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Strange peaches;: A novel
A TV western star quits his successful series and returns to Dallas to make a documentary film that reveals the truth about his home town. His quest forces him to learn if he is capable of using his six-gun for real as he moves from booze and radical politics in oil men's palaces into the infamous Carousel Club and the underworld of arms and dope smuggling in a city ripe for the murder of a President.
375 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1972
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January 2, 2018
One of the best novels written about Texas, a first-hand account of Dallas during the time of the Kennedy Assassination. Here's some of what I wrote about Bud Shrake's "Strange Peaches" in my book Texas Literary Outlaws:
Bud Shrake’s Dallas novel, a full-throttle roar through the months leading up to the Kennedy assassination, was published in May 1972. The dust jacket describes Strange Peaches as "a novel about the making of a modern outlaw," and the cover portrays a peach—with a marijuana plant rising from the stem.
The novel is set in the early 1960s and opens as John Lee Wallace, the long-haired star of the hit TV series Six Guns Across Texas, returns to Dallas. On the flight home, John Lee sits beside a former colonel who has become a lobbyist. The colonel rants about Kennedy “giving this country away to the devil,” and he growls that Cuban leader Fidel Castro should be shot for nationalizing prized property once held by Dallas millionaires. Communists threats to U.S. order and prosperity are popping up everywhere, the colonel says, even in Vietnam, where, “little yellow bald-headed Buddhist sons of bitches, they kneel down in public and burn theirselfs up with gasoline. What the hell kind of a way is that to act?” The man finally begins to relax as the plane lands. He turns to John Lee and smiles. “Dallas,” he says. “My favorite city.”
John Lee, modeled on Shrake, moves into an apartment with his best friend, Buster Gregory, modeled on Gary Cartwright. Together, the two set out to make an uncompromising documentary that will show what Texas is really like. Along the way, their lives intersect with an array of Dallas figures—prankstering millionaires, rabid right-wing businessmen, an aged billionaire based on H.L. Hunt, cheap hoods, Jack Ruby, and “Jingo”—the star stripper at Ruby's nightclub.
Strange Peaches was released with little fanfare or publicity... Bud Shrake went on no promotional tour. Little advertising was expended on the novel, not even in core markets such as Texas.
Still, reviews of Strange Peaches crept into national publications. The New York Times wrote, “this big novel, two parts anger to one part humor, is fast and surefire. And Edwin Shrake’s narrative technique has been amply dosed with Dexedrine. There’s not an ounce of fat on it.” Time magazine hailed Shrake’s “amphetamine apocalypse” that “captures superbly the feeling of combustible chaos that climaxed in the Kennedy assassination.” Book World wrote that Shrake "records scene after memorable scene, some touched with manic humor, all hurtling towards the fateful explosion….there is not a dull page, not even a dull paragraph, in this book." A reviewer for United Press International called Strange Peaches “one of the best-written American novels since World War II.”
But back in Texas, Bud Shrake found an entirely different reception. Most newspapers simply ignored Shrake's book. No mention ever appeared in the anemic book sections of the Houston Post and the San Antonio Express. Those that did review the novel had little kind to say. In the Houston Chronicle, the headline read, "A Sports Writer Takes a Crack at Politics." In Austin, the American-Statesman asked "Is This Texas?" and concluded that Shrake's "puzzling" novel about "sex bums and dope fiends" reflected only a small portion of the state. The Dallas Times-Herald, noting that “the protagonist’s view of Dallas and Texas is not a pleasant one,” judged that “the cleverness of it all is a matter of viewpoint.”
Surprisingly, it was the Dallas Morning News that stood out, running an effusive review. Strange Peaches "could well be the novel that gains [Shrake] overdue recognition in serious literary circles. It is an ironic, sensitive, sometimes brutally realistic, humorous and sexy account of criss-crossing lives in Dallas in the fall of 1963.” There was a good reason for the positive tone—the review was written by Shrake’s friend Jay Milner.
