The Last Kind Words Saloon: A Novel

I am a HUGE fan. So imagine my disappointment at how poorly written this book is. The whole book seems rushed. Two people will be saying " is that bill off in the distance, I haven't seen him in weeks? " "Well I was out herding cattle." How did he get into the conversation? This happens on multiple occasions. Also the story was just not up to McMurtry standards. It didn't make me not want to put it down like his others. It felt like he needed to put out a book so he just slapped this together. I will always be a fan and will be waiting patiently for his next book, so there's no rush.

I love, adore and cherish much of the late, great McMurtry's work. I bought this as kind of a last hurrah. It's a little amusing, not much more. But for the full-on McMurtry Experience, find another title.

This was a good book, typical Larry McMurtry, with a good story.

Thank you for making books so affordable. I really enjoyed this book & I will buy more from Amazon in the future.

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 write 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 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 a 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?

Starting with “Lonesome Dove”, Larry McMurtry has been trying to de-glamorize the Old West, but somehow readers made heroes out of his protagonists despite his intentions. Maybe there is just something inherently fascinating about the loner out on the frontier that can’t be excised despite his best efforts.

“Last Kind Words Saloon” is the latest in this series of deconstructions of the Western mythology. In this short novel we meet Wyatt Earp and his brothers, plus Doc Holliday and rancher Charles Goodnight. They are not particularly nice people. They alternately pursue, abuse or are perplexed by women. They drink too much. They have no pretense of culture or stability or ambition. By any modern standard, they are pitiful creatures.

And they are comical, in a down-beat, down-trodden way. The women are dependent on their men, but at the same time manage and control them in farcical ways. And whenever it seems Wyatt or Charlie or Doc or the Earp brothers might have a chance to get ahead, some accident of nature in the form of a runaway horse or a giant sandstorm wells up to bust that chance to smithereens. "Last Kind Words Saloon" is ruefully funny in the tradition of The Little Tramp and The Three Stooges, - lots of good intentions, lots of mishap which borders on slapstick

Many people have forgotten if they ever knew it that Wyatt Earp ended his days on the west coast, tending bar and refereeing boxing matches, long after the dust of the OK Corral had settled. Larry McMurtry hasn’t forgotten, and he makes us look. If you have a taste for irony, this is a strong-brewed cup.

I picked up a copy of Larry McMurtry's most recent novel, The Last Kind Words Saloon, at the airport in Kansas City as I was heading out for a vacation in Alaska a couple of weeks ago. A book by McMurtry just seemed to be a natural fit for a trip into the rugged and desolate northwest.

The prolific author had his first book, Horseman, Pass By, published in 1961 when he was just twenty-five-years-old. Two years later McMurtry wrote the screenplay for the movie, Hud, based on Horseman, Pass By. During the intervening years, McMurtry has written literally dozens of novels and screenplays, many of them award winners.

(My favorite book by Larry McMurtry is Lonesome Dove which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - and my favorite movie of all time is The Last Picture Show which is a dramatization of a McMurtry novel of the same name.)

So, all things considered, The Last Kind Words Saloon seemed like a safe bet for a good vacation read - and I was not disappointed.

In this novel, Larry McMurtry takes a look at the complicated and intertwined lives of two of the Old West's more legendary characters: Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. He follows the two friends as they move through the final days of the frontier experience - from the cattle lands of Texas, to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver, to the gunfight that made them legendary in Tombstone - and beyond.

Wyatt's family plays important roles in this novel. His brother Virgil is always on the periphery of the action as a local lawman, and Warren runs a saloon. Warren's saloon has a sign out front declaring it to be "The Last Kind Words Saloon." As the family moves from place to place, Warren always drags his sign along hoping to acquire a saloon to hang it on. Jessie, Wyatt's wife, is a professional hostess who tends bar for Warren.

McMurtry depicts Wyatt Earp as a generally unemployed drinker and gambler who doesn't know how to respond to women. He disappears for days on end to enjoy the bottle, cards, and the pleasures of working girls, and he becomes violent with his wife when he gets frustrated. Doc Holiday is shown by McMurtry to be a better gambler than Wyatt, a heavy drinker, and a womanizer who is not the least bit particular about the women he beds. The author has these two characters exchanging clever one-liners and raunchy asides throughout most of the narrative.

The Last Kind Words Saloon traipses across the American west as the sun is beginning to set. Wyatt and Doc sense the darkness coming on, and slowly it consumes them until all that remains are legends.

If I had to guess, I would think this was written just to show that a writer who wrote seriously in his youth could use his skills in old age to write a ridiculous put down of historical figures because he wanted to prove that his fans no longer had any judgement. They would swallow even dreck, if it had his name on it. Picking Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday to demean is to mock the heart of Old West romanticism.

He was very pleased to receive it

A not-too-sympathetic tale of characters we're familiar with as they most likely existed. An unromantic, wry look at a hard-scrabble existence on unforgiving land.