The Last Kind Words Saloon is a testament to how much you can get away with when you’re a famous novelist. The Last Kind Words Saloon purports to be a novel about Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday and the road to their famous shootout in Tombstone, Arizona, but in truth it is barely a novel at all. With 60 short chapters in a novel under 200 pages long there is barely time for any plot to occur. McMurtry tries to dispel some myths of the Old […]
The Game Within the Game After the Game
This is a book for a niche audience. Obviously you’d have to be a baseball fan to even have a passing interest, but on top of that you’d really need to be a Mets fan to care enough to read it. Not only that but you’d probably have to be old enough to remember the 1986 Mets or at least have a specific interest in that historic team. It would also help if you were given the book by your mom. For those of you […]
Murder and Mayhem in Oklahoma
Everyone’s history deserves to be told. One of the principal reactions I had to David Grann’s new book, about a series of heinous murders committed against wealthy Osage Indians in the 1920s, was incredulity that I had never heard even an inkling about this terrible chapter in American history. The story, in brief: after being forced out of their original homeland the Osage Indians found themselves on a rocky, arid plain in Oklahoma that was given to them essentially because no one else wanted it. […]
Murder from the Inside Out
Ross Macdonald’s plots are just as intricate as Raymond Chandler’s, but somehow he manages to tie it all together with no loose ends. (Who did kill that chauffeur anyway?) The only way I can imagine Macdonald putting together his mysteries is by writing a straightforward novel without a detective, then putting all the events in the wrong order for his detective, ex-cop Lew Archer to discover one at a time. All the staples of the Lew Archer series are on display here, the post-war California […]