The most contemptuous response ran in the Texas Observer, where Shrake, Cartwright, Brammer, and King were still listed as contributing editors. Book reviewer Roxy Gordon described Strange Peaches as “a long book and a lot of stuff happens between the first of the book and the last.” Gordon’s main aesthetic objection, it turned out, was that Strange Peaches “gets the real and the unreal mixed up.” The satire seemed offensive to Gordon, who refused to believe that right-wing millionaires would machine-gun tame rabbits at a private shooting club. The novel, Gordon decided, is nothing more than “a combination rich-Texan joke/liberal horror story.”
Despite Strange Peaches’ praise in the national media, sales were dismal. The book sold even less than Blessed McGill. Harper’s refused to publish a paperback edition and, Strange Peaches quickly went out of print.
In the years since its publication, Strange Peaches has retained a devoted following among the Texas literati. In 1987 Texas Monthly Press reissued the novel as the third title in its contemporary fiction series. Academicians continue to cite Strange Peaches as one of the state’s significant novels. Tom Pilkington, in State of Mind: Texas Literature and Culture, calls Strange Peaches “an exceptionally powerful evocation of urban life in modern Texas.” Don Graham, writing in the November 2000 issue of Texas Monthly, concluded, “When anybody asks me what Dallas was like during the time of the Kennedy assassination, I always refer them to one book: Edwin "Bud" Shrake's Strange Peaches.”
Strange Peaches transcends the many histories written on the Dallas of that era. In this way it is a marked example of what could be termed “eyewitness fiction.” Stories written by firsthand observers, however fictionalized they may seem, often contain truths and perspectives ignored or underplayed by “fact-based” sources, such as newspapers. This is especially true in Texas, where the state’s newspapers have been notoriously poor. Yet traditionally, Texas historians have relied heavily on newspaper accounts. As a result, Texas literature is replete with examples of eyewitness fiction outstripping history, from Elmer Kelton’s account of the 1950-1957 drought in West Texas—The Time it Never Rained, to Américo Paredes’ novel about Texas Mexicans resisting Anglo encroachment in the Lower Rio Grande Valley—George Washington Gómez. For that matter, there’s also Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place, which provides an unparalleled social history of Austin’s political culture in the 1950s.
In Strange Peaches, Shrake blends his personal history into the larger historical canvas. In this sense, the novel parallels what the narrator, John Lee Wallace, is attempting. Wallace says, “I want to make this into a fictional documentary, using actual people when we can, inventing a few things to help it stick together, re-shooting some parts to show myself in all these places involved…Let this be one good, true, fair thing we can do."
Shrake’s previous novel, Blessed McGill, focused on transcendence. Strange Peaches, in contrast, is a work of resistance. It evokes the themes of the sixties counterculture—with a decidedly Texas twist. Shrake’s portrait reveals a Dallas dominated by materialistic greed and sanctimonious racism. We get views of cornpone ostentatiousness ranging from solid gold toilets to extravagant boasts of financial might. John Lee zeroes in on the source of the nouveau riche’s buffoonery as he observes a gathering of Dallas elite at a party: “Many of them had leaped from the farm or…the Depression shack into the country club and the opera league without a metamorphosis.” Though not many of the rich cared for the arts, they cared about status, and the “coarse-faced lout in the corner might be a multimillionaire with a collection of Remingtons and French Impressionists.”
In Strange Peaches, Dallas’ police dispense frontier justice as they enforce the establishment’s rule. This is most clearly seen in the experience of Hector, a friend of John Lee’s who owns a small Mexican restaurant. When Hector is cleaning up outside at closing time, two Dallas cops stop and accost him. “Hey, you damn greaser, what are you trying to steal?” When Hector explains that he is the owner, the response is “You’re still a damn greaser.” The harassment quickly escalates into physical violence, and the encounter leaves Hector nursing sore ribs, a bloody face, and a long-standing grudge.
