Glendon Swarthout moved into southwestern American satire with The Cadillac Cowboys, following his loose strategy of alternating dramas with comedies. His new hometown of Scottsdale, Arizona, he felt through his newcomer's sharp eyes, was ripe for some thoughtful ribbing.
In his search for the Old West of romantic legend, Professor H. Carleton Cadell of Connecticut, with rich wife and two teenaged step-daughters in tow, arrived at that outpost of civilization -- Scottsdale, Arizona. They buy a house ("pseudo-adobe-mock-tile-roofed-baroque-hacienda -- sort of") on Sarcophagus Mountain. At their first cocktail party they meet Wall Streeters, oil magnates, and dowagers; but the prize is Eddie Bud Boyd, last of the cowboys, now a commission cattleman, resplendent in ranchman's costume and 12-gallon hat. Here is the Old West! On his part, Eddie Bud saw in Carleton his first friend among these rich dudes and his entree into the Scottsdale social whirl.
So begins Eddie Bud's downfall and Cadell's disillusion. The last cowboy has made his pile and now wants something to show for his money. The realtors sell him a house on Fast Draw Drive -- a $150,000 rococo-Polynesian job. Sponsored by H. Carleton, Eddie joins the Camino d' Oro Country Club for $5k, and his troubles begin when his new young ranch wife Christobel causes $220,000 damage to a neighbor's property in her first drive in her new Cadillac. Other expensive catastrophes also occur. Even a quiet Sunday ends in disaster when a group of old-time cowboys off the dude ranches up Wickenburg way come to town. At the Camino d' Oro bar, one whiskey leads to another, and the party winds up as a rodeo in golf carts, causing devastation to greens and fairways.
One funny crisis follows another, until Eddie Bud finally hits the skids with tragic force in spite of H. Carleton's dramatic efforts to save him. But old cowboys never die, and Eddie Bud finally finds a Western role to play on a surprising new range.
This southwestern comedy was Glendon's most "regional" novel, so today a hard cover copy of Cadillac Cowboys qualifies as a rare book. So amusing is this farcical tale, though, that it was once optioned for a possible Broadway play by the late actor, Tom Ewell.
