Telegraph Days was published by Simon & Schuster in 2006. Nellie Courtright is an orphan raised in a small Kansas town who discovers two talents: she can shoot with remarkable accuracy, and she can operate a telegraph key. These skills take her across the West in the 1870s and 1880s, where she encounters — in rapid, implausible succession — virtually every famous figure of the era: Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull, and assorted others.
The novel is openly, deliberately absurd. McMurtry makes no pretense of historical accuracy — the encounters are contrived, the chronology is compressed, and the famous figures are deflated to life-size or below. Wyatt Earp is vain and mediocre. Doc Holliday coughs. Billy the Kid is a nuisance. The point is not to tell a realistic story but to demonstrate, one more time, that the mythic West is a collective hallucination — a story Americans tell themselves about who they are, which bears almost no relation to what actually happened.
Nellie is an engaging narrator — wry, unsentimental, clear-eyed about her own limitations — but the novel lacks the emotional depth of McMurtry’s major work. Critics noted that McMurtry in his late period seemed to be writing faster than he was thinking, and Telegraph Days has the feel of a book written in a few weeks by a man who has already said everything he has to say about the West but cannot stop saying it.
Collecting Telegraph Days
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2006): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good: $5–$15
- Signed: $25–$60