Roy & Lillie, A Love Story

'Unfinished business leaves room to daydream. Theirs is the ideal love story, because it never had a chance to be anything else!'[p.265]

It's probably my favorite genre 'historical fiction.' While browsing through the library last week I came upon a new acquisition by the library, 'Roy & Lille: A Love Story' by Loren D. Estleman. I'm not one of the worlds' greatest western fans - my father certainly was - he even had my sister record westerns while he was at church, so that he could see them later! I would have spoke about the 'faith side of it' but dad would have said, 'she's not going to church anyway, so......' and he was right.

This book, thinly based on history is a fascinating book, absolutely 'no' off color words, the author takes a little known story from history, the correspondence that went on between 'Judge Roy Bean: The Law West of Pecos' and an English actress Lillie Langtry and builds a romantic novel where you continually want to hurry the story up so that Lillie can visit the town in the old west that the Judge has named for her. Finally, Lillie has become a US citizen, and rarely returns to her birth country, she buys a ticket that passes by the town named for her,[as she journeys to a farm in California that she purchased from the proceeds of a gift a suitor had given her, which is a scandal itself] and the railroad has agreed to make a special stop there so she can visit the town and meet the judge, who has a life-time free pass on the railroad. So the day comes when Lillie is riding on the train and it stops just outside Langtry..... oops, gotta go!

Let me say that the concluding chapter, the acknowledgements, is well worth reading the whole book ... matter of fact that chapter brings everything together and makes you want to rush out and get another of Estleman's novels.
ESTLEMAN, Loren D., Roy & Lillie: A Love Story, New York, N.Y., 2010
Tom Doherty Associates Publishers, A Forge Book, ISBN: 9780765322289
ENJOY