The establishment’s control of the city also extends to the news media. As John Lee recounts his early experiences as a police reporter, he acknowledges, “Newspapers, radio, and television did not report violence involving blacks unless it was against whites. They did not report much of anything at all involving blacks…unless it was humorous, like watermelon stealing. But if a black man killed a white man or raped a white woman, you would see detectives in the hall with shotguns, and you had a story.”
One of John Lee’s final news stories involved a civil rights sit-in at a drugstore near the SMU campus. “The drugstore doors were locked and a fumigating company was called to spray the inside of the building with insecticide. The demonstrators withstood the white smoke for fifteen minutes or so. Then they came to the glass doors and begged to be let out. Police and firemen dragged out several who were unconscious.” John Lee interviewed demonstrators, police, and the drugstore owner, who claimed that the demonstrators “had ruined the goods on his shelves.” But John Lee’s story was not used. “The incident was never mentioned on the air or in the newspapers. If such a thing should be reported, I was told, it would encourage other radicals to cause trouble in a peaceful city.”
The undercurrent of resistance churns throughout the novel and assumes forms ranging from small-time hoods with gun-running ambitions to Buster Gregory’s self-cultivated marijuana plant, “Baby Giant,” which grows peacefully in the closet of his apartment home. One man John Lee meets at Jack Ruby’s nightclub explains his own trouble with the law in terms of resistance: “I might of done some stealing a few years ago, but that was mostly just from churches and beer distributors and big chain drugstores, redividing the wealth, you understand.”
John Lee drifts through much of his life, often stoned or hung over and vaguely dissatisfied. He is convinced at a visceral level that the documentary he is making—his art—will provide him with the meaningfulness he’s seeking. The focus becomes more clear after Kennedy is assassinated. His friend Buster tells him, "I don't like this movie, John Lee, but we've got to see the end of it…. It's the movie we've been making."14 By the end of the book, reality has overtaken the documentary. John Lee finds himself in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and his television persona takes a surreal turn as he becomes, at last, “a modern outlaw.”
One other note: Bud Shrake's "Strange Peaches," focusing as it does on the climate in Dallas during the time leading up to the Kennedy Assassination, helped inspire my later non-fiction book on the same subject, DALLAS 1963, co-written with my friend Bill Minutaglio.
Bud Shrake’s Dallas novel, a full-throttle roar through the months leading up to the Kennedy assassination, was published in May 1972. The dust jacket describes Strange Peaches as "a novel about the making of a modern outlaw," and the cover portrays a peach—with a marijuana plant rising from the stem.
The novel is set in the early 1960s and opens as John Lee Wallace, the long-haired star of the hit TV series Six Guns Across Texas, returns to Dallas. On the flight home, John Lee sits beside a former colonel who has become a lobbyist. The colonel rants about Kennedy “giving this country away to the devil,” and he growls that Cuban leader Fidel Castro should be shot for nationalizing prized property once held by Dallas millionaires. Communists threats to U.S. order and prosperity are popping up everywhere, the colonel says, even in Vietnam, where, “little yellow bald-headed Buddhist sons of bitches, they kneel down in public and burn theirselfs up with gasoline. What the hell kind of a way is that to act?” The man finally begins to relax as the plane lands. He turns to John Lee and smiles. “Dallas,” he says. “My favorite city.”
John Lee, modeled on Shrake, moves into an apartment with his best friend, Buster Gregory, modeled on Gary Cartwright. Together, the two set out to make an uncompromising documentary that will show what Texas is really like. Along the way, their lives intersect with an array of Dallas figures—prankstering millionaires, rabid right-wing businessmen, an aged billionaire based on H.L. Hunt, cheap hoods, Jack Ruby, and “Jingo”—the star stripper at Ruby's nightclub.
Strange Peaches was released with little fanfare or publicity... Bud Shrake went on no promotional tour. Little advertising was expended on the novel, not even in core markets such as Texas.
Still, reviews of Strange Peaches crept into national publications. The New York Times wrote, “this big novel, two parts anger to one part humor, is fast and surefire. And Edwin Shrake’s narrative technique has been amply dosed with Dexedrine. There’s not an ounce of fat on it.” Time magazine hailed Shrake’s “amphetamine apocalypse” that “captures superbly the feeling of combustible chaos that climaxed in the Kennedy assassination.” Book World wrote that Shrake "records scene after memorable scene, some touched with manic humor, all hurtling towards the fateful explosion….there is not a dull page, not even a dull paragraph, in this book." A reviewer for United Press International called Strange Peaches “one of the best-written American novels since World War II.”
But back in Texas, Bud Shrake found an entirely different reception. Most newspapers simply ignored Shrake's book. No mention ever appeared in the anemic book sections of the Houston Post and the San Antonio Express. Those that did review the novel had little kind to say. In the Houston Chronicle, the headline read, "A Sports Writer Takes a Crack at Politics." In Austin, the American-Statesman asked "Is This Texas?" and concluded that Shrake's "puzzling" novel about "sex bums and dope fiends" reflected only a small portion of the state. The Dallas Times-Herald, noting that “the protagonist’s view of Dallas and Texas is not a pleasant one,” judged that “the cleverness of it all is a matter of viewpoint.”
Surprisingly, it was the Dallas Morning News that stood out, running an effusive review. Strange Peaches "could well be the novel that gains [Shrake] overdue recognition in serious literary circles. It is an ironic, sensitive, sometimes brutally realistic, humorous and sexy account of criss-crossing lives in Dallas in the fall of 1963.” There was a good reason for the positive tone—the review was written by Shrake’s friend Jay Milner.
The most contemptuous response ran in the Texas Observer, where Shrake, Cartwright, Brammer, and King were still listed as contributing editors. Book reviewer Roxy Gordon described Strange Peaches as “a long book and a lot of stuff happens between the first of the book and the last.” Gordon’s main aesthetic objection, it turned out, was that Strange Peaches “gets the real and the unreal mixed up.” The satire seemed offensive to Gordon, who refused to believe that right-wing millionaires would machine-gun tame rabbits at a private shooting club. The novel, Gordon decided, is nothing more than “a combination rich-Texan joke/liberal horror story.”
Despite Strange Peaches’ praise in the national media, sales were dismal. The book sold even less than Blessed McGill. Harper’s refused to publish a paperback edition and, Strange Peaches quickly went out of print.
In the years since its publication, Strange Peaches has retained a devoted following among the Texas literati. In 1987 Texas Monthly Press reissued the novel as the third title in its contemporary fiction series. Academicians continue to cite Strange Peaches as one of the state’s significant novels. Tom Pilkington, in State of Mind: Texas Literature and Culture, calls Strange Peaches “an exceptionally powerful evocation of urban life in modern Texas.” Don Graham, writing in the November 2000 issue of Texas Monthly, concluded, “When anybody asks me what Dallas was like during the time of the Kennedy assassination, I always refer them to one book: Edwin "Bud" Shrake's Strange Peaches.”
Strange Peaches transcends the many histories written on the Dallas of that era. In this way it is a marked example of what could be termed “eyewitness fiction.” Stories written by firsthand observers, however fictionalized they may seem, often contain truths and perspectives ignored or underplayed by “fact-based” sources, such as newspapers. This is especially true in Texas, where the state’s newspapers have been notoriously poor. Yet traditionally, Texas historians have relied heavily on newspaper accounts. As a result, Texas literature is replete with examples of eyewitness fiction outstripping history, from Elmer Kelton’s account of the 1950-1957 drought in West Texas—The Time it Never Rained, to Américo Paredes’ novel about Texas Mexicans resisting Anglo encroachment in the Lower Rio Grande Valley—George Washington Gómez. For that matter, there’s also Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place, which provides an unparalleled social history of Austin’s political culture in the 1950s.
In Strange Peaches, Shrake blends his personal history into the larger historical canvas. In this sense, the novel parallels what the narrator, John Lee Wallace, is attempting. Wallace says, “I want to make this into a fictional documentary, using actual people when we can, inventing a few things to help it stick together, re-shooting some parts to show myself in all these places involved…Let this be one good, true, fair thing we can do."
Shrake’s previous novel, Blessed McGill, focused on transcendence. Strange Peaches, in contrast, is a work of resistance. It evokes the themes of the sixties counterculture—with a decidedly Texas twist. Shrake’s portrait reveals a Dallas dominated by materialistic greed and sanctimonious racism. We get views of cornpone ostentatiousness ranging from solid gold toilets to extravagant boasts of financial might. John Lee zeroes in on the source of the nouveau riche’s buffoonery as he observes a gathering of Dallas elite at a party: “Many of them had leaped from the farm or…the Depression shack into the country club and the opera league without a metamorphosis.” Though not many of the rich cared for the arts, they cared about status, and the “coarse-faced lout in the corner might be a multimillionaire with a collection of Remingtons and French Impressionists.”
In Strange Peaches, Dallas’ police dispense frontier justice as they enforce the establishment’s rule. This is most clearly seen in the experience of Hector, a friend of John Lee’s who owns a small Mexican restaurant. When Hector is cleaning up outside at closing time, two Dallas cops stop and accost him. “Hey, you damn greaser, what are you trying to steal?” When Hector explains that he is the owner, the response is “You’re still a damn greaser.” The harassment quickly escalates into physical violence, and the encounter leaves Hector nursing sore ribs, a bloody face, and a long-standing grudge.
The establishment’s control of the city also extends to the news media. As John Lee recounts his early experiences as a police reporter, he acknowledges, “Newspapers, radio, and television did not report violence involving blacks unless it was against whites. They did not report much of anything at all involving blacks…unless it was humorous, like watermelon stealing. But if a black man killed a white man or raped a white woman, you would see detectives in the hall with shotguns, and you had a story.”
One of John Lee’s final news stories involved a civil rights sit-in at a drugstore near the SMU campus. “The drugstore doors were locked and a fumigating company was called to spray the inside of the building with insecticide. The demonstrators withstood the white smoke for fifteen minutes or so. Then they came to the glass doors and begged to be let out. Police and firemen dragged out several who were unconscious.” John Lee interviewed demonstrators, police, and the drugstore owner, who claimed that the demonstrators “had ruined the goods on his shelves.” But John Lee’s story was not used. “The incident was never mentioned on the air or in the newspapers. If such a thing should be reported, I was told, it would encourage other radicals to cause trouble in a peaceful city.”
The undercurrent of resistance churns throughout the novel and assumes forms ranging from small-time hoods with gun-running ambitions to Buster Gregory’s self-cultivated marijuana plant, “Baby Giant,” which grows peacefully in the closet of his apartment home. One man John Lee meets at Jack Ruby’s nightclub explains his own trouble with the law in terms of resistance: “I might of done some stealing a few years ago, but that was mostly just from churches and beer distributors and big chain drugstores, redividing the wealth, you understand.”
John Lee drifts through much of his life, often stoned or hung over and vaguely dissatisfied. He is convinced at a visceral level that the documentary he is making—his art—will provide him with the meaningfulness he’s seeking. The focus becomes more clear after Kennedy is assassinated. His friend Buster tells him, "I don't like this movie, John Lee, but we've got to see the end of it…. It's the movie we've been making."14 By the end of the book, reality has overtaken the documentary. John Lee finds himself in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and his television persona takes a surreal turn as he becomes, at last, “a modern outlaw.”
One other note: Bud Shrake's "Strange Peaches," focusing as it does on the climate in Dallas during the time leading up to the Kennedy Assassination, helped inspire my later non-fiction book on the same subject, DALLAS 1963, co-written with my friend Bill Minutaglio.
