Zane Grey

I just picked up a 1957 pulp edition of The Lone Star Ranger by Zane Grey, a real boy’s own tale of border and frontier. Here is the opening: ‘So it was in him, then – an inherited fighting instinct, a driving intensity to kill. He was the last of the Duanes, that old fighting stock of Texas. But not the memory of his dead father, nor the pleading of his soft-voiced mother, nor the warning of this uncle who stood before him now, had brought to Buck Duane so much realization of the dark passionate stain in his blood. It was the recurrence, a hundredfold increased in power, of a strange emotion that for the last three years had arisen in him.’ Powerful, hard-boiled stuff!