The Last Kind Words Saloon

February 10, 2014
McMurtry of Lonesome Dove fame returns to fiction (after Custer) with this uneven portrayal of the frontier friendship between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. McMurtry is a master of colorful character development and snappy dialogue, both nicely showcased here as Wyatt and Doc meander through Texas and Colorado to Arizona, drinking, gambling, whoring, and debating whether or not they ought to shoot folks who annoy them. As these two lethal saddle pals wander the West, McMurtry introduces other real-life figures in side-plots—cattleman Charlie Goodnight; Quanah, the Comanche chief; Satanta, the Kiowa chief; and Buffalo Bill, whose adventures provide some action and humor, but add little to the Earp-Holliday story. McMurtry portrays Doc as a cuddly, funny drunk, but Wyatt is handled much differently. Here Wyatt is depicted as a moody, jealous wife beater, short-tempered and itching to pick a fight with anybody—especially Old Man Clanton and his cattle-thieving family in Tombstone, Ariz. When Wyatt stirs up a fight with the Clantons, an ambush, murder, and a challenge result in deadly powder burning at the O.K. Corral. This whole choppy story leads up to the predictable shoot-out, but McMurtry’s treatment of the Old West’s most famous gunfight is abrupt and unconvincing, taking just eight uninspired sentences to describe. This revisionist western plays loose with historical facts, and is a disappointing effort from a Pulitzer Prize–winning author.

February 15, 2014

In the waning days of the Old West, lawman Wyatt Earp, his sidekick Doc Holliday, and big-time rancher Charles Goodnight often cross paths, sometimes not even knowing what state or territory they are in. Cowboys fight over cattle, the few remaining Kiowa Indians commit brutal murders, and prostitutes outnumber wives. Wyatt and Doc gain employment with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, but when that shuts down, they end up in Tombstone, AZ. Wyatt opens the Last Kind Words Saloon and installs his wife, Jessie, as bartender but gets jealous when she pays attention to the male customers. In brief, scattershot chapters, McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) portrays nearly all his characters as cantankerous, fed up, or lovelorn. "Life was a peril, purely a peril," summarizes Goodnight when three unrelated herds of cattle intermingle, bringing his operations to a halt. Earlier in the novel, his outlandish partnership with an English lord evaporates when the aristocrat plummets off a cliff on a thoroughbred horse. VERDICT By turns droll, stark, wry, or raunchy, this peripatetic novel is a bit sketchy at times. The infamous gunfight at the OK Corral brings the novel to a dramatic end and will satisfy many readers who long for more from literary icon McMurtry. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/13.]--Keddy Ann Outlaw, Houston

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