Cheap Masterson (Book) (Richard S. Wheeler) Price

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Customer Reviews of Masterson

The old man, plagued by diabetes and a love of alcohol, is about to be greatly inconvenienced by Prohibition. He is getting close to the end, but he hasn't finished what the psychologist Erik Erikson called the seventh stage of life, coming to terms with the past. It's 1919 and he's working as a sports columnist (especially boxing, on which he was an expert) for the New York Morning Telegraph, where the Hollywood columnist is Hedda Hopper. Partly because of her interest, Bat decides to tour his past, literally, taking along Emma, who has become his life-companion through persistence and a sense of humor. No need for a stagecoach -- the railroad will do.

Dodge is shocked by his appearance, a demon from the past they are trying to deny. Another place is in love with the shootist they believe him to be. In Hollywood William Hart initiates Bat and Emma into the world of the silent Western, quickly casting them in an improvised movie that is little more than a child's game of "Let's play guns -- you be the bad guy and I'll..." In a dozen towns Bat goes to the scene of traumatic confrontations and finds them removed, boarded up, sunk into decrepitude. What kind of sense can he make of all this? Last century's news. Comforted by alcohol, Emma, and fairly dependable good meals, he is able to persist but not to sum it all up.

The couple zigzags thorugh the West visiting the personalities left from long ago -- though it wasn't that long, was it? You remember Hedda Hopper, don't you? At that time she was a bigger and more powerful force than Masterson, with only her typewriter to render the ratatatat. Baby Doe is an ascetic broke old woman. Wyatt Earp is a resentful paranoid old man, he and his wife fighting hard to keep up a front. Some are only headstones, and probably not the original ones at that. One newspaper man comes only to attack Masterson as a two-bit crook and killer; another comes with research to reveal that there are no known deaths except the first one, which was clearly self-defense, and though Bat made his living in the shadowy demi-monde of gambling and stage shows, he was never a keeper of whorehouses or a seller of drugs.

What's more important is Masterson's slow realization that A) he actually cares about being seen honestly and B) his best defender and ally has always been the woman he took for granted, Emma. And so, in Denver, a town he never liked, he does the right thing, and comes home ready for Erikson's eighth and final stage: Wisdom.

Fact or Fiction?
I really enjoyed this novel.I have read a lot of stuff on the Old West ;both fact[?] and fiction. As for fiction I like Longarm and Trailsman.However part of the fascination is trying to sort out which is which.The author takes a novel approach in trying to do this and produces a very readible and convincing book.The list of books at the end is appreciated;thanks.

Well done
Wheeler assumes Masterson's identity and writes a first-person account of a 1919 trip the old lawman, gambler and businessman might have taken out west to make sense of his life and legend.
The author seems to care very much about getting historical details right, which is important to me as I like to learn something about history when I read historical novels.
Masterson was, by 1919, a newspaper columnist living in New York City with his wife Emma. Wheeler has Masterson uneasy about the dichotomy between his legend and his real life and sends him back into the American West to reach some conclusion about how he would like to be remembered.
It's a fact-filled odyssey that takes Masterson to Dodge City, Trinidad, Los Angeles, Leadville and Denver (among other places). Along the way he reminisces about his life in the West, talks to Wyatt Earp, gets a bit part in a William S. Hart movie, discovers the result of a forgotten act of kindness in Denver and formally marries Emma (a rite they had somehow neglected oh those many years).
There's a touching scene when he visites the grave of Doc Holliday and hears that the long-dead dentist's widow has been paying to have flowers put on the grave every week for years. "God bless you, Big Nose Kate," he says to no one.
It's a masterful book, no pun intended, and I'm glad I read it. But it suffers from lack of a plot, which is why I'm giving it just three stars. I won't fault the author for that, however, as the whole premise mitigates against the use of a plot in the meaning that the term is generally accepted to have.
"Masterson" does exactly what historical fiction is supposed to do. It entertains and instructs simultaneously. I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in the reality of the American West but has trouble digesting non-fiction history books.