Annie Potts Books

I was quite disappointed. Heroine seemed very unrealistic. Larry' M's awesome talent seemed shelved for this book. Also the boy who shot the 5 bandit brothers in the heart with 5 bullets? Wha - ? That is just cheezeball comic book! Sorry, Larry, but this book was not worthy of you.

McMurtry's latest Western is garnering mixed reviews, but I liked it a lot, except for the ending. It's a brisk faux-historical burlesque romp, and wicked funny. Marie Antoinette Courtwright, an unwitting pioneer at the tail end of the Old West, lands on her feet, and on her back, in a set-piece tour that includes her attempted seduction of Buffalo Bill, hiring on as his accountant, her slapdown of the Earps, her eyewitness report on the OK Corral dustup, and her making millions, writing dime-novel accounts of her Western adventures.

It's weightless fluff, mostly, but *good* fluff, and had enought versimilitude to send me to Google and Wikipedia, to see if Buffalo Bill really did have someone like Nellie in his life (it appears not, but the other details are correct).

McMurtry spent years in futile attempts to demystify the Old West of cowboys and gunfighters. Futile, because everybody loves a good story, and building railroads, churches, schools and hospitals just isn't very dramatic. So the real story of settling and civilizing the West gets buried under exciting legends of cowboys and Indians, gunfighters and lawmen...

McMurtry's figured this out, finally, and now he's having fun subverting the silliness. You'll have fun with it, too. Except for the ending, which just kind of tails off. Up to then, it's great.

Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman

I must confess I have never found Larry McMurtry easy to read. In fact I cannot recall finishing one of his novels, even Lonesome Dove, which won a Pulitzer Prize and allegedly put the Western genre on the literary map. McMurtry seemed to me determined not to over-romanticise the Old West by making the action too exciting and so went to the other extreme of making it plodding. However, if those narratives proved as heavy as damper, Telegraph Days is light as soufflé. To read the first page is to devour the novel. There is a tongue in cheek flavour to this picaresque story recounted by the decidedly uninhibited Marie Antoinette (Nellie) Courtright. In 1876 her father takes his family west from Virginia into what becomes the Oklahoma Panhandle. Along the way his wife and most of their offspring die and, suitably dispirited, Dad "hangs himself to death." Presumably he was smart enough to realise that his twenty-two years old daughter could very well take care of herself, and would look after his not very bright seventeen years old son, Jackson. Having buried dad, Nellie and Jackson move to Rita Blanca, a town whose most conspicuous building is a two-storey adobe jail with accompanying gallows. The sheriff is sweet on Nellie so agrees to hire Jackson as deputy while Nellie takes over the Telegraph office. In no time Jackson (under Nellie's direction) has shot to death six violent outlaws in as many seconds and Nellie's account of the incident launches her career as a popular writer. This draws Colonel William Frederick (Buffalo Bill) Cody to her side and before she knows it she is managing his new Wild West Show. By the book's end Nellie, having been on hand with history all over the West and in the straw with most of its `heroes', is writing scripts for the first movie `westerns'. It's nonsense but it's fun. Enjoy.

A McMurtry fan, I found this book totally disappointing. In the final stages of his career, he apparently is just coasting. Some day, someone will write a great novel about the last years of the American West and someone else will make an epic movie about it but this poor effort leads me to believe that McMurtry has peaked and is now on a long slide into obscurity. If Telegraph Days had been written by an unknown author it would have sold a couple hundred copies...to the author's friends and relatives. For some reason McMurtry seems to want to debunk that period in American history. Western story aficinados should rent a copy of Tombstone rather than spending 8 bucks for this novella, which belongs in one of the old western story magazines that were forgotten and discarded after a quick read.

Pound for pound, few writers can compare with Larry McMurtry. The Pulitzer Prize winner has penned several contempary classics--among them, 'Terms of Endearment', 'The Last Picture Show', and the epic 'Lonesome Dove'.

So it's beyond disappointment when a writer as talented as McMurtry spits out a contrived, one-dimensional shell of a novel. And that's being kind to TELEGRAPH DAYS, McMurtry's "alleged" spoof of the cheap dime store novels of the 19th Century. This is a Western dominated by unimagination; by the "adventures" of Nellie Courtright, a young woman who roams the frontier, subsequently rubbing elbows with all of the famous--and infamous--icons: Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, Jesse James, the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday, General William Sherman, Billy the Kid, to name but a paltry few.

Setting aside such a titanic suspension of disbelief, this is a book whose author blatantly goes through the motions--this is a book penned for nothing more than a contractual obligation to a publisher. There is no development, no depth, no dire conflict--no feeling. It's a rambling story that never sets a pace and ends with a whimpering yawn. . .that ends with nary an afterthought.

What's most frustrating is the fact had TELEGRAPH DAYS been written by an unknown, it never would have seen the light of day--or it would have been self-published. And that would do even more of a disservice to self-publishing.
--D. Mikels, Author The Reckoning