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The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Big sharks, coded love letters, a movie fiasco: the strange Australian chapter of celebrity cowboy writer Zane Grey
The story begins with a shadow beneath the waves. A great white, pitiless and silent. Dorsal fin like a mean knife. Eyes dark and empty. The setting: a tight-knit coastal town where the locals are being picked off, one by one. They need a hero – a man with the audacity to challenge a legend. There's blood in the water. The cameras are rolling. Movie history is being made. Behind the scenes, it's chaos. There's a mechanical shark that barely resembles a living creature, and is far more trouble than it's worth. The production is beset by so many delays and accidents it begins to feel cursed. But the crew push on. There's a lot riding on this big fish film: fortunes, careers, legacies. You know this story. Or you think you do. But rewind the reel: this isn't Jaws, and Spielberg is nowhere in sight. We're in Australia, four decades earlier – drifting in the waters of the Great Barrier Reef. The film is White Death (1936), and the man calling the shots is a celebrity novelist turned monster catcher: Zane Grey. Today, his name barely registers: a footnote in fishing lore, a ghost in vintage paperbacks. But in his heyday, Grey was stratospherically famous. A reluctant dentist turned adventure novelist, Grey's pulp westerns sold in the millions. His travels made front page news. He was Hemingway before Hemingway (some even say The Old Man and the Sea was cribbed from one of Grey's tall tales). Even death couldn't slow him down: Grey's publisher sat on a stockpile of manuscripts, and kept rolling out new titles for decades. On the page, Grey built a mythic vision of the American West. Hollywood made it global, with dozens of adaptations, including Riders of the Purple Sage, The Lone Star Ranger and The Rainbow Trail. You may not know his name, but you know his frontier. 'It's extraordinary to me that he's fallen from social memory to such a degree,' marvels Vicki Hastrich, Grey's latest biographer. Hastrich stumbled on to the author by accident while tracing the lineage of the literary western. Grey's name popped up, not just as one of the genre's defining figures (he wrote more than 80), but also as the namesake of a caravan park in Bermagui on the coast of New South Wales. Why was a cowboy writer from Ohio venerated in an Aussie beach town? There was a story here, and Hastrich was the perfect person to tell it: author, angler, cartographer of the deep (her 2019 memoir, Night Fishing, is a quicksilver marvel of Australian nature writing). Hastrich knows the cultural weight a fish can carry. Her swashbuckling new book, The Last Days of Zane Grey, is the story of a very big fish; a tale of obsession and fading glory. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning A lifelong sport-fisher, Grey spent his twilight years chasing a dream: to hook a great white. Australia lured him in 1935, and again in 1939, with the promise of shark-rich waters (there was also a secret lover in Sydney). Hastrich traces the arc of that quest: the role Australia played in Grey's final chapter, and the unlikely mark he left on the national imagination. A deep-sea detour into the Australian psyche. 'We just went crazy for him,' Hastrich tells me. 'As far as I can tell, there were something like nine of Grey's films in circulation when he arrived in Australia in 1935.' And arrive he did – with 166 pieces of luggage and the full weight of his own legend. The welcome bordered on hysteria, something the country wouldn't see again until The Beatles. The reporting was relentless. 'If he sneezed or farted, it made the papers,' Hastrich says, not entirely joking. 'I was able to track him day by day – almost hour by hour.' Thousands of people followed Grey up and down the east coast, camping alongside him as he trawled the sea for record-breakers: marlin, swordfish, tuna (Grey is credited with kickstarting Australia's tuna industry with a single hefty catch). But beneath the glitz and spectacle, the 63-year-old author was struggling. He was financially over-stretched and fraying at the edges. The Australia trip wasn't just another adventure; it felt like a last chance to do something magnificent. Underwater photography was cutting-edge. If Grey could land a monster shark on film, he wouldn't just make history, he'd put himself back at the centre of it. Enter White Death. The behind-the-scenes story of Grey's great white flop is pure writer bait: a top-shelf fiasco. Cameras failed. Boats broke. The weather was hellish. The cast and crew were bitten, burned, and blown up. A brush with the notorious 'suicide plant' (the gympie-gympie) nearly cost one actor his sanity. And the star refused to show. No amount of burley or patience could summon a 'villain fish' from the deep, so Grey had to settle for a much smaller reef shark – painted white by the art department, and filmed from a distance. And yet it's here, in this laughable disaster of a film (you can watch chunks of it online), that Hastrich comes closest to understanding Grey's cultural pull. 'He's not a gifted actor, that's for sure. He's very wooden in that film. But there's a presence about him,' she says. 'He has this sort of stillness on screen, a kind of physical charisma.' Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion For all the drama on screen, Hastrich's richest material turned up elsewhere: a cache of love letters from Grey to his Australian lover, the Sydney poet Lola Goodall. Hastrich still doesn't know how – or why – Grey's letters to Lola were preserved (Lola's replies were destroyed), but reading them required a crash course in code-breaking: all the racy parts were written in cipher. 'I thought I had the key, but it didn't match what I was seeing,' says Hastrich. 'Just when I was about to give up, I realised what was going on, and I could add symbols to the code. It was so slow: literally one alphabet letter at a time for ages.' Lola had always been treated as a blip in Grey's story – dismissed as a dalliance. But the affair Hastrich uncovered was substantial, with hundreds of letters stretching over years. Lola was a middling poet in her mid-50s, still living with her mother, pretending – at least on paper – to be decades younger. Grey was ageing, lonely, carving out space for one last big love. 'I came to think of them like two drowning people,' Hastrich says, 'clutching and clawing at each other as they went down. They could both see their relevance in the world slipping.' It's the women, including Lola, who give this story its guts. There's Dolly, Grey's formidable wife, quietly running the family empire, and largely unfazed by all the girlfriends (she organises their travel). Miles Franklin makes a surprise cameo, impressing and infuriating Grey in equal measure. And we meet Chickie Nathan – an ice-skating socialite turned marlin wrangler – who holds her own against Grey at sea. (Chickie is a scene stealer; she deserves a biography of her own.) Hastrich also offers a fish-eye view of interwar Australia: a country blind to the scale of its ocean bounty, and its fragility. 'That's the story nudging at the edges here,' she reflects. 'Just as we're starting to comprehend how abundant things are, they're already depleting.' Code-breaking wasn't the only new skill Hastrich had to master; she braved a trip in a shark cage, determined to see Grey's nemesis for herself. 'The water was this sort of teal blue, a veil of particles of colour. And this shark loomed out of the veil, scuffed and scarred,' she tells me – still awed. 'It was like this great, slow-moving bomb – and then it was just gone. That was the moment I understood the perennial allure of this formidable fish.' That's the thing about great whites: they come ready-made as metaphors. In the end, The Last Days of Zane Grey isn't just about a man chasing a shark: it's about a man in a duel with death itself. 'This story didn't need any massaging,' Hastrich laughs. 'Everything you needed to make a narrative was already there.' Now she's hauled in Zane Grey, what's next? 'I'm ready to go and catch another fish.' The Last Days of Zane Grey by Vicki Hastrich is out through Allen & Unwin
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan: Why you should season your bird feed with red-hot pepper
The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan (Corsair £20, 320pp) I am in danger of becoming even more obnoxiously bird proud,' the novelist Amy Tan gloats after posting a video of a Bewick's wren splashing about in a pool in her garden. In the birding world this is the equivalent of a paparazzo shot of the Princess of Wales in a bikini, since this is a bird that has rarely been seen to bathe in water. Tan is a full-blown bird obsessive, though curiously until she was in her mid-60s she had little interest in them. That changed when she started taking nature drawing classes with a teacher whose advice was: 'as you look at the bird, try to feel the life within it'. Tan saw the parallels with her job as a novelist, because 'I always imagine I am the character I am creating'. As her drawings improved, so did her ability to recognise the birds. It dawned on her that she didn't need to venture into the countryside to observe birds; she had her own wildlife paradise right in her garden in California. Tan's house is nestled among four ancient oaks that are a 'community hub' for dozens of types of birds. Her garden is full of things birds like: dense tree cover, a nectar-bearing fuchsia shrub, passion fruit, jasmine, ivy, lemon trees and plenty of water. If she were selling this house to a bird, she muses, she would point out the rain runoff from the roof terrace, 'on which a little bird and its growing family can perch while drinking and enjoying a view of San Francisco Bay'. Her journal entries, starting in 2017, track her fascination with the comings and goings of her avian visitors. Soon she is noting down the names of more than 60 types of birds in her garden, from finches, sparrows and thrushes to hummingbirds, woodpeckers, owls, hawks and waxwings. Tan doesn't just enjoy the birds, she has a novelist's curiosity to work out what the dynamics of their relationships are and she frequently imagines conversations between them. Her anthropomorphism means that at times this book veers perilously close to tweeness, but this is more than offset by Tan's bird drawings, which capture them in all their feathered splendour. She puts up more and more feeders throughout the garden and constantly experiments with the best food with which to lure the birds. They love suet but so do the cunning, acrobatic squirrels. Eventually she discovers suet studded with hot pepper – 'inferno-strength stuff' – that has no effect on the birds but is loathed by the squirrels. Mealworms are also a big success, and soon Tan has 3,000 living in a container in her fridge, along with a bird corpse in the freezer (a local university wants it for their scientific collection). 'I have a very understanding husband,' she writes. Tan tries to persuade her nine-year-old neighbour to set up a mealworm-breeding business so she can source them more cheaply. Disappointingly, his mother vetoes the idea. Even if some of the bird names are unfamiliar to a British reader, this is a lovely book for anyone with even a passing interest in birds. You can understand why she finds observing the birds in her 'backyard' such an all-absorbing pastime. If she has learned one thing, it's that 'each bird is surprising and thrilling in its own way'.
Globe and Mail
5 days ago
- General
- Globe and Mail
To be good with today: A found poem about life in prison
Claire Cameron is a novelist, essayist and author of the memoir How to Survive a Bear Attack. This poem was assembled using responses to questions asked during a book club meeting at the Grand Valley Institution for Women, a prison in Kitchener, Ont. 'Seek markets elsewhere' What is Canada? I Don't Have a Family Doctor To Sleep on the Street Charles
Washington Post
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Miss Manners: Constructive criticism not wanted here
Dear Miss Manners: My stepson is a successful novelist. I'm reading an advanced copy of his new book, which is brilliant, but contains a neurodivergent character that doesn't ring quite true to me. (I'm neurodivergent, if that matters.) In a recent conversation, I complimented him on his truly wonderful book, but when I tried to talk about this character in what I hoped was a light way, he said, coldly and dismissively, 'I don't care what you think.'
Washington Post
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
In ‘Girl, 1983,' a writer tries to make sense of her teenage self
One September morning as she walked through the park near her home in Oslo, the novelist Linn Ullmann saw a ghost. She glimpsed a figure standing under an elm tree, the girl she once was, a wayward 16-year-old who defied her mother to fly to Paris and meet up with a famous, and predatory, fashion photographer.
