Blazing Saddles

Larry McMurtry rides into town with a six-shootin' Western comedy.

TELEGRAPH DAYS

A Novel

By Larry McMurtry

Simon & Schuster. 289 pp. $25

Easterners write literature; Southerners write literature; Westerners write Westerns. For years, that adage was a burr under the saddle of writers west of the Mississippi -- until Larry McMurtry won the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove and moved the Western out of the genre category.

With Telegraph Days , the prolific Texas writer of fiction and nonfiction, who also won an Academy Award for the script of "Brokeback Mountain," has done a bit of backsliding. Telegraph Days is no Pulitzer contender, but it's still a darn good read: an entertaining spoof about the Wild West that brings alive the romance of outlaws, gunfighters and shootouts.

McMurtry parts with the real West right there, of course. Dying in the West was no more romantic than dying anywhere else. The real West was a sober place, peopled by fortune hunters, psychopaths, charlatans and a few decent people. But how much fun is that? In Telegraph Days , McMurtry puts aside the history of greed and conquest to recreate the West of the dime novels and Wild West shows, the land of bigger-than-life characters -- an era more Cat Ballou than Clint Eastwood.

The heroine is Nellie Courtright, a very forward young lady -- actually, a bit of a slut. (She's already canoodled with Wild Bill Hickok and George Custer.) In her own words, she's "twenty-two, kissable, and of an independent disposition." Nellie and her brother Jackson, 17, are orphaned after their father "hung himself to death." This is not an introspective book, so we're not sure why their father committed suicide, but the deaths of a wife, six children and various servants in the days since they all left Virginia for a better life in the Cimarron country might have had something to do with it. Besides, death is no stranger in Texas. When a neighbor hears of their father's demise, he says, "Damnit! I expect you'd welcome breakfast." The orphans spend little time mourning. Instead, they rush off to the nearest town, Rita Blanca, where Nellie convinces the sheriff, one of her paramours, to make her brother a deputy. Nellie takes over the telegraph office.

Jackson has barely strapped on his gun before the six dreaded Yazee brothers ride into town, murder the sheriff and are about to club Nellie and Jackson. When Nellie commands her brother to shoot, he fires six bullets, each one striking the heart of a Yazee. "That makes you the biggest hero in the whole West!" Nellie tells him. Journalists and others, including Buffalo Bill Cody, descend on Rita Blanca to interview the boy-hero. The showman wants to hire Jackson, but the boy's shooting luck has deserted him, so Cody employs Nellie to oversee his far-flung investments. From there her adventures continue, to Tombstone and the OK Corral and eventually out to Hollywood, where the Old West is celebrated and romanticized on the new silver screen.

"Once is enough to live your life through, ain't it?" a friend asks toward the end of the book. Nellie agrees. After all, who could live that life twice? With Telegraph Days , McMurtry has created a modern-day dime novel, a romantic knock-up of the West -- proof that an old-fashioned oater can be as much fun to read as a literary work. ·

Sandra Dallas is the author of six novels including, most recently, "New Mercies."