In his two earlier novels, "The Sea of Grass" and "The Trees," Conrad Richter has made a solid contribution to the long shelf of Americana; in "Tacey Cromwell" he goes back into the Arizona Territory a half century ago, to find a protagonist in the hennaed sporting-house madam who gives the book its name. Like others of this celebrated sisterhood, Tacey yearns for a husband and social esteem. (p. 6)

Certainly there is material here for a novel of the magnetic West. Mr. Richter has packed his story into a little over 200 pages. He tells it with soundness as well as economy; and yet, for all his careful choice of character and local color, there is something unfulfilled about it, something oddly lifeless. Though the plot is honestly conceived, though it avoids most of the cruder allurements of melodrama, it emerges as a made-to-order pattern, no more moving than a pile of stereopticon slides in an old-fashioned parlor.

Perhaps Mr. Richter would have been wiser not to write in the first person, through the mind of Nugget Oldacker; certainly a boy of 9 is hardly the best reporter for the White Palace House and its painted ladies of the evening….

The story moves swiftly; there are first-class vignettes of an Arizona mining town, pit-bosses brawling in the saloons, a hard-muscled drilling contest on the Fourth, a ghastly fire that all but destroys Bisbee…. But even here one cannot help feeling that the cleverly worked-out bits come from research rather than a remembered past.

Perhaps Mr. Richter is more at home in the wilderness than among the humans who tamed it; perhaps a deeper penetration into his subject, and more elbow-room, would have produced the novel he was trying to write. But "Tacey Cromwell" is an opulent canvas in a sketch-book. For all Mr. Richter's facility, he has crowded far too much into far too few pages. His story rings true in its major premise, but it does not stir the heart. (p. 7)