Pay Dirt and Other Whispering Sands - Stories of Gold Fever & the Western Desert (1889-1970)

By Erle Stanley Gardner

William Morrow & Co | June 1983 | ISBN-10: 0688019811 | PDF | 324 pages | 42.3 mb

https://www.amazon.com/Pay-Dirt-Whispering-Stories-Western/dp/0688019811



This collection of stories, selected from the Whispering Sands stories originally published in "Argosy" between 1931 and 1934, features desert prospector Bob Zane in tales of outlaws, Indians, and adventure

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER, author, lawyer, humanitarian, adventurer, was born in 1889. He was not only the world s best-selling author, he was also almost unbelievably prolific. Early in his career, he produced a great variety of short stories and novelettes—almost 600 of them. He knew the deserts of the Southwest at first hand, and traveled as prolifically as he wrote, camping in the desert. Beginning with his first fulllength detective novel (also the first Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, Morrow, 1933), he averaged approximately one book every four months until his death in 1970.

His life was a remarkable one, and so were his methods of writing. He remained with the same publisher to the end. The history of this association, remarkable in itself, is recorded in the biography Erie Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason by Dorothy B. Hughes (Morrow, 1978). His career as a highly disciplined, self-taught writer is documented in the book Secrets of the World's Best-Selling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erie

Stanley Gardner by Francis L. and Roberta B. Fugate (Morrow, 1980).

Like the first collection of Gardner's desert stories, Whispering Sands, published by Morrow in 1981, the stories in Pay Dirt appear here in book form for the first time.



CONTENTS

Singing Sand 19

The Land of Painted Rocks 53

The Big Circle 93

Pay Dirt 131

The Land of Poison Springs 161

Stamp of the Desert 203

Law of the Ghost Town 227

The Law of Drifting Sand 249

The Whip Hand 287