Bob Zane Скачать все книги 5 Количество книг

Little by little a mystery unfolded itself to Bob Zane out on the desert, but for a solution he had to ask the murmuring sands themselves

Gold is the pay dirt in all these rip-roaring western stories, more of Erle Stanley Gardner’s series with their unique desert setting. Again the master storyteller features his rugged western hero, the philosophical prospector Bob Zane.

In the title story Zane is true to form when he gets a spoiled rich kid to behave like a man and beat out claim jumpers in the desert. Men learn fast out there, or die, and Zane moves faster than any of them, rescuing a pretty hostage from Yaqui Indians, outwitting murderous gangsters in the Painted Desert, avoiding death from poisonous alkali springs, and hunting lost gold in Death Valley. Around camp at night, the sand whispers on the wind and the philosopher in Zane may start talking — but he always keeps his hand on his gun.

The stories move at the headlong pace for which all Gardner adventures are famous, and Zane himself is an exceptional character who often reveals ideas that are clearly Gardner’s own about life, justice, and the debatable values of civilization.

Says Zane: “The reason men don’t know the law of life is because they’re afraid to look Eternity in the face. Out in the desert they have to look at Eternity. It’s on all sides of them; they can’t turn their eyes away. That’s the spell of the desert.”

Bob Zane, the hero of most of these stories, is a seasoned prospector who not only knows the western deserts, but also knows the criminal mind and the laws that govern survival in this beautiful, dangerous land where the search for gold never ends. With keen intelligence and a strong sense of justice, he tracks robbers across the desert wastes and rescues hapless city slickers. Deep in the arid Sierra Madre, where gold is so plentiful it is used to make bullets. Bob Zane saves a young woman prospector from a band of fierce Yaqui Indians. He is almost outwitted by a psychotic killer who knows everything there is to know about desert warfare, and he solves a case of robbery and murder for the Bleaching Skull Mining Company. Occasionally Zane leaves the desert; he always returns for another adventure. Erle Stanley Gardner knew the deserts of the Southwest at first hand. During the Great Depression, when these colorful adventure stories were written, he heard the legends of lost mines from old prospectors, rumors of fabulous fortunes buried by Spaniards, and tales of hardened adventurers lured by mysterious gold into lethal encounters with the burning sun and bullets aimed to kill. He traveled as prolifically as he wrote and, camping in the desert, heard night after night the mysterious sound of the sand whispering on the wings of the desert wind. This collection of his “Whispering Tales,” set in the Mojave Desert, Death Valley, the Colorado basin, Mexico, is both vintage Gardner and a rare nugget of Western Americana. The action is fast, but the feeling is subtly different from other Gardner fiction; the difference is the desert — and the gold.

Bob Zane was certain that somewhere the desert held the evidence—carved in sand—to bring a murderer to justice

Death in the desert is a grimmer thing than elsewhere—but in all ways the desert is a grim school for men, as Pete and his partner knew only too well