Customer Reviews

Streets Of Laredo : A Novel

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

McMurtry shows us that not all sequels leave you unsatisfied. "Streets of Laredo" is an excellent book that shows a hero in his old age. It is both bittersweet and thrilling at the same time. We see Woodrow Call in his post-Gus McCrae days, taking on a bandit many years his junior. We see Pea Eye Parker, an unexpected choice for the last great Hat Creek member to follow Call, fighting his impulse to go on one last job with the captain. We see fear and hatred and loneliness and loss, and each emotion is conveyed in McMurtry's masterful way.

McMurtry adds a special note of realism by using actual historical figures--John Wesley Hardin, often called the West's most prolific killer, Charlie Goodnight, one of the great cowboys, and Judge Roy Bean, the hanging judge, the Law West of the Pecos. He weaves these people with his fictional characters like Pea, the Captain, and Ned Brookshire to make a very effective and entrancing novel.

"Streets of Laredo" is at times violent, amusing, depressing, and at all times interesting. A fine novel, and worthy of its predecessor, "Lonesome Dove." You can't go wrong with this one.

Like many other readers, I absolutely loved Lonesome Dove, which was the first novel I read after two years of only non-fiction. Lonesome Dove reminded me of what I was missing and I looked forward to Streets of Laredo.

I suffered a big disappointment. I am not so naive as to expect a sequel to be EXACTLY the same as the original (or maybe I was), but while Lonesome Dove was joyously written, Streets of Laredo seems angrily written.

McMurtry is a good writer and Lonesome Dove is surely his masterpiece. There is a reason that book is a beloved modern classic and Streets of Laredo is not.

The first book was anchored on the charisma of a truly memorable character, Gus McCrae, and his relationship with the reserved Captain Call. Their quest is the story, but the characters, and their friendship, drive the book.

There is none of that richness here, and I think McMurtry feels a little lost and angry without it. The book is filled with nearly pointless violence that seems designed to simply show that there is cruelty out there. Over and over, we are subjected to ugly scenes like the old Indian woman's trampling death, the attempted burning of the children, Joey's mutilation and murder of one of his mother's husbands. The list goes on and on.

Lonesome Dove had its share of violence, too, but it served to bring home the danger and ruthlessness of the West, casting into relief the bravery and heroism of the characters in the novel.

Here the west seems merely ugly and mean, an evil and frightening place. That is but one half of the vision McMurtry projected in Lonesome Dove, and it makes this book about half as good, which is to say just average.

I think McMurtry should have used his prodigious talents on new characters with new conflicts, instead of trying to force something out of the remnants of a group whose stories have already been marvelously told.

I must say I enjoyed reading Streets of Laredo. I recently read Lonesome Dove (one of my favorites) and was hoping for a repeat performance. I suppose with a book as outstanding as LD, a repeat is a tall drink to get down. But here I am, doing what every other reviewer on this list is doing: comparing the book to LD. If you do that then everyone will consider it a disappointment....LD was a masterpiece. I wish people wouldnt strike it for not being the same book as LD was. If I had never read LD before I would rate this a 4 star. I bet that most of the ratings given by others would be a bit higher if they had never read LD. The book blends fictional characters and real life westerners. Violence is widespread but in that era, that was the case. I especially love the way McMurtry weaves the stories of of the different characters together.

My big criticism is there is no good understanding of the root of Joey Garza's evil. Also the possiblity of Lorena marrying Pea Eye seems so remote, further description of her feelings towards him are needed to make it more believable.

Overall, the book was an enjoyable read. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a western. For those of you who have not read McMurtry yet, start with Lonesome Dove. That is the best.

