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Dead Man's Walk (1995)
Simon & Schuster , 477 pages, $26.00 hardcover, ISBN 0-684-80753-X, Books on Tape: 3874

First came Lonesome Dove (1985), which won a Pulitzer Prize. Then came the sequel, Streets of Laredo (1993), the story of the lives of an elderly Call and a few other characters from Lonesome Dove. Now there's the prequel, Dead Man's Walk, about the early adventures of Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae as young Texas Rangers. Fans both of McMurtry and of Call and McCrae will be disappointed.

Some of the writing in Dead Man's Walk looks more like a first-draft manuscript than a polished novel. Passages such as "They had no water to spare-it would take a bucketful to wash such a wound effectively, and they didn't have a bucketful to spare" and "Gus suddenly realized, to his embarrassment, that his knees were knocking. He heard an unusual sound and took a moment or two to figure out that it was the sound of his own knees knocking together" could benefit from a copy editor.

And while Woodrow Call appears here as the same serious, straight-laced, stubborn man we first met in Lonesome Dove, Gus McCrae is a one-dimensional character who "preferred to talk mainly about whores, often to the point of tedium"; "Gus would borrow, or cheat at cards, or make promises he couldn't keep, just to have money for whores." During the time between the first and second Rangering expeditions, "What time Gus didn't spend in the whorehouses he usually spent in jail. With no work to do he had developed a tendency to drink liquor, and drinking liquor made him argumentative. The day seldom passed without Gus getting into a fight, the usual result being that he would whip three or four sober citizens and be hauled off to jail. Even when he didn't actually fight, he yelled or shot off his pistol or generally disturbed the peace." Here there's none of the sensitivity Gus shows in Lonesome Dove when he knows just how to treat Lorena after he's rescued her from Blue Duck.

Dead Man's Walk does contain much of the gritty realism that makes Lonesome Dove such a powerful story of the American West. Unfortunately, McMurtry's latest book reads more like the outline for a television miniseries (which, in fact, aired on ABC in April 1996) than a great novel.

 

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