely available in public domain editions. No matter what he wrote (prairie romance, baseball stories, fishing accounts, or classic westerns), Grey knew how to tell a good story, and his vivid descriptions are second to none.UPDATE 05-08-13: You may wish to compare this set of 26 to another Zane Grey collection recently published by Wildside Press as "The Zane Grey Megapack." Attractively formatted and offering 42 novels and stories for only $.99, that now seems like the better deal.