I fell in love with Gus, Lorena, Call, and the other characters in Lonesome Dove, and was anxious to read what happened to them, particularly Call and Newt. Streets Of Laredo, the sequel to the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, did not satisfy. In all great books, characters have deep motivation for the things they do, even if the reader doesn't agree. The writer's responsibility is to make the reader understand why they do these things. In Streets Of Laredo, McMurtry doesn't provide that. The poetry of the language and the complexity of the relationships between characters in Lonesome Dove are not followed through here. It's as if a completely different writer wrote it. in this so-called sequel The author had characters doing things out of character, like Lorena marrying Pea-eye. What was the attraction? Why would a smart beautiful woman want a homely man who can barely put a sentence together? If McMurtry had given me more of these people than mere description, I would have found it plausible. But I never understood the attraction. The dialogue between these people is about as interesting as waiting for wallpaper to dry. "Show don't tell" is one of the rules of good writing. Lonesome Dove showed me the west, in its glory and rage. Streets of Laredo story does little showing, in fact parts of it read like notes a writer makes to himself as he writes, scenes that he or she plans to flesh out later. McMurtry also missed an opportunity to honor he relation ship between Call and Newt. He could have built the entire sequel around the dynamic between father and son. Instead the author kills off Newt so we never get to explore what could have been. Also, Call comes off as a whiny, cowardly simp when faced with death. The call I knew in Lonesome Dove was a stoic and brave. As great as Lonesome Dove was, this book was just awful.

Alright, it's not as good as LONESOME DOVE. That was the first book of the series I read, and it was so brilliant and entertaining, that I almost didn't want to read more and spoil it. But I gave in to temptation, and I'm glad I did. Warning, though...if you thought there were depressing things in DOVE, watch out for this one! Lots of characters die...in fact, lots of memorable characters from LD are already dead when STREETS begins. But you have to accept that sort of thing from McMurtry. His plots, just like life, do what they want to, and no preference from the reader will change that. A feeling of dread hangs over this book, particularly whether Pea Eye and Lorena will ever reunite happily. Jeez, I couldn't read this thing fast enought to see what happened next, and in my opinion, that's about the best praise you can give a book. I've never liked westerns, but thank God I plunged into these. STREETS is not has funny as LD was in parts, but otherwise, it is a very, very worthy sequel.

WARNING: Plot spoilers. (As if they matter in books from a writer who isn't much interested in conventional plotting.)

The following is not only a review of "Streets of Laredo", but a consideration of the other books in the "Lonesome Dove" series. It includes subject matter some readers might find offensive (though paling in comparison with the events in these books).

As I read this novel, finishing up my traversal of the four "Lonesome Dove" books, I'd intended to give it four stars. But when I reached the chapter in which Doobie Plunkert goes to the sheriff's office to see whether he's heard about her husband Ted (whom Woodrow F Call has seduced into going off with him after Joey Garza), is raped by the sheriff (for no other reason than This Is What Men Do To Women), decides that she is now permanently shamed, and eats rat poison to kill herself, expiring in a graphic and ghastly fashion, I had one of those WTF moments. What, exactly, is going on here?

There would be no point to the following comments if Larry McMurtry /weren't/ a great writer. Of the five McMurtry novels I've read, "The Last Picture Show" and "Lonesome Dove" are masterpieces whose popularity will likely outlive even the youngest people reading this review. It's also notable that McMurtry has been associated with /five/ outstanding motion pictures, four of which were based on his novels. That is a rare and remarkable record for any writer.

It's also true, as one reviewer remarked, that Larry McMurtry is probably the most erratic of living American authors. Great books are so often followed by awful ones, that one wonders how any writer with a shred of self-awareness could have submitted them to the publisher. "Streets of Laredo" is one of those "What was he thinking?" books. Its many weaknesses overwhelm its few strengths.

One need not be a mind-reader to see that McMurtry's historical novels are intended to thoroughly disabuse readers of any lingering romantic notions about the American West. It is an indescribably brutal place, its only "morality" the use of violence to kill the bad people. McMurtry's bad'uns aren't your garden-variety bank robbers or gunslingers, but people whom Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Pol Pot wouldn't want to be in the same room with.

