Whispering Sands: Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert

Foreword

The Whispering Sands stories are a series of twenty-one tales that Erie Stanley Gardner wrote for Argosy magazine between 1930 and 1934. Each of the stories is (what was then) a contemporary western set somewhere in the deserts of the United States or Mexico. Each is told in the first person, each concerns crime and gold, most are also romances, and all but the first two feature Bob Zane as the protagonist.

Mr. Gardner was a natural-born storyteller, and these works arc, like most of his writings, immensely entertaining. Indeed, unwary readers will probably take only one sitting to speed through the entire book. But Gardner also always provided a great deal of unusual information.[1] In this series you will learn many things about the desert — such as the tactics of night fighting, the value of canned tomatoes, and two ways of concealing a campfire. And maybe most important are the inspirational values implicit in the stories. Upbeat and optimistic, these works arc peopled with active heroes rather than the passive and ineffectual victims so favored by the literary mainstream. Gardner touts the virtues of self-reliance, faith, and fair dealing; he makes us believe that we can achieve great things by trying; and he makes us want to try.

“Gold Blindness” was the first Whispering Sands story published. Set in the Funeral mountain range east of Death Valley, it is a tragic love story that features a fascinating portrait of the moon ceremonies of a dying Indian tribe and an unforgettable description of Auno, a young Indian maiden educated at Berkeley.

“Fall Guy” was the second story to appear. Its protagonist is Sid, who seems to be an older, less well educated version of Bob Zane. Along with his young friend Phil Ryan, Sid is a mine guard assigned the task of getting something on the slippery outlaw Pedro Gallivan. Their job is complicated by an involved romantic situation in which Phil loves a sort of desert welfare worker, Dixie Carson, who loves a weak-willed eastern gentleman, Walt Hedley, who loves a no-good society woman, Miss Westing, who loves the reprehensible Gallivan. Interestingly, two of this story’s peripheral incidents, a discussion of Colorado Basin wheel ruts sticking up into the air and the teaching of self-reliance in the desert, were later to turn up as central themes in two other series’ stories — “Written in Sand” and “Sand Blast.”

Bob Zane, who is the narrator of all the remaining stories, never gives his age and rarely reveals anything about his physical features or his background. Nevertheless, it is possible to form an impression of the man from his behavior, his reported conversations with others, his observations about life, and his descriptions of the typical desert dweller.

Zane is a prospector evidently in the prime of life, probably in his forties or early fifties. Unlike Sid, Zane doesn’t reminisce about his experiences with the Earps and Clantons or complain about getting old, or say there are some things he can no longer do. On the other hand, while he still confesses to looking at young women, he doesn’t seem troubled by the passions or impetuosity of youth; his present role seems rather to be matchmaker for others, with, at best, a kiss of gratitude as reward. For example, in the whodunit “Carved in Sand,” Zane’s impulsive young friend, Pete Ayers, gets himself deeply in trouble with the law by attempting to help Margaret Blake, a young woman whose father has been accused of murder. To save the couple and give their affection a chance to grow into love, Zane employs superior desert knowledge and tracking ability to put his finger on the actual culprit.

Physically, Zane probably resembles those other individuals he describes as having been shaped by the desert. So he has gray eyes, firm lips, and a face that is bronzed and deeply lined by the burning sun. His voice has a “dry husking whisper in it that’s like the sound of a lizard’s feet scratching along the surface of a sun-baked rock.” His clothes have been soaked in desert sunshine and dust until they are a nondescript gray. His whipcord lean frame possesses great endurance and his slow, deliberate way of moving belies lightning-fast reflexes.

Zane has been prospecting for a long time and has spent many years roaming around the western deserts. But he continues this life-style out of enjoyment rather than need. To him adventure is in finding gold, not in having it, and he has quickly blown all but the last of the several fortunes he has made. However, by the time of “Golden Bullets,” which seems to be the chronological end to the series, he has finally tired of the desert and is leading a life of luxury in Los Angeles. Still, he finds he periodically longs for his old home and will occasionally visit the desert for excitement. In this story, for example, he returns for a brief stay and ends up deep in the rugged Sierra Madres of Mexico where gold is so plentiful that it is actually used to make bullets. There he undergoes torture as he tries to save a young woman prospector from a band of fierce Yaqui Indians.

On rare occasions, perhaps when he is bored or needs a grubstake, Zane will interrupt his prospecting to take a job as deputy or special investigator. “Law of the Rope” finds him serving as an agent for the board of directors of The Bleaching Skull Mining Company. Here he tries to discover who is behind the string of murders and robberies that plague their Greasewood Mine. After his job is done, however, he appears to return quickly to his search for gold.

He is intelligent and has apparently received some education, for he speaks well and is sometimes capable of poetic expressions such as “The town of Mojave squats in the sunlight like a gigantic spider...” or “The desert waited with white-hot arms, and swallowed those who entered into a silence that was like that of the grave.”

Zane is observant. As he says: “Little things count for a good deal in the desert. The man who lives in the desert must observe everything, no matter how small, otherwise he won’t live long.”

