Masterson - Hardcover

Wheeler, Richard S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312870477 ISBN 13: 9780312870478

Publisher: Forge, 1999

Synopsis

The year is 1919 and William Barclay "Bat" Masterson, frontier lawman, gambler, and crony of Wyatt Earp, is working as a sports columnist on the New York Morning Telegraph and enjoying the last legal Manhattan whiskey with his friends as Prohibition looms.
Bat is bothered, not just by passage of the Volstead Act, but by the legendry that has grown up about him. He takes pride in the fact that, in all his years as sheriff and marshal in the West's most dangerous boomtowns, he has never killed a man. Yet over the decades since he abandoned his gun-toting life to carve a career in journalism as a respected sportswriter and boxing authority, sensational dime-novel stories have dogged his footsteps and made him a legend, literally, in his own time.
Worse yet, Bat has to admit that while he respects the truth, he enjoys the legendry and the doors it has opened for him.
To try to find the real Bat Masterson, he and his wife, Emma - a former showgirl who works as a costumer and confidante among the dancers in Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies - take a train trip back West, where both spent their salad days.
The journey takes them to Dodge City, Trinidad, Cheyenne, Denver, Leadville, and Los Angeles. In the burgeoning movie industry in southern California, both Bat and Emma are given parts in a William S. Hart silent Western film; in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, Bat visits Doc Holliday's grave and makes his peace with him; in Denver, he springs a special surprise on Emma - the only woman he has ever loved.

About this title

About the Author:

RICHARD S. WHEELER is the author of over fifty novels of the American West. He holds five Spur Awards and the Owen Wister Award for lifetime contributions to the literature of the West. He lives in Livingston, Montana, near Yellowstone Park, and is married to Sue Hart, an English professor at Montana State University in Billings.

From Publishers Weekly:

Again depicting characters with frailties as well as heroic qualities, the prolific Wheeler's 25th novel (after Aftershocks) is a sprightly romp of revisionist western history. In 1919, legendary gunfighter Bat Masterson is a 64-year-old New York City sportswriter who suddenly becomes worried about the inglorious and mostly false reputation he has endured for decades. Certainly, he had hunted buffalo and fought Indians at the Battle of Adobe Walls; he'd been a gambler and a lawman. But everyone still believes he's an incorrigible womanizer who has run cathouses and gunned down dozens of men. He does admit to being quite the ladies' man, but bristles at the dime-novel exaggerations that depict him swaggering with 26 notches in his pistols and carrying the heads of seven outlaws around in a sack. Accompanied by his common-law wife, Emma, Bat decides to return to Dodge City, Tombstone and Denver to clear his name and to establish that he killed only one man, who richly deserved it, and that he is really a nice fellow if folks would just get to know him. This journey is a hoot as the old lawman finds that the public wants the legend, not the truth. When Bat visits his old friend Wyatt Earp in L.A., he meets actor William S. Hart and learns about why western films are so popular in Hollywood. Bat reminisces with Emma and a few old saddle pals, but finally gives up his quest when he realizes that folks want mythic, infamous heroes, and "you may as well sit back and enjoy the ride because there's no way to get off the train." This is classic Wheeler, a solid story about real people told with wit, compassion and a bit of whimsy. Author tour. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Forge
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0312870477
• ISBN 13: 9780312870478
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 253