The Fugitive Trail - Zane Grey

As I’ve mentioned before, the elementary school I attended didn’t have a library, but each room had a shelf of books in it that the students could borrow and read. I have no doubt that the teachers provided those books themselves. When I was in fourth or fifth grade, one of the books in our room was THE MYSTERIOUS RIDER by Zane Grey. I remember reading it, but that’s all I can tell you about it. The plot has faded completely from my mind. But I must have liked it because not long after that I got a copy of Grey’s THE LOST WAGON TRAIN from our little public library. I enjoyed it, too, and over the years I read more of Grey’s novels from the library and the bookmobile or in paperback editions picked up here and there. I don’t recall whom I started reading first—Grey, Max Brand, or Clarence E. Mulford—but those three were my introduction to Westerns for grown-ups. They were also the three big names in the genre during the first two decades of the Twentieth Century. I’m not forgetting Owen Wister, but despite Wister’s huge influence on the genre, he didn’t write nearly as much as those other three and wasn’t as much in the public eye. We tend to forget these days that, sales-wise, Zane Grey was the James Patterson/John Grisham/Stephen King of his time, and his books still sold very well all the way through the Sixties and Seventies.

Over the decades I read quite a few of Grey’s novels but nowhere near all of them, so I still pick one up now and then when I’m in the right mood. And Grey is definitely one of those writers I have to be in the mood for. His flowery, melodramatic, old-fashioned style makes his books difficult going for most modern readers. I’ve always been able to put myself in the mindset of readers from the first half of the Twentieth Century, though, so I still enjoy his books. For example, THE FUGITIVE TRAIL, which I just read.

This is one of the novels published after Grey’s death, but unlike today when popular authors continue producing new books long after they’ve passed on, Grey actually wrote his posthumous novels and left quite an inventory of them when he died of heart failure in 1939. It’s possible that his wife and son polished and fleshed out those manuscripts; I’m not enough of a Zane Grey scholar to say one way or the other. THE FUGITIVE TRAIL was published in 1957 by Harper & Brothers and has been reprinted in paperback editions many, many times.

Set in Texas in the late 1870s, it’s the story of former buffalo hunter and scout Bruce Lockheart, who allows himself to be blamed for a bank robbery that his wastrel twin brother really took part in. Bruce believes that the girl he loves, Trinity Spencer, is actually in love with his brother, so for her sake, he goes on the run and lets the law think he’s the owlhoot, not his twin. Such self-sacrifice in the name of love is common in Grey’s novels. I did mention that his books are a little old-fashioned.

Another well-worn plot element is that Trinity is a foundling, the only survivor of an apparent Indian attack when she was a baby. But is she really the orphan she appears to be, or does she have a family and a surprising fate waiting for her somewhere in the vastness of the Texas frontier?

And what about Quade Belton, the gambler/outlaw who got Bruce’s brother in trouble to start with? Do you think he might show up somewhere later on and cause more trouble for Bruce and Trinity, who are actually in love with each other although they won’t admit it at first?

The first half of THE FUGITIVE TRAIL is an epic chase yarn that covers a span of several years while Bruce is trying to avoid being captured or killed by the Texas Rangers and Trinity is trying to find him, since she’s realized she’s in love with him, not his brother. The second half of the book settles down into a more standard battle-the-rustlers-and-save-the-ranch story driven very much by coincidence. One thing to remember about Grey’s work is that while he didn’t really invent most of these plot elements—credit for that goes more to Wister and Mulford—he was one of the earliest practitioners of them. What seems stereotypical to us was much fresher in those days, and that’s the way you have to approach Grey’s novels.

Although the romance angle is a huge part of the plot, as it usually was in his books, there’s a lot of action, too, including numerous shootouts and chase scenes and a dramatic, large-scale battle at the end. Grey may be known these days more for his descriptive prose and his convoluted romances than anything else, but when he wanted to, he could burn powder pretty darned good, too.

THE FUGITIVE TRAIL isn’t one of Grey’s better-known novels, and it’s not a classic like RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE or DESERT GOLD, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. If you like very traditional Westerns, you might, as well.