The Shootist

John Bernard Books is the only surviving top gunfighter in a vanishing American West. He rides into El Paso in the year 1901, on the day of Queen Victoria's demise, there to be told by a doctor that he has a terminal illness. As word spreads that the famous assassin has reached the end, an assortment of vultures gather to feast upon his corpse - among them a gambler, a rustler, an undertaker, an old love, a reporter; even a boy. Books outwits them all, however, by selecting the where, when, and manner of his death. The climactic gunfight is one of the finest examples of muscular prose ever written. Now remembered only as John Wayne's last movie, The Shootist deserves to be re-discovered as a masterful example of a now rather overlooked genre, and can be compared to other classic western novels such as Shane or The Ox Box Incident.