A quick, enjoyable read by one of my favorite authors. In his final novel, McMurtry spins a short yarn around the historical characters Charles Goodnight, Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday. Though the story is brief, McMurtry displays his continued mastery of character development and dialogue. Not his best, but worth a read for fans. ( )

I would have enjoyed this more if I had known it was more a collection of sketches featuring mostly Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, along with several other characters from McMurtry's stories. I was puzzling over trying to make sense of the narrative until I finally realized that there really was no narrative, and by then nearly half the book was gone. Yes, I am that dense.

So by the time I finally settled in to just enjoy the characters and the prose, there wasn't enough left to really enjoy.

Audiobook, borrowed from my public library. Outstanding performances by Tom Stechschulte and Carine Montbertrand. ( )

The Last Kind Words Saloon is the opposite of McMurtry's masterpiece, Lonesome Dove. The Last Kind Words Saloon is a short novella that focuses on Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday as well as a series of other intriguing characters (some that come from other McMurtry's works) as they roam and ramble around the American West. The story is told through a series of short chapters (not uncommon to McMurtry) and vignettes. The novel ends with the famous shoot out at the OK Corral but it isn't a glorified Hollywood shoot out. In fact, it's quite anticlimactic.

McMurtry dabbled in short prose more often than folks think and in a way, The Last Kind Words Saloon, is McMurtry exercising this strength of his. It also feels cinematic (McMurtry also worked movie scripts). McMurtry accurately captures this novel's flavor in his preface as “a ballad in prose whose characters are afloat in time; their legends and their lives in history rarely match”. Quoting the director John Ford: “when you had to choose between history and legend, print the legend. And so I’ve done.” What McMurtry has done, like the great John Ford, is taken the history and made his own sprawling, mythic American Western legend out of it. It might not be accurate or what you think but it's also superbly human.

The Last Kind Words Saloon is a mythic, melancholy, humorous journey through a different time through the eyes of legends. And it may not rank as one of McMurtry's greatest novels, it certainly, and if you allow it to, can move you. ( )

Like for many others, this fell flat for me. I don't get what it's supposed to be. It's far removed from Lonesome Dove's heights and it's not even a Dead Man's Walk. A meditation on the western heroes and some attempt to contrast the legend with a less glamorous reality? Except he states the opposite from the outset. ( )

McMurty's Lonesome Dove was a classic - poetically told, yet compelling and involving. Last Kind Words is none of the above. McMurtry tries to put a new twist on an old tale, which he does. I'm not sure that it was a successful twist. ( )