Writers have always been the most interesting people I meet, and they almost all tend to be passionate readers as well. They're also impulsive and vibrant and twisty and unpredictable and curious and generally enjoyable to talk to and to get into adventures with. Reading and writing have always gone hand-in-hand with me. I was…
Larry McMurtry mentions in his brief introduction to The Last Kind Words Saloon, “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 the legend. And so I’ve done.” But the reader will quickly realize that McMurtry’s…
In 2003’s Monte Walsh, a story about the end days of the Old West cowboy, our protagonist played by Tom Selleck tells another long-time ranch hand that as long as there is one cow and one cowboy, it ain’t over. The film closes with Monte heroically galloping away on horseback, leaping over a car stuck…
Bandolero! (1968): In her first western film, Raquel Welch is being lustfully eyed by a gang of outlaws when one hard case drools the obvious, “She sure is pretty.” To which Dean Martin playing the part of Dee Bishop replies, “She’s not pretty. She’s beautiful. Beautiful as something real fine. Something you can’t never have,…
Brothers shouldn’t get involved with the same woman. There could be a whole subgenre or books/movies in which this scenario is involved, and I feel confident stating that tragedy would be a common theme. Bob Crane (no, not that Bob Crane), narrator of Hill Girl—Charles Williams’s excellent work of farmyard pulp from 1951—never had any…
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry’s 1985 epic of the old west, was the kind of success that can ruin a writer. Before its release, McMurtry was the widely respected author of “literary” novels like Moving On and All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers. Despite being pegged as a regional writer, the native Texan was…
