Meager McMurtry in 'Last Kind Words Saloon'
The prospect of Larry McMurtry chronicling Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday as they sidle up to the shoot-out at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Ariz.? That's enough to make any reader say, "Deal me in, pardner."
The Last Kind Words Saloon
By Larry McMurtry
Liveright. 224 pp. $24.95
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Reviewed by David Hiltbrand
The prospect of Larry McMurtry chronicling Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday as they sidle up to the shoot-out at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Ariz.? That's enough to make any reader say, "Deal me in, pardner."
But you may find yourself disappointed by The Last Kind Words Saloon. (The title comes from a sign that Wyatt's youngest brother, Warren, totes from town to town, hoping to establish a business at every stop.)
The first hint that this may be a meager McMurtry offering comes in the publisher's description of the book as "a ballad in prose." That apparently means skimpy chapters and minimalist prose. The legendary gunfight is afforded less than half of a page, dispatched in just over 100 words. (Perhaps justifiable: the actual exchange in 1881 is said to have lasted 30 seconds.)
Many Western icons make appearances in the pages (Buffalo Bill, Bat Masterson, Annie Oakley, Johnny Ringo), but only fleetingly as cameos or simply as references. It feels like stunt casting. In fact, all of The Last Kind Words Saloon reads like sketches from a novel rather than a novel.
Initially, it seems that Wyatt and Doc may have some of the same salty chemistry that Gus and Woodrow enjoyed in Lonesome Dove, McMurtry's beloved 1985 novel. But the more you get to know them, the less you like them. Violent, vagrant men, they are mostly interested in drinking themselves into a stupor.
There is crisp dialogue here and some colorful ancillary characters, like the member of the British peerage who decides to build a home, however humble, on the plains:
"Lord Ernle had made himself a legend in the West by ordering the construction of a vast castle on a bluff overlooking the Canadian River. Miles of train track had been laid just to bring workmen and equipment to the castle site. Though still a vast shell, travelers who happened on it were struck speechless by the scale."
There are also some nicely turned set pieces, like a field eulogy for a young cowboy killed in a stampede that is even more terse and unsentimental than the words Gus said over Josh Deets in Lonesome Dove:
" 'This was Johnny Deakin, a good boy of sixteen I believe,' Wagoner said. 'He rode through a prairie dog town, an infernal thing for a cowboy to encounter at night. His horse broke a leg and the cattle stampeded right over young Johnny. Such is the life and death of a good cowboy. Amen.' "
It's such passages that make McMurtry an American delicacy. You just won't be able to make a meal of The Last Kind Words Saloon. You won't lament reading the book, but you may regret paying $25 for the privilege.
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