Streets of Laredo

Streets of Laredo is the sequel to Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer winning Lonesome Dove, picking up the surviving cast of the original almost twenty years after the great cattle drive that defined the first book. Captain Woodrow Call is in his sixties now, working as a hired manhunter in a Texas that has changed in ways neither he nor the country has quite figured out. The frontier is closing. The railroads are everywhere. And the kind of work Call knows how to do is being slowly pushed to the margins.

The plot follows Call as he is hired to track down Joey Garza, a young Mexican train robber who is killing white passengers and railroad agents along the border. The hunt takes Call deep into Mexico and into a confrontation with a country and an enemy he does not really understand. Along the way McMurtry brings back familiar faces from Lonesome Dove. Pea Eye, who has finally tried to settle down with the schoolteacher Lorena Wood. Newt’s old friend Jasper. The reader who has waited for years to know what happened to these characters gets a difficult, melancholy answer.

McMurtry does not write sequel novels that protect the comfort of his returning readers. Streets of Laredo is darker than Lonesome Dove, more elegiac, less interested in the pleasures of the trail. The violence is more pointed and the losses are heavier. Some characters do not survive. Some survive in ways that are worse than dying. McMurtry was unsentimental about the West and his late vision of it has more in common with Cormac McCarthy than with the Western romances of an earlier era.

For readers who loved Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo is essential, even if it leaves you bruised. For new readers, start with Lonesome Dove and work forward.