Streets of Laredo (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

STREETS OF LAREDO begins two decades after Call completes the epic trail drive recounted in the earlier book. A nineteen-year-old psychopath named Joey Garza has been pillaging trains and murdering passengers, and the railroad hires Call to track him down along the Texas-Mexico border. Ned Brookshire, a timorous accountant from Brooklyn, is dispatched to audit expenses during the expedition. Pea Eye Parker, now comfortable as a farmer, husband, and father, at first refuses Call’s order to accompany him but later rushes off to join his old leader. Lorena, a good-hearted whore turned schoolteacher and Parker’s wife, sets out to bring him back, while Maria sets out to warn her son Joey that Call is on his trail.

McMurtry evokes a brutal world in which those who manage to endure the harsh elements often succumb to the cruelty of fellow humans and to their own despair. Rape, murder, and suicide are frequent and casual. The novel rejects the triumphalist interpretation of Western history. “Life’s but a knife edge, anyway,” declares cattleman Charles Goodnight, a real-life figure, like John Wesley Hardin and Judge Roy Bean, recruited into the fiction. “Sooner or later people slip and get cut.”

There is an autumnal air to Call’s quixotic quest to capture Garza and to his encounter with Mox Mox, a miscreant who burns his hapless victims, as if this were the last adventure by a species facing extinction. Call still exhibits flashes of youthful verve, thrashing a sheriff who fails to accord him due respect. But he is a knight who has outlived his era, thwarted by physical debility and haunted by failure.

Though rich in portraiture, STREETS OF LAREDO lacks the narrative engine that an epic trail drive provides LONESOME DOVE. McMurtry revels in pungent dialogue and the hyperbole of frontier whoppers. In counterpoint to the myth of the romantic West, McMurtry builds his compelling story around the fact that a vicious punk is a match for an illustrious Texas Ranger.

Sources for Further Study

Chicago Tribune. August 15, 1993, XIV, p.1.

The Christian Science Monitor. August 31, 1993, p.15.

Houston Post. August 15, 1993, p. C4.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. August 8, 1993, p.1.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVIII, July 25, 1993, p.9.

Newsweek. CXXII, August 2, 1993, p.52.

Publishers Weekly. CCXL, May 31, 1993, p.40.

Texas Monthly. XXI, August, 1993, p.40.

Time. CXLII, August 9, 1993, p.59.

The Washington Post Book World. XXIII, August 1, 1993, p.4.