THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON

I finally read a Larry McMurtry novel, and I’m glad I did. Most of the reviewers of this 2014 novel gave it one or two stars (47% on Amazon). I think they are way out of line. Surely the author of the best western novel ever written (so says Bestwesternbooks.com and many others), Lonesome Dove, couldn’t have written a stinker...could he? No, I don’t think he did. His style was smooth and deliberate with a touch of western humor. I don’t think that Larry McMurtry had any intention of writing a serious novel about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday as they traveled from Long Grass, Texas to Denver, Colorado and eventually to Tombstone, Arizona for the showdown at the O.K. Corral in 1881. Larry McMurtry states in the forward, “The Last Kind Words Saloon is a ballad in prose whose characters are afloat in time; their legends and their lives in history rarely match. I had the great director John Ford in mind when I wrote this book; he famously said that when you had to choose between history and legend, print legend. And so I’ve done.” With that said, I read McMurtry’s story with a grain of salt. Apparently most of the reviewers either missed that early quote or didn’t understand what he was saying. I thought the author’s prose was first-rate, sprinkled with the local flavor of the waning years of the old west. Some reviewers said the chapters were too short...so what. This style of writing makes me want to read more pages per session. I’m the type of reader that counts pages to see how many are left if it appears the chapter is too long.

The story is mostly lighthearted with both Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday not the deadeye shooters that most books portray them to be. Wyatt hardly ever has a job in this novel and is either drunk or arguing with his wife, Jessie, the bartender at The Last Kind Words Saloon owned by Wyatt’s brother, Warren. By the way, when the Earps leave a town, Warren brings the saloon sign with him. Wyatt’s brother Morgan is always the sheriff and Virgil Earp is his deputy. The novel introduces the reader to the real life Texas rancher Charlie Goodnight (known as the father of the Texas Panhandle) and his fictional partner Lord Benny Ernle, a British Baron. Lord Ernle gets killed early in the novel while sprinting with his horse on unfamiliar territory where he falls off a cliff and breaks his neck. We meet  Madame San Saba of the brothel, The Orchid, in Long Grass, Texas. Supposedly, she was rescued from a harem in Turkey by Lord Ernle and taken under his wing. San Saba was reported to still be a virgin (what?). The reader meets the authentic telegraph operator and reporter Nellie Courtright, who was reputed to be the girlfriend of Buffalo Bill Cody, who also makes am appearance in this novel. As a matter of fact, Buffalo Bill hires Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday to join his Wild West Show in Denver for a $100 a show, each to stage a gunfight skit with blanks of course. The boys are a tad leery of blanks, “I’d be wary of it. What if some fool forgot to put blanks in his gun?”, said Doc. The Comanche Chief Quanah Parker, the son of kidnapped Cynthia Ann Parker and Comanche chief Peta Nocona also makes a brief appearance. I wonder if the 1956 John Wayne movie, The Searchers, is loosely based on the authentic Parker incident.

I’m not going to get into the Tombstone gunfight between Wyatt, Doc Holliday, Morgan, and Virgil Earp versus Ike and Billy Clanton, and the McLaury brothers (Johnny Ringo left town before the showdown) at the O.K. Corral. But I will tell you about a funny incident at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Denver. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday’s first show didn’t go off too well. “The gunfighter skit involving Wyatt and Doc did not, at first, go well at all. For one thing the pair had not bothered to practice - both despised practice, on the whole. “Pull a pistol out of a dern holster and shoot it - why would that require practice?” Wyatt wondered. “Everything about show business requires practice,” Cody told him. “Sure enough, on the very first draw, Wyatt yanked his gun out so vigorously that it somehow flew out of his hand and landed twenty feet in front of him with the barrel in the dirt. Doc, meanwhile, had the opposite problem; he had jammed his pistol in its holster so tight that it wouldn’t come out. This behavior annoyed Doc so much that he ripped off the holster and threw it at a bronc, which happened to be loose in the arena.” I told you that the novel had some humor, didn’t I? Look, I know that this wasn’t McMurtry’s best novel, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. So do I recommend this lightly regarded novel? Did Babe Ruth hit home runs?

RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

Comment: Reading a Larry McMurtry novel keeps my quest to read at least one of all the great cowboy author’s novels intact. The next writer has to be either Louis L’Amour (1952’s Hondo), Jack Shaefer (1963’s Monte Walsh or 1949’s Shane), or A.B. Guthrie (1947’s The Big Sky).

Larry McMurtry’s credentials are amazing. His 1966 novel, The Last Picture Show,also became a hit movie winning two academy awards, as did Terms of Endearment (1975), which won five academy awards. And he and co-writer Diana Ossana wrote the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, which won three academy awards. Lonesome Dove (the 1985 Pulitzer Prize novel) was a successful winner of seven Emmy awards as a miniseries. Wow!