Does the action fizzle when the Wild West meets Old Age? Not a chance.
Larry McMurtry’s latest, “Streets of Laredo,” brings back some of the characters from “Lonesome Dove” more than a decade farther down the dusty trail.
Picture the legendary Texas ranger, Woodrow Call, with fingers so swollen and stiffened by arthritis that he can hardly pull the trigger. But he’s still in the saddle, tracking down a young Mexican bandit named Joey Garza, who has been robbing trains.
Call figures that with his experience and wiliness he can outwit the theoretically impatient youth. He has underestimated the situation. And he doesn’t have much help to fall back on. He’s joined by an unlikely crew that includes a New York accountant and a homesick deputy.
This is a larger-than-life story that, like “Lonesome Dove,” meanders all over Texas and northern Mexico. It deserves to be told aloud, and Simon and Schuster does that in a 21-hour, full-length recording of the book.
The only problem is the $50 pricetag. Not that it’s unreasonable. In some ways, $50 is a bargain for a 21-hour recording when you consider that the standard three-hour recording costs $16. Then again, unless your grandfather was a Vanderbilt or you plan to split the cost with a few listening friends, $50 is a lot to shell out for anything.
Happily, narrator Daniel von Bargen provides as good an excuse as any for buying a recording that costs precisely twice as much as the hardback. As with any of the arts, good performances don’t come cheap.
He has just enough gravel in his voice to evoke that creaky-saddle mood, but he backs off from making them sound like rasping geezers.
Also, he has a way of varying his anonymous “narrator” voice, spicing it up with a hint of the tone he uses for the character of the moment.
Von Bargen joins a string of super readers for Simon and Schuster’s McMurtry recordings. First there was Betty Buckley, reading “Buffalo Girls,” then Dana Ivey on “The Evening Star.”
Each of those, too, was unabridged. McMurtry has refused to allow his work to be abridged, and I applaud his stubbornness in the face of what must have been a lot of pressure.
– If “Laredo” prompts a taste for Westerns, there are plenty available and most of the big names are there. But new to the scene is a $24.95 collection of Western short stories from the audio company The Mind’s Eye. The authors on the six-hour recording are Tony Hillerman, Max Brand, Harte, Mark Twain and others; the reader is Jack Palance.
