Which Lonesome Dove book should you read first? Pick wrong, and McMurtry's biggest gut-punch gets spoiled
Larry McMurtry wrote four books about Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call, but not in the order the events happen. Two are prequels, one is a sequel, and they came out over 12 years. So the obvious instinct — start at the chronological beginning — is available. It's also the one order that costs you something.
Read in publication order, starting with Lonesome Dove (1985). Publication order is Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo (1993), Dead Man's Walk (1995), and Comanche Moon (1997). Chronological order is Dead Man's Walk, Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo. The original novel is self-contained and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction — it works cold, with no setup.
The four books
- Dead Man's Walk (1995) — set in the early 1840s. Gus and Call as teenage Rangers on a doomed expedition. Chronologically first, and widely rated the weakest of the four.
- Comanche Moon (1997) — set in the 1850s and '60s. Fills in the Ranger years, Clara, Maggie, and the backstory Lonesome Dove refers to in passing.
- Lonesome Dove (1985) — set in the mid-to-late 1870s. The cattle drive from the Texas border to Montana. The one everybody means.
- Streets of Laredo (1993) — set in the early 1890s. An aging Call is hired by a railroad to hunt train robber Joey Garza.
Where the spoiler is
Streets of Laredo. It opens roughly 20 years after the cattle drive and establishes in its first pages who from the Hat Creek outfit is still alive and who isn't — including the one death that gives Lonesome Dove its weight. Kirkus Reviews summarized the situation in its 1993 write-up without ceremony:
"Gus McCrae is in his grave."
The sequel also disposes of another major Lonesome Dove character in a single sentence, which lands very differently if you haven't read the book that made him matter.
What about the prequels?
They're safer, but they still flatten things. Reading Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon first tells you that Gus and Call survive every scrape in their twenties and thirties, and it front-loads two books that most readers rank below the original. McMurtry also wrote them years later and let details drift, so a few things contradict the 1985 novel outright.
If you've already finished Lonesome Dove, the common recommendation is Comanche Moon next, then Dead Man's Walk, then Streets of Laredo last.
Do the miniseries follow the same order?
Loosely. The 1989 CBS miniseries adapts the original novel. Streets of Laredo (1995) stars James Garner as Call, and both prequels were filmed later. Return to Lonesome Dove (1993) is not McMurtry's work at all — the novel Streets of Laredo ignores it completely.
Fun fact: Lonesome Dove started as a screenplay called The Streets of Laredo, written for Peter Bogdanovich in the early 1970s. James Stewart was set as Gus and Henry Fonda as Jake Spoon.
John Wayne turned down Call on John Ford's advice, the project collapsed, and McMurtry bought his script back and turned it into a novel.