In "Lonesome Dove", the chief psychopath is Blue Duck, a half-breed who enjoys rape, knifings, murder, and rape. (He likes rape.) He'd just as soon kill someone as look at them, and he leaves a trail of bodies that includes many sympathetic characters, including a bumbling deputy and a young boy.

McMurtry gets away with this, because Blue Duck is a peripheral character, and the novel is principally a fictionalization of events in the life of Charles Goodnight, best-known as the inventor of the chuck wagon. Woodrow F Call stands in for Goodnight, while Augustus McCrae represents his close friend, Oliver Loving. Goodnight was the first cattleman to drive Texas cattle north (as Call & McCrae do). Loving (McCrae) was shot in an Indian attack, and sent his companion, Bill Wilson (Pea Eye Parker in the book) for help, a journey of a hundred miles. Though both returned to "civilization", Loving (McCrae) died of blood poisoning from the wound, with Goodnight (Call) at his side. Gus asks Woodrow to return his body to Texas, as Loving requested of Goodnight.

This story comprises so much of the novel that, despite its length, McMurtry can't do much to screw it up. Though "Lonesome Dove" is fundamentally a sad and even depressing story (McMurtry wondered out loud why people liked it!), there are so many interesting and well-drawn characters, and (as is typical of even McMurtry's bad novels) the ring of truth sounds over almost all of it. "Lonesome Dove" is a fun read, a satisfying novel that needs neither prequel nor sequel.

Unfortunately, McMurtry wrote two of the former and one of the latter. "Dead Man's Walk" and "Comanche Moon" reveal little about the development of Gus and Woodrow's relationship, but we do get to see Woodrow nearly whipped to death by Mexicans, a relatively mild form of torture in McMurtryland. The stories about the Indians are more interesting, and might justify reading these books. (In case you're wondering... McMurtry's Indians are hardly "noble savages". Though he's clearly on their side, it's in the context of the whites' continuing efforts to exterminate them. Though he apparently admires the Indians' simple lives, they're highly superstitious, and on a certain level, Just Plain Stupid.) "Comanche Moon" includes a weird American Army officer, whose grotesquely oversexed wife throws Gus in a closet before forcing herself on him. The officer is later captured by another of McMurtry's ur-psychos, a man who enjoys cutting the skin off his victims. (The officer is subjected "only" to an attempt to starve him to death, and the removal of his eyelids.)

The problem (as I see it) is that, when forced to /imagine/ a story set in another era, McMurtry can't resist the temptation to create the most frightening and appalling people and events, which often exceed our ability to believe them. (I'm not the Red Queen, and I doubt most readers are.) Many people have horror fantasies (you don't want to know what I'd like to see done to the Geico gecko); McMurtry is one of those rare non-horror writers unafraid to put them on paper.

He's at his worst in "Streets of Laredo". We have not /one/ Norman Bates wannabe, but /two/. Joey Garza was a nice boy who changed after spending two years with the Apache. He considers his mother a whore simply because she's been married four times. He ambushes his mother's third husband, a decent, gentle man, and chops off his hands and feet. He robs trains and kills the passengers (and burns/melts a car full of sheep), not primarily because he wants their money, but because he likes nice things, including a German rifle with a powerful 'scope that lets him commit murder from a half-mile off.

The other is Mox Mox. His fun hobby is to set living people (and even dogs -- "Not Flop!") on fire. (He should not be confused with Lox Lox, who kills people by choking them with slices of smoked salmon.) /One/ of these inhumans would have been enough. We don't need two, except to pad out the novel. It seems incumbent on Larry McMurtry to write Western novels that are Sprawling Tomes.

Nor does McMurtry let us forget how he feels about women. It's common knowledge he's much more interested in his female characters than the male -- seemingly to the point of near-deification -- and his feelings are plain in just about every book: Women are stronger and more-capable than men. They handle adversity better, and are less likely to make foolish mistakes. They're smarter, too, at least to the extent that they know what's right for men -- and men oughta listen. The ideal male/female relationship puts the woman in charge, with the male dragging behind, tethered by a rope through a ring in his nose.

