Death on a Texan Plain

The title I thought of years ago but never got round to writing the book. The problem is, I’m no Larry McMurtry Nor did I grow up in a house or city devoid of books.

Larry McMurtry, on the other hand, grew up in a house that had no books and in a town that had no library. And no Kindle then to cushion the blow. Perhaps in response to that, he died leaving behind a private collection of 28,000 books and a further 400,000 books homed in 4 warehouses in Archer City.

In his words: “Forming that library and reading it is surely one of the principal achievements of my life.”(Memoir, Book.) This from a man who found time to write the Lonesome Dove  quadrilogy and many more before that; his second novel, Horseman, Pass By was turned into the film Hud; his third novel The Last Picture Show into the film of that name, similarly, a later novel Terms of Endearment. He also developed a sideline as a script editor, sharing an Oscar for his work on Brokeback Mountain.

And yet for all that, he concluded: “Little of my work in fiction is pedestrian, but, on the other hand, none of my work is really great.”

He offered a similarly downbeat description of his hometown, Archer City: “Simply put, it is not a nice town.” And was even more disparaging about the larger towns in north-central Texas, Wichita Falls, Lubbock and Amarillo. For me, they have wonderfully evocative names; not for Larry McMurtry: “I have always found them uniformly graceless and unattractive. In summer they are hot and dry, in winter cold, dusty and windswept; the population is rigidly Protestant on the surface and underneath seethes with imperfectly repressed malice.”

For all that, he is one of Texas’s favourite sons. The book remains so popular in the Lone Star state that the director of the TV series Lonesome Dove felt: “the whole of Texas was looking over my shoulder. … In Texas, Lonesome Dove is like the Bible.” Which makes it all the more surprising that a tone deaf Republican politician Jared Paterson opined that Texas schools “might need to ban Lonesome Dove,” because of its sexual content, though admitting he himself had never read it. To see what happened next read  here 

For me too, it is the bible of the ‘old west,’ a Tardis that takes you there and back in time for tea.

The entire quadrilogy:  Lonesome Dove, Dead Man’s Walk, Comanche Moon, and the Streets of Laredo are some of the finest books I have ever read and without doubt the most evocative westerns you are ever likely to read. My tragedy is, I can never re-read a book for fear of disturbing the magic. I’m content to keep it lingering hot in the mind.