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Lassiter #1
Lassiter
Young Lassiter quickly learns to defend himself and his possessions when a host of unscrupulous forces, led by the villainous Joe Rudd, attempts to drive him from his cattle ranch. Reprint.
- GenresWesterns
252 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
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21 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 30, 2022
Good action scenes, poor plotting, poor editing. This is one of three westerns I picked up at a resale store because they were cheap. The plotting in this book is bizarre and the telling is hurt by very poor editing (one character disappears without any reason). The bad guy is just too bad and the good guy is not going to stay with the one he loves because this is a series. It almost appears that the people who put this out were trying to exploit the author's name.
September 10, 2016
I picked this book because I wanted to borrow an audiobook from the library and didn't know what I wanted. How about a western? Isn't there an author Zane Grey? So, this isn't by Zane Grey senior, which I didn't know until I borrowed it. I basically picked it because of the name, which fellow geeks will recognize as the name of antique laser gun stolen by the cast of Serenity in the awesome show Firefly. Hey, there are worse reasons to choose a book.
What can I say about this book? It's a western. Steely-eyed men, damsels in distress, treacherous cowhands, duplicitous sheriffs, and at the center of it all, Lassiter, the man's man. He can out-fight the bare-knuckle champ, out-draw the hired killer, and seduce any fe-male he takes a fancy to. He's basically Buckaroo Banzai of Northern Arizona in the 19th century.
The ornery Mr. Rudd wants to take all the land through the power he's amassed through his pool. Everyone's afraid of him, everyone, that is, except our hero. His pool has Ally Carrington's (one of aforementioned damsels in distress) K - 27 ranch surrounded, and if he can get Lassiter and Devlin to join their DL ranch to the pool, they can hem her in. Naturally, Lassiter is resistant. He seems to have superhuman abilities, such as the ability to heal a broken hand in less than a week with no cast. (You have to take time with a wounded hand, because it likes to heal.)
The plot takes a rather contrived route. One man rather implausibly descends into a self-destructive spiral on account of a woman he barely knew marrying someone else. Then the crooked sherriff and apparently an entirely crooked and stupid jury accuse another woman of murder, based on implausible testimony and bad forensic evidence (surely even 19th century yokels would realize that if a man were killed by a gunshot wound, he would have dried blood on him. It did bother me to think that a woman would be hanged on hearsay for a dead man she happened to know, when a man who murdered another man was most likely off the hook as long as the corpse in question tendered an insult or looked at him wrong, or was facing the murderer when he died. I tried to set my feminist ire aside.) In the end, the inconvenient people get killed and some convenient marriages are arranged, and Lassiter starts hankering to see what's over the next horizon.
The writing is not notably strong. Scenes are repeated, and plot is re-summarized, as if for a serial novel. The setting seemed clear enough, but I happened to be actually in the area it was set in while I was listening to it, so maybe that's me. But hey, it's a western. It's meant to be an action story set in a lawless west. It's a fantasy about when black people didn't exist, women had fewer rights than horses, and you could be shot dead in the street before the age of thirty with only a faint hope your death would be avenged. But that's a little harsh. Don't let my liberal cynicism ruin it for you. It was a fun book, if you don't think about it too much. I do have to wonder, how long will it be before people romanticize and novelize life in the crime-ridden inner city projects? Maybe it's already happening. Do little boys have gangster action figures, and cartoon gangsters on their bedsheets?
The plot is brisk, the characters larger-than-life, the dialogue and mores charmingly antique, and the writing was straightforward. This won't likely convert non-western fans to the western genre, but if you already like western novels, it's pretty much par for the course.
What can I say about this book? It's a western. Steely-eyed men, damsels in distress, treacherous cowhands, duplicitous sheriffs, and at the center of it all, Lassiter, the man's man. He can out-fight the bare-knuckle champ, out-draw the hired killer, and seduce any fe-male he takes a fancy to. He's basically Buckaroo Banzai of Northern Arizona in the 19th century.
The ornery Mr. Rudd wants to take all the land through the power he's amassed through his pool. Everyone's afraid of him, everyone, that is, except our hero. His pool has Ally Carrington's (one of aforementioned damsels in distress) K - 27 ranch surrounded, and if he can get Lassiter and Devlin to join their DL ranch to the pool, they can hem her in. Naturally, Lassiter is resistant. He seems to have superhuman abilities, such as the ability to heal a broken hand in less than a week with no cast. (You have to take time with a wounded hand, because it likes to heal.)
The plot takes a rather contrived route. One man rather implausibly descends into a self-destructive spiral on account of a woman he barely knew marrying someone else. Then the crooked sherriff and apparently an entirely crooked and stupid jury accuse another woman of murder, based on implausible testimony and bad forensic evidence (surely even 19th century yokels would realize that if a man were killed by a gunshot wound, he would have dried blood on him. It did bother me to think that a woman would be hanged on hearsay for a dead man she happened to know, when a man who murdered another man was most likely off the hook as long as the corpse in question tendered an insult or looked at him wrong, or was facing the murderer when he died. I tried to set my feminist ire aside.) In the end, the inconvenient people get killed and some convenient marriages are arranged, and Lassiter starts hankering to see what's over the next horizon.