If this isn't obvious, McMurtry spells it out on page 578:

"No beaux?" Lorena asked one morning, when [she and Clara] were sitting in the kitchen, talking. ...

"No beaux," Clara admitted. "I expect it's just as well. I'm too set in my ways now. I doubt there's a man alive who could put up with me. Even if there is such a man alive, he probably doesn't live in Nebraska." ...

"You probably run all the boys off," [Lorena] said. "You have to be gentle with menfolk, you know. They aren't tough, like us."

In the "Lonesome Dove" novels, Clara is the worst example of this type of tough woman. She's toned down in the film (to the extent that some people question Angelica Huston's perfect casting), but in the novel we see her excessive and irrational expectations of men, and how she emotionally abuses July Johnson, another in McMurtry's never-ending parade of feckless white males. Augustus McCrae is a rare exception. Regardless of how Gus feels about Clara, he knows which end is up -- marrying Clara is tantamount to penal (penile?) servitude for life. He's /one/ man she can't control.

And why is that? It's because Gus and Woodrow are such good friends. "You ruined each other", she nearly screams at Woodrow. "Ruined", in this context, means "made unfit for female domination". In McMurtryland, male/male friendship is a direct threat to the dominance of women, and in "Streets of Laredo" two women go into near-conniptions when their husbands leave them to run off with Captain Call in his search for Joey Garza.

The "other" kind of male/male relationship -- which dasn't speak its name -- isn't even /hinted/ at in McMurtryland, because it's a total rejection/refutation of the male's most-basic biological need for the female. The plain and simple truth is that men -- cowboys, especially -- don't actually /need/ women, but McMurtry has (apparently) never confronted this in his novels. (See Badger Clark's "The Lost Pardner", one of the most-famous of all cowboy poems. Give an eye to "Bachin'", as well. Larry McMurtry has likely never had an intense friendship with a man. I doubt he has /any/ understanding of what "Pardner" is about.)

In surveying the first three novels, it becomes clear that Gus and Woodrow, despite McMurtry's claims to the contrary, aren't /really/ friends. They have a dysfunctional "marriage", in which Gus is another one of McMurtry's overbearing females, who is constantly criticizing Woodrow. Though Woodrow is the most conventionally masculine of the principal characters in these books, he's also the most socially obtuse, to the point of stupidity. After failing to capture Joey Garza, and Garza having shoot off his right leg and left arm (which becomes his /right/ arm at the end of the book -- were you snoozing, Diana?) he considers himself "ruined", and even contemplates suicide. Pea Eye and Lorena take him in, but do little to comfort him. McMurtry has always abused and tortured his characters, and his treatment of Woodrow F Call is especially mean-spirited.

In "Streets of Laredo", Maria Garza (Joey's mother) is perhaps the highest realization of McMurtry's ideal woman. Though brutally maltreated by life (a string of husbands, all but one of whom abused her, and three "damaged" children (one blind, one retarded, one psychotic)), she nevertheless hangs in there. Indeed, she loves her children so much, in the irrational way all good mothers do, that, even though she knows Joey hates her and might kill her, she moves Heaven and Earth to find him and warn him that Captain Call is gunning for him. She hates Call with a vengeance, because Call was responsible for the arrests of her brother and father, and thereby their eventual executions. Though she ought to be aware that Joey's death would be, if nothing else, a blessing for everyone living in a radius of at least 250 miles, she'll do whatever needs to be done to preserve him.

In describing Maria, McMurtry pens the following lovely passage, of the sort one rarely sees in his historical novels:

"Of her four husbands, only Benito, the third, had laughed with her. Carlos and Juan, her first two husbands, had been too jealous. Juan was also too violent. Roberto had been too restless; he didn't like to stay put. He could not even stay in bed all night, much less stay with her for months. He didn't live in the past, though. Men who lived in the past brought out /her/ restlessness. Life was there, in the house, in the yard, in the town; in the bedroom, in her hands, in her womb. It was not in the past. The bad things that had happened to her had not killed her. They had not even killed the laughter in her."