He is also extremely curious. If he must investigate to make sense of what he sees, he does so. This trait has involved him in a number of adventures such as his Colorado Basin experience called “Written in the Sand.” Here his attempts to discover why an embittered young woman would steal into the desert to eavesdrop entangle him with a ruthless gang of double-crossing robbers.

One of Zane’s most admirable qualities is a strong sense of justice, and he is particularly sensitive when a woman is involved. In “Priestess of the Sun” he briefly encounters a young city woman wearing snakeskin shoes. Later he stumbles across those shoes at what appears to be an ambush site in the Mojave Desert. Deeply outraged, he starts a rumor of finding her skeleton and plants a map to set himself up as bait. Still, the chances he takes arc calculated ones, based on his belief that he knows the desert well enough to outmaneuver his foes in it, and usually his assumption is accurate. But in “Blood-Red Gold” he meets his most formidable opponent, someone who, for the first time, seriously challenges Zane’s superior grasp of desert warfare. Harry Ortley is a brilliant thinking machine whose mind works with ball-bearing efficiency. Unfortunately, he is also psychopathic, unscrupulous, selfish, and merciless. In his haste to bring Ortley to justice, Zane seriously underestimates the man and is lucky to survive.

To Zane, the desert is a woman. She is ever restless and ever changing: her dunes alternate with broken rocks and mountains, her chilly nights with burning days, and her absolute silence with whirling sandstorms. Yet she is always the same: awesome miles of barren waste operating under immutable laws. She is the crudest country in the world, yet she is the kindest. Her rabbits are the swiftest; her rattlesnakes are the deadliest; her coyotes the most cunning. Even her plants have to be coated with a natural varnish and studded with thorns. The desert is the world’s greatest natural obstacle, and Zane feels that life can progress only by overcoming obstacles. In civilization, people do not have to be tested. There are fancy veneers and distractions which allow them to hide from others, even from themselves. But they cannot hide from the desert. Its vastness and nothingness force them to look inward, and those who cannot accept their findings panic and flee to their doom. Those willing to learn, who are clear of mind, keen of eye, and swift of hand, may live long; those who are not will die. For only by knowing and embracing the desert can one survive in this never-ending contest which results in self-respect and tranquility.

Zane loves this fascinating lady. And perhaps the reason he seems not to have married is because he cannot find another as exciting and satisfying. The desert satisfies his desires for adventure and a simple, self-reliant life, and it is these desires rather than the weaknesses of the greedy such as gambling or drinking which keep him prospecting. Indeed, when he has the chance, he is likely to try to salvage city slickers by forcing them to undergo the desert’s rite of passage. For example, in “Sand Blast” he goes back east and rescues George Ringley, an old partner’s dissolute son, from gangsters. Then, to try to straighten the young man out, Zane drags George back to the western deserts and maneuvers him into a position where he must demonstrate his character by defending a young woman from a gang of claim jumpers.

The desert plays a leading role in each of the Whispering Sand stories and, to those who know the desert well, her whispers are her most enchanting feature. Late at night, in the silence, the sand often brushes against the sage or the cactus and sometimes rubs against itself or the soft sandstone to make a soothing, crooning whisper much like that of a mother reassuring her child. Sometimes just before sleep or while awakening, one seems to hear the whispering form into words and sentences. Many people, including Zane, believe that these are desert messages which lodge in the unconscious and provide them with warnings, guidance, and love — messages that result in special intuitions.

One cannot help but think that such whispers inspired Erle Stanley Gardner himself, for he camped out much of his life and did a lot of his writing while traveling in various western deserts. Mr. Gardner is, of course, best known for his work in the mystery field; indeed, sales of his books that feature investigators such as Perry Mason, Doug Selby, and Lam and Cool exceed 300 million copies. But Gardner thought of himself not only as a lawyer and a writer but also as a westerner, and during his career he was to produce over seventy western novelettes and short stories.

In fact, Gardner bears a striking resemblance to his most notable western protagonist, Bob Zane. At the time the stories were written, both were middle-aged; both were of average height, intelligent, and curious; both were experienced in the ways of the desert, had a strong sense of justice, and were convinced of the values of desert living. Gardner spoke contemptuously of New Yorkers and seemed to enjoy destroying their city by flooding, as in “New Worlds,” or by bombing the bejazzers out of it, as in “As Far as the Poles.” Zane is disgusted with urbanites and continually refers to them as “city” folk. Gardner kept taking visiting New York editors on camping trips into the desert to see what they were made of, and Zane lures people out into the desert to try to develop their characters.

But Gardner found writing westerns frustrating, because he felt that editors had false ideas about what the West was really like and did not appreciate, and sometimes interfered with, his intent to portray it accurately. He was also a hardheaded businessman who realized that the real money lay in novels and not shorter works. So when his Perry Mason novels caught on, Gardner shifted his attention more and more to detective novels, until finally by 1935 the desert s beautiful whispers were rarely heard again in his works.

Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg