Originally published in 1952, Tom Lea’s The Wonderful Country opens as mejicano pistolero Martín Bredi is returning to El Puerto (El Paso) after a fourteen-year absence. Bredi carries a gun for the Chihuahuan warlord Cipriano Castro and is on Castro’s business in Texas. Fourteen years earlier—shortly after the end of the Civil War—when he was the boy Martin Brady, he killed the man who murdered his father and fled to Mexico where he became Martín Bredi. Back in Texas Brady breaks a leg; then he falls in love with a married woman while recuperating; and, finally, to right another wrong, he kills a man. When Brady/Bredi returns to Mexico, the Castros distrust him as an American. He becomes a man without a country. The Wonderful Country clearly depicts life along the Texas-Mexico border of a century-and-a-half ago, when Texas and Mexico were being settled and tamed.
One of Texas's true renaissance men, Tom Lea (1907-2001) was already a noted artist, muralist, and book illustrator when he published his first novel, The Brave Bulls, in 1949. This suspenseful story of bullfighting in Mexico, elegantly illustrated by the author, spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was hailed by Time magazine as the best first novel of the year. It also won the Carr P. Collins Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, went through numerous reprints and translations, and became a 1951 movie starring Mel Ferrer and Anthony Quinn.
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