Masterson - Softcover

Wheeler, Richard S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0595390226 ISBN 13: 9780595390229

Publisher: Iuniverse Inc, 2006

Synopsis

After two decades as a New York sports writer, Bat Masterson revisits the western locales of his youth, and discovers nothing is the same. He's heard a lot of nonsense about his early life, and he intends to set the record straight. But that proves to be much harder than he imagined back in New York. On the eve of Prohibition, he and his wife Emma head for Dodge City, once a wild town but now the province of bucolic wheat farmers who are ashamed of the town's wild reputation and try to erase it. They travel to Las Vegas, New Mexico, Trinidad, Colorado, and end up in Los Angeles, where they meet an old and cranky Wyatt Earp, and do a little acting in an early silent film. Old, diabetic, hard-drinking Bat isn't so sure he likes the new West, the West he helped create. The easy, genial, tough old lawman isn't quite ready for a parched and puritanical America, but at least the long trip into the West gave him a chance to revise the legend that follows him everywhere.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard S. Wheeler is the award-winning winning author of seventy novels, most of them set in the American West. He is the recipient of six Spur Awards given by Western Writers of America. He also has received the Owen Wister Award, given for lifetime contributions to the literature of the West. He lives in Livingston, Montana, in the heart of the country he loves to write about.

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: Iuniverse Inc
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0595390226
• ISBN 13: 9780595390229
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256