Shades of Grey

It’s not often that hotels and books overlap — that is, in a major, official way. Of course one reads books while lodging in hotels. And of course one reads books about hotels: Ali Smith’s The Accidental, for instance, or John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire. Or Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel Psycho, although technically that was a motel. Wilkie Collins wrote The Haunted Hotel, in which terror stalks a doomed countess; Paul Theroux wrote Hotel Honolulu, in which paradise proves elusive. Oh, yeah, and Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales. But on Catalina Island — just an hour’s ferryboat ride from Los Angeles harbor — is the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel, former hilltop home of the early 20th-century novelist who made the whole world fall in love with the Wild West (or at least his version of it) in his hundred-or-so books.... Originally a Midwesterner, later a dental student and womanizer and minor-league baseball player, Grey emerged from his first paternity suit to publish a sportfishing article in 1902. From there his career bloomed like the purple sage that he would popularize, with such novels as The Last Trail, The Mysterious Rider, Tales of Lonely Trails, Call of the Canyon, The Thundering Herd, Twin Sombreros and Twenty Thousand on the Hoof. He traveled to far corners of the globe, catching big fish, shooting big animals, and becoming one of the world’s first millionaire novelists: an income-bracket ancestor, that is, to Joan Collins and the Foer Brothers. Craving the salt-air solitude of Catalina, which boasts a mild year-round climate and rolling, wildflower-dotted hills, Grey built a sprawling home there in 1926, patterned after a Hopi village with rough-textured stucco walls and rugged wooden beams. Today it’s a hotel which commands some of the world’s most charming sea views — and which offers shockingly low off-season rates, as Dibs! discovered on a trip to the island last month. Each room is named after one of Grey’s novels and is outfitted with homey, Western-themed decor. A lounge at the end of the hall has a grand piano for songfests. Because cars are pretty much forbidden on the island and a nature conservancy keeps 80 percent of the territory free from development, you really can drift into that solitude and silence which Grey himself savored (when he wasn’t busy killing animals or cheating on his wife) — and you might actually get some writing done, yourself.