Whispering Sands: Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert

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The stories in this collection were first published in Argosy magazine on the following dates:

Sand Blast, July 21, 1934

Law of the Rope, March 11, 1933

Gold Blindness, March 8, 1930

Written in Sand, October 25, 1930

Blood-Red Gold, September 30, 1930

Carved in Sand, June 17, 1933

Fall Guy, March 22, 1930

Priestess of the Sun, December 6, 1930

Golden Bullets, June 7, 1930

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.

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