When the Rangers' commander, a half-mad, Harvard-schooled captain named Inish Scull, loses his prized war-horse to a Comanche thief and sets off to reclaim him (winding up as Ahumado's latest and most challenging victim), McCrae and Call are thrust reluctantly into command of the Rangers - forcing them to fight not only Indians, but a parsimonious Texas legislature. Much of the story is spent on the sere plains, as the Rangers pursue three different but equally dangerous men: Buffalo Hump, a legendary Comanche warrior (introduced in Dead Man's Walk ) who seeks to stem the tide of white settlement his murderous outcast of a son, Blue Duck and Ahumado (the "Black Vaquero"), a Mexican warlord practiced in the creative arts of torture. Moon covers a 20-year timespan around the Civil War, when white civilization was usurping even the West's strongest Native American cultures and turning resisters into renegades. Lonesome Dove 's success led to a 1993 sequel, Streets of Laredo (disappointing, since McCrae's death in the original book left Call to carry this adventure alone), and two prequels: Dead Man's Walk (1995) and now Comanche Moon - the last and arguably the second-strongest entry in McMurtry's Old West saga.Īgain, Gus and Woodrow are riding with the Texas Rangers, only they're now middle-aged and more set in their complementary - and pleasantly ornery - ways. That groundwork lent him credibility when he finally sat down to glorify the tongue-tied cowpokes, unabashed prostitutes, and malevolent marauders who were once this region's best and brightest. But Texas-born McMurtry had built much of his reputation on such antimythic stories of the West as Horseman, Pass By and The Last Picture Show. Had a lesser wordsmith penned that book, it might have been dismissed by critics. It was a sprawling, spirited tale about two former Texas Rangers - the loquacious, whiskey-drinking Augustus McCrae and his terminally taciturn partner, Woodrow Call - who drive a motley crew and a herd of beef cattle across the treacherous West in the 1870s. His best-selling 1985 epic Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer Prize and spawned a superfluity of imitations. Which is what makes Larry McMurtry so interesting. The archetypes of those stories - stoic heroes with barking six-guns, whores with hearts of gold, bandits with a fashion fetish for black - were reinforced by early Hollywood, and it's the rare novelist since who has successfully offered a distinctive, much less memorable perspective on the Old West.
It suffers for being rooted in the "dime novels" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mass-produced yarns that emphasized romantic myths of the West over the rude realities of Manifest Destiny. WESTERN HISTORICAL fiction has had a hell of a time being taken seriously as literature.
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