The Last Kind Words Saloon

I did not care for this one unfortunately. I found the premise to sound pretty interesting, Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp palling around before their time in Tombstone, sounds like fun. However, this just came off as being sexist and racist. All of the female characters were treated horribly and the minority characters were made out to be stupid or border line evil. I'm just glad that it was short.

Wanted to like it-couldn't. Throw out the male characters-they are useless, the gals show the old time western character but really need to dump the useless bunch of dodos they are paired up with. What was McMurty doing here-trying to make us hate the West.?

McMurtry isn't taking himself as seriously these days as he did a generation ago. It becomes him.

Peels the Wyatt Earp Doc Holliday mythology the way we'd peel an onion and replaces it with a more human mythology that includes personal traits a lot nearer reality.

Follows the friendship of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday with supporting characters such as Charlie Goodnight as it traces their journey from Long Grass, Texas, to the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.
It starts out weakly, but gathers momentum. In the 58 short chapters, the dry humor and brief dialogue works well at times, but the development of characters and situations is a bit wanting.

Disappointing McMurtry Western.

"Lonesome Dove" it ain't. Sparse, a quick read, and a quick write. I think Larry knocked it out between several bourbons and branch water at his favorite watering hole. Reader Sanrin is correct; the female characters are more vital than the males.

Presented as a "ballad," the novel is spare -- in dialogue, in descriptions -- and broken into a number of brief chapters that follow historic characters such as the Earp brothers, Doc Holiday, and Buffalo Bill as the WIld West draws to a close. Unfortunately, the characters are drawn so tersely that it's hard to care about them. The female characters seem to have more variety, and they convey the hardships of living out on the plains.

Short, sharp, dry, dusty. I really enjoyed the dry humor and sparse dialogue. I've read a number of other McMurtry novels and like this one the best. If you do end up liking this book, try Pete Dexter's Deadwood.

This short novel of 60 short chapters has some moments that capture the McMurtry magic of Lonesome Dove and Buffalo Girls, but those moments are few.

It has to be extremely frustrating for an author to have any new work judged in the light of his earlier work, but when you create such an iconic masterpiece like Lonesome Dove it should be expected.

This tale of the Earp brothers and Charlie Goodnight had the possibility of greatness, but McMurtry did not spend enough time on the characters to allow the reader to care about them. Even Goodnight, a favorite of McMurtry, is only an faint blur against an impressionistic background.