November 24, 2015
I'm sad that I had never heard of Bud Shrake until he died last week because this really is a fine and underappreciated piece of Texas fiction. I was reminded at times of Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, and Joan Didion, but I think if I were forced to write a blurb about the book, I would say that it reads like Robert Altman's lost version of the JFK assassination, if that makes any sense.
Read
April 25, 2021ok so that silver jews line about how dallas "shine[s] with an evil light" makes perfect sense now. here 1963 dallas is as fraught with bad vibes as socal ca. manson, acrawl with gun-toting right wingers, revanchist cuban sugar barons, racist cops, & other bad actors -- a place where shaggy facial hair or having a joint on you can be actual life-or-death dangerous. incred comic set pieces in here too -- if the lion in the hearse doesn't hook you idk what will. biggest critique here is the shapelessness of the plot: it rarely rises above the level of "a thing happened, then another thing happened" & the division into book 1, book 2, etc seemed completely arbitrary. but when this gets optioned & you hear it called a forgotten classic, you can say "forgotten? no way, i saw that person w/ the terrible avatar give it big ups on goodreads"
September 11, 2015
What a strange and brilliant book! I read 'Strange Peaches' based on the recommendation of a friend who clearly knows my taste. Excellent blending of fact and fiction with a brisk writing style that really keeps the pace captivating. This is one of those books you truly can't put down once you start reading it.
March 27, 2014
Ordered this book after reading Shrake's "Land of the Permanent Wave." I read the first couple of pages this afternoon before turning to other matters, and I'm hooked. I don't often read fiction, but I'm really looking forward to this one.
April 7, 2007
One of the best JFK assasination books around, even if it's fiction. I mean, most of the other ones are fiction, too, right?
January 30, 2011
This book should really be made into a film. It was absolutely emotionally exhausting but funny enough to keep me amused.
February 1, 2015
If you wanted to know what life was like in Dallas back in the 60's - this is it.
October 17, 2020
Never read Shrake's books although I am well familiar with his columns, etc. having lived in the Fort Worth area for over 40 years. I'm impressed with this book for several reasons. It gives insight to the city of Dallas which has been an armpit for years. The attitude that they are something special is well pictured and the arrogance of Dallasites is apparent. He incorporates the assassination of JFK into the story with a slant that speaks his opinion on what really happened. Also, there is the coverage of the two pro football teams. Basically though, this is not about the elite of Dallas. It's about an underlying population that has nothing to be proud of. With the partial exception of John Lee, who is a TV star of sorts the rest of the characters are pretty slimy. Overall, it's well written and a compelling page turner that Yankees must read with mouths hanging open. It's real folks.
September 1, 2022
This is perhaps the third time in over 40 years that I've read this amazing novel by Bud Shrake who I actually got to know living in Austin, Texas and playing golf. Most of the action takes place in Dallas around the time of the Kennedy assassination when Shrake was an up and coming young sportswriter who knew Jack Ruby and dated one of the strippers at his Carousel Club. Shrake captures all the characters of the day, from drug dealing murderers to schizophrenic Born Again billionaires. Reading this was once again a rollicking ride on a literary roller coaster fueled by alcohol, amphetamines, marijuana and LSD during a pivotal time in the history of Texas, America and the world at large.
July 1, 2014
Enjoyed this novel set in Dallas right around the time Kennedy was assassinated. At times it got a bit plodding and there's really no reason it needed 400+ pages. But atmospherically was at times really great. Favorite line: "Anybody who does ever'thing he says he's going to do is short on imagination."
June 26, 2009
An interesting read. It was brillant at times and frustrating at others. Another review compared it with a Robert Altman film. I agree. Starts in Dallas and ends in Mexico. Way to many drug induced episodes for my taste, but it kept my attention. Shrake had a way with words.
October 24, 2015
Wacky and muddled. It seems like Shrake didn't know when to stop. Honestly, I can't remember half of this novel... Kind of reminds me of Jack Kerouac's On the Road in that way.
January 15, 2025
There is no better novel capturing the Dallas leading to 11/22/63.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews