One of the best series Erle Stanley Gardner wrote was the quasi-Western series collectively known as “The Whispering Sands” series for Argosy Magazine between 1930-1934. Most of these stories have been collected in two volumes:Whispering Sands: Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert (1981) and Pay Dirt and Other Whispering Sands Stories of Gold Fever and The Western Desert (Morrow, 1983). Of the eighteen stories collected (out of the twenty-one), all but two featuring Bob Zane, a knowledgeable desert prospector, an amalgamation of the author’s own personality and the type of man Gardner knew from his travels.
These tales might be seen as Westerns by some readers but as the books’ over-long titles state they are actually “Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert”. Which isn’t to say “The Whispering Sands” stories wouldn’t appeal to Western fans, but that Gardner has mixed a wonderful blend of the Western, Mystery and Adventure genres into these stories. The fiction most similar is perhaps Jack London’s stories of the Klondike, in that Gardner captures a place and how it affects people in the same way.
Gardner states his theme in each story (which he never intended to be read in a volume but in different issue of a magazine), telling about the “sand whispers”:
"Of course, those whispers, aren’t really voices. I know as well as you do that they’re the noises made by the sand scurrying along on the wings of the desert winds and rustling against the cacti and the sage. And then, when the wind gets stronger, you an hear the sound of sand rustling against sand, the strangest whisper of all".