McMurtry fails to pay attention to Woodrow's personality. Perhaps because Woodrow is one of the two central characters (Maria Garza being the other), he's now obliged to carry on more or less normal conversations with people. And he seems to be developing some sense of metaphor (note his remark about cascading dominoes). He's no longer the alienated person we grew to hate in "Comanche Moon". He's changed, but for no obvious reason other than that this novel requires it.

Lorena also changes. She's a lot more like Clara, no surprise after living several years with her. Nor is it a surprise she chooses Pea Eye Parker to seduce and marry. * He's simple and unaffected, and therefore easily manipulated. She constantly criticizes him, which hurts his feelings, so she then has to buck him up. The idea of /not/ criticizing him the first place (or at least finding a more-subtle way of doing so) has apparently never occurred to her. A man is not someone whose presence and affection are to be enjoyed, but a botched job that needs to be fixed up. In his historical novels, Larry McMurtry is fundamentally anti-male. (Pea-Eye never showed any interest in women. Had I written "Streets", I would have gotten Pea-Eye involved with a young cowpoke.)

One of McMutry's greatest strengths is one of his greatest weaknesses. He studiously avoids cliché and the obvious, which is good -- there are no preordained, "reader-pleasing" endings to most of his stories. But because his stories have little plot and rarely lead up to any "point" or satisfying conclusion -- indeed, virtually everything that happens in these books has no meaning or purpose -- the characters become merely players in "the ghastly farce of material existence".

Because McMurtry's characters hardly ever find any degree of happiness (let alone simple satisfaction) in their lives (Clara loses her male children and her husband, and is kicked to death by a horse), a pall of meaninglessness, even nihilism, hovers over his stories. He doesn't want us to forget that "life isn't for sissies", but bad things happen to almost all his characters, even ones who /aren't/ sissies. Contrary to what McMurtry says, the strong do not always survive, and he often fails to give his surviving-though-damaged characters any consolation.

It's also worth noting that few characters, male or female, develop close relationships (other than marriage) with other characters. For a writer trying to show the West as it really was, we don't see any of the cowboys developing long-lasting friendships, which was common. In "Lonesome Dove", all the cowboys seem to do is pine over Lorena, or debate her virtue.

At the end of "Streets of Laredo", we are told that the West is moving from barbarism to civilization, and Pea-Eye and Lorena are the sort of people who will lead it there. But after four novels of murders, rapes, burnings, lynchings, child molestations, mutilations, poisonings, skinnings, and all sorts of horrifying incidents that have turned the American West into a Grand Guignol, it's too little, too late, regardless of how accurate McMurtry's portrayal of Western life is. "Streets" has the stink of self-serving post-justification, as if the author has finally discovered a /point/ to all this wretchedness. There is none, and I don't care to hear, in the final pages, that there /was/ one. Reading these four novels is not unlike working through Mishima's "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy -- though Mishima is even more-plainly pointless, as we discover at the end that everything preceding never actually /happened/.

"Streets of Laredo" is one of McMurtry's poorer works. It's less a coherent story than a conflation of McMurtryland exhibits we've seen before, picked from a file-box of clippings that has nothing happy in it. Besides the psycho killer(s), we have the spouse who commits suicide, the women who abuse men, the men who behave stupidly, the appalling injuries, etc, etc, etc.

It is all-too-easy to imagine Larry McMurtry as a writer for "[I Remember] Mama", the TV series based on Kathryn Forbes' novel about Norwegian immigrants in San Francisco (which I'm old enough to remember):

We were not rich. Yet my San Francisco childhood was filled with happy memories.
I remember dragging home stray cats and cutting off their legs with a hacksaw, bringing much joy to my little friends.
I remember the homeless people of the Tenderloin who, when soaked with naphtha and ignited, infused a glowing warmth to the chill winter air.
But most of all... I remember repeatedly striking my mother with an ax when she refused to purchase the fancy party dress I so badly wanted.
Yes... "I dismember Mama".

Ultimately, McMurtry's poorer novels aren't so much imaginative fiction, as they are his way of spewing his uncensored emotions in the reader's face. It's a shame, because when McMurtry is good, he is very, /very/ good -- one of the bestest writers around.

* It's implied that Pea-Eye isn't very good-looking. But the first actor who played him -- the late Timothy Scott -- was adorable, and the role was later assayed by Sam Shepard (!!!), at one time considered a strikingly handsome man.

Streets of Laredo, set in Texas and Mexico in more or less the 1890's, is the sequel to Lonesome Dove. Anyone who's read the author's other work will know that his novels are a progression of character deaths, often pointless and cruel. This one was even more depressing than that.

Use of language in this book is generally evocative, but occasionally, particularly in the section from Doobie's perspective, becomes downright simple-minded and annoying. There are a lot of repeated phrases.

Characterization is excellent, sort of. The reader gets to know the characters. The reader gets to care about the characters. Then the characters mostly die, or worse. It's a bummer.

The plot involves a manhunt for various different brutal outlaws. It's about the end of Captain Call's career, and the ongoing story of Pea Eye and Lorena, now married with a large family. Secondary characters include the return of Mox Mox, the various men involved in Call's manhunt, the outlaw Garza's downtrodden yet plucky mother Maria, and fictionalized versions of John Wesley Hardin and Charles Goodnight. Mostly it's exciting and fast-moving, but there are some annoying tangents -- Maria running off to deliver a baby right at a climactic moment especially frustrated me.

One unbelievable element of the plot was the amateur amputations and terrible wounds suffered by the characters -- without cauterization, ligature, tourniquets, or anything else. Realistically, the amputee in particular should have bled to death in minutes.

The end, however, I did not enjoy. The whole thing with the little blind girl was sentimental and frankly creepy. The main character's downfall seemed like an act of pointless cruelty on the author's fault -- I wondered if it was meant to be fate, some kind of karmic punishment for deeds done (or more, not done) in earlier volumes. I still didn't enjoy reading it.

The title, taken from a sad traditional ballad about a dying cowboy, seems appropriate here. In many ways this is a well-written book, but there are things in it I wish I hadn't read. Take your chances.

First let me say I loved Lonesome Dove. I believe it's one of the best novels ever written. This, on the other hand, is far from it. All the things that made Lonesome Dove so great just aren't present here. The lyricism, the poetry, the sense of wonder are gone. Those things and all the interesting characters. This isn't giving anything away but almost all the interesting surviving character from Lonesome Dove dies before Streets of Laredo even begins. The few left are the ones that don't talk much. They have nothing interesting to say and very little interesting to do other than suffer. I'm not particularly interested in watching people suffer. Reading about it either. The first part of this book just recounts how everyone died in the intervening time. And that's the fun part. It gets worse from there, much worse. I've never been more happy to end a book.

This book was ok. I enjoyed the story. It was nice to find out what happened after Lonesome Dove. But this story doesn't nearly live up to the standard set in Lonesome Dove. I think Call without Gus just doesn't work quite as well.

I probably would have liked this better if I hadn't read it right after Lonesome Dove.

For those who complain that McMurtry's STREETS OF LAREDO didn't have the same feel as LONESOME DOVE, it's a legitimate critique, but it's also one that misses the point.

STREETS OF LAREDO is by far a more effective, chilling and worthy book than any of the prequels that McMurtry would later pen about Gus and Call's earlier days (all of them enjoyable reads...but none of them ever managed to recapture the magice of LONESOME DOVE).

As far as I'm concerned STREETS OF LAREDO is one of the most terrifying books I've ever read. Some of the scenes of brutality and cruelty are tons more frightening and nightmarish than anything ever penned by Stephen King.

LONESOME DOVE...though, no doubt, filled with a gritty realism that has often been lacking in Westerns (either on film or in literature)...did still convey some sense of romance to the Western. Even though LONESOME DOVE is in a leagure of its own, one can still see homage being paid to classics such as RED RIVER, THE GUNFIGHTER, THE COWBOYS and THE SEARCHERS both on page and on film.

STREETS OF LAREDO strips away the romance and paints a picture of a dying era.
The likes of Woodrow and his peers have become so scarce that it's gotten to the point where a hero such as Charles Goodnight will pause in the desert to have a conversation with a human monster such as John Wesley Hardin (a chilling scene in STREETS OF LAREDO that's akin to the Angel Gabriel and Lucifer meeting face to face).

STREETS OF LAREDO is in the same league as the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone or more brutal Westerns such as Sam Peckinpah's THE WILD BUNCH (and even shares a bit with the theme of the more low-key homage to the dying West that's depicted in THE SHOOTIST). If LONESOME DOVES had its share of heroes who seem bigger than life, STREETS OF LAREDO shares all the grotesque qualities of a Leone Western by filling its landscape with characters barely worthy of life. Disurbingly nightmarish places such as Crow Town in STREETS OF LAREDO would not be at all out of place in one of Leone's MAN WITH NO NAME(Clint Eastwood) TRILOGY.

What's especially brilliant about STREETS OF LAREDO is that McMurtry builds up such a grand landscape with so many rich characters in LONESOME DOVE...only to tear apart that terrain, its heroes and its nobility with his sequel. It is a jarring book, for sure. Even though LONESOME DOVE is not without its disturbing & brutal moments, there is a nobility to many of the scenes and characters (which is why it's so well-loved...and will continue to be well-loved for many, many decades). Yet, to make sur that we're not too smitten or swept away by the grandeur of LONESOME DOVE, McMurtry delivered STREETS OF LAREDO as a way of showing us the dark underbelly of the beast that we didn't completely see in LONESOME DOVE. Without Gus riding by Woodrow's side, Captain Call has become every bit as much a shell of a man as Eastwood in the Leone movies (or in UNFORGIVEN). It is not easy to read...and perhaps McMurtry would have left many readers much more happy had he let the LONESOME DOVE saga end with that one book. However, by writing STREETS OF LAREDO McMurty provides the hangover that comes after a night of drunken revalry. It's not an easy read...it strips away the myth & awe that LONESOME DOVE provided to so many...but it is brilliant.

With those two books (LONESOME DOVE and STREETS OF LARED0), McMurty managed to go from conjuring up the spirit of John Ford/Howard Hawks to evoking the demons of Leon/Peckinpah.

In many ways one could draw a parallel to this pair of books to THE GODFATHER and THE GODFATHER PART II. Though both GODFATHER films are brutal, one shows the rise of a glorious America...while the other shows its fall (all through the character of Michael Corleone). McMurtry accomplishes the same with LONESOME DOVE (the more glorious time) and STREETS OF LAREDO (the fall of such glory).

I mean, finding out within the first dozen pages or so that Newt was killed shortly after the story of LONESOME DOVE ends...that pretty much let the reader know from the word "go" that we'd be in for a dark ride with this book.
If LONESOME DOVE...even amidst the betrayals, the murders, the senseless killings, the dirt and the grime...managed to speak to the better angels within us, the STREETS OF LAREDO speaks to our demons. With this in mind, I find these two books to complete and complement one another. STREETS OF LAREDO, by its very dark/dim nature, manages to exalt LONESOME DOVE even more.
While LONESOME DOVE, through its sweeping majesty, manages to make STREETS OF LAREDO all the more disturbing.

As for the other books with Gus & Call...they are entertaining at best... but none of the prequels ever come close to accomplishing the jarring dichotomy that McMurty accomplishes with his pairing of LONESOME DOVE and STREETS OF LAREDO.

So, for those who are disappointed or disturbed by STREETS OF LAREDO...I'd suggest that you put a few CDs of Ennio Morricone's Western Themes on the stereo to play in the background while giving this book another reading. You might find that it's in the same league as LONESOME DOVE itself when read this way.