The writing is not notably strong. Scenes are repeated, and plot is re-summarized, as if for a serial novel. The setting seemed clear enough, but I happened to be actually in the area it was set in while I was listening to it, so maybe that's me. But hey, it's a western. It's meant to be an action story set in a lawless west. It's a fantasy about when black people didn't exist, women had fewer rights than horses, and you could be shot dead in the street before the age of thirty with only a faint hope your death would be avenged. But that's a little harsh. Don't let my liberal cynicism ruin it for you. It was a fun book, if you don't think about it too much. I do have to wonder, how long will it be before people romanticize and novelize life in the crime-ridden inner city projects? Maybe it's already happening. Do little boys have gangster action figures, and cartoon gangsters on their bedsheets?
The plot is brisk, the characters larger-than-life, the dialogue and mores charmingly antique, and the writing was straightforward. This won't likely convert non-western fans to the western genre, but if you already like western novels, it's pretty much par for the course.
November 7, 2017
Back when I was a wee lad of 11 or 12, my great uncle gave me a box full of old paperbacks by guys like Louis L'Amour, Max Brand, etc. Included were several of Loren Grey's LASSITER books, which started me on a steady diet of Westerns over the next several years. It wasn't long before I picked up Zane Grey's RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE and THE RAINBOW TRAIL (the original novels to feature the Lassiter character), but I found them over-long, slow, and completely lacking in excitement. Loren Grey's books, on the other hand, were fast-paced, action-packed, and comparatively gritty. For a long time, he was my favorite writer within the Western genre--a fact that became a bit embarrassing when I later found out all his novels were ghostwritten.
But what once so appealed to me about this series as a kid no longer impressed me much as an adult. Book 1 of this series, titled simply LASSITER, is your typical pulp fiction offering, recycling once again the most cliched of all Western plot lines: An evil cattle baron tries to cheat a new ranch-owner out of his property, but must first contend with the steely-eyed ex-gunslinger standing in his way. As a strong-but-silent hero, Lassiter is more of a cipher than an actual character, and the frequent action scenes tend to feel perfunctory rather than exciting. As an adult, I now consider books like RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE to be immeasurably superior to something like LASSITER, but it's easy to see why Loren Grey's series hooked me as a kid whereas RIDERS didn't. RIDERS is genuine literature, and LASSITER is pure entertainment. In RIDERS, Lassiter is portrayed as a believable person; in LASSITER, he's the cowboy equivalent of a superhero.
And though I no longer respect Loren Grey as a writer the way I once did, I still had a good deal of fun re-visiting this series after so many years. Perhaps much of my enjoyment stemmed from nostalgia, but I'd nonetheless recommend LASSITER as an enjoyable piece of fluff. Sure, it's unsophisticated and workmanlike storytelling, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do. It even threw me for a loop with a nice plot twist in the final chapter. (Since the rest of the story was so completely by-the-numbers up to that point, I had to re-read that part in case I'd hallucinated it.)
And considering how much I loved this series as a kid, I'd definitely recommend it as a sort of "gateway" book for introducing young boys to the world of cowboy fiction.
But what once so appealed to me about this series as a kid no longer impressed me much as an adult. Book 1 of this series, titled simply LASSITER, is your typical pulp fiction offering, recycling once again the most cliched of all Western plot lines: An evil cattle baron tries to cheat a new ranch-owner out of his property, but must first contend with the steely-eyed ex-gunslinger standing in his way. As a strong-but-silent hero, Lassiter is more of a cipher than an actual character, and the frequent action scenes tend to feel perfunctory rather than exciting. As an adult, I now consider books like RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE to be immeasurably superior to something like LASSITER, but it's easy to see why Loren Grey's series hooked me as a kid whereas RIDERS didn't. RIDERS is genuine literature, and LASSITER is pure entertainment. In RIDERS, Lassiter is portrayed as a believable person; in LASSITER, he's the cowboy equivalent of a superhero.
And though I no longer respect Loren Grey as a writer the way I once did, I still had a good deal of fun re-visiting this series after so many years. Perhaps much of my enjoyment stemmed from nostalgia, but I'd nonetheless recommend LASSITER as an enjoyable piece of fluff. Sure, it's unsophisticated and workmanlike storytelling, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do. It even threw me for a loop with a nice plot twist in the final chapter. (Since the rest of the story was so completely by-the-numbers up to that point, I had to re-read that part in case I'd hallucinated it.)
And considering how much I loved this series as a kid, I'd definitely recommend it as a sort of "gateway" book for introducing young boys to the world of cowboy fiction.
December 31, 2023
This book was (supposedly) written by the son of Zane Grey; the style more resembles that of Louis L'Amour. It is a very good read.
July 3, 2025
Good not great but a story with many well developed characters. Much stronger language than Zane Grey would have chosen but these are different times. I liked that it was an easy read all together.
July 19, 2009
Lassiter and his partner had bought a ranch. Arriving, he learns an old enemy is one of his neighbors. The man has two objectives: getting control of that ranch and Lassiter's death.
January 2, 2012
Subpar western.
November 24, 2012
listened to the audio version which was excellently narrated. didn't care for several themes in the book.
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January 15, 2015terrible
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews