The Last Kind Words Saloon - Larry McMurtry

Written by Larry McMurtry
Read by Carine Montbertrand, Tom Stechschulte
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
Release date: May 5, 2014
Duration: 03:49:15

Larry McMurtry has done more than any other living writer to shape our literary imagination of the American West.

With The Last Kind Words Saloon he returns again to the vivid and unsparing portrait of the nineteenth-century and cowboy lifestyle made so memorable in his classic Lonesome Dove. Evoking the greatest characters and legends of the Old Wild West, here McMurtry tells the story of the closing of the American frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures: Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.

Opening in the settlement of Long Grass, Texas-not quite in Kansas, and nearly New Mexico-we encounter the taciturn Wyatt, whiling away his time in between bottles, and the dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc, more adept at poker than extracting teeth. Now hailed as heroes for their days of subduing drunks in Abilene and Dodge-more often with a mean look than a pistol-Wyatt and Doc are living out the last days of a way of life that is passing into history, two men never more aware of the growing distance between their lives and their legends.

Along with Wyatt’s wife, Jessie, who runs the titular saloon, we meet Lord Ernle, an English baron; the exotic courtesan San Saba, “the most beautiful whore on the plains”; Charlie Goodnight, the Texas Ranger turned cattle driver last seen in McMurtry’s Comanche Moon, Quanah Parker and Nellie Courtright, the witty and irrepressible heroine of Telegraph Days. McMurtry traces the rich and varied friendship of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday from the town of Long Grass to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Denver, then to Mobetie, Texas, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona, culminating with the famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral, rendered here in McMurtry’s stark and peerless prose.

McMurtry’s short novel is a brief series of vignettes featuring Western favorites…This funny novel does include a good deal of ribald humor, but those seeking the genre’s typical plotty action will come up short. The audio treatment is excellent, and narrator Tom Stechschulte has one of the best voices for Westerns. — Library Journal,

“Tom Stechschulte and Carine Montbertrand do well in narrating this work from the current dean of Western writers. Stechschulte delivers the majority of the work, providing both narrative and dialogue in his rich, gravelly baritone. Montbertrand is the production’s host, and at the end of the story reads an account by Nellie Courtright, which is spot-on in every way. The combination of these two voices brings to life the realities of life in the Old West as McMurtry dramatizes Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in their sunset years. We hear an unsparing and gritty picture as the two old lawmen–and others such as Buffalo Bill and Kiowa Chief Satanta–see their world disappearing.”–AudioFile