For many years​ I held certain assumptions about Larry McMurtry. Without ever having read his novels, I thought of him as a prolific – perhaps excessively prolific – author of sentimental bestsellers, most of them sequels or prequels to earlier successes. I knew that a few good movies had been adapted from his work, but had mentally classified him alongside Sidney Sheldon, Colleen McCullough and John Jakes, writers of great popular appeal in my youth, whose moment had passed and whose work was unlikely to be revisited.

I came of age as a writer in the 1990s, in Montana, where I moved to attend graduate school, and cut my teeth on the literature of the contemporary American West: writers such as James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Donald Barthelme, Pam Houston and Rick Bass, some of whom counted McMurtry as a friend. But I must have regarded the ubiquity of his paperbacks in second-hand bookshops as reason to dismiss him. I had developed a taste for literature that undermined the myth of the cowboy, with his ambition, rugged individualism and bravery. My favourite Western writers embraced style over melodrama, foregrounded Native American culture and explored the lives of women. Surely McMurtry wasn’t for me.

As it happens, this misapprehension plagued McMurtry for his whole career. In Tracy Daugherty’s often absorbing and sometimes vexing new biography, McMurtry bemoans the fact that readers take his characters at face value and misidentify cowboy selfishness as heroism. ‘I don’t think these myths do justice to the richness and fullness of human possibility,’ he said. Traditional gender roles don’t make ‘for the best sort of domestic life’. McMurtry’s own domestic life, in both his childhood and adulthood, suggests a kind, sensitive, ambivalent man in perpetual conflict with responsibility and desire, tradition and contemporary morality.

The child of Texan ranchers, McMurtry grew up with both the anecdotal memory of white settlers’ ‘Old West’ and the living experience of its extinction. Bookish and ambitious, he sought out the urbane and intellectual, but he grew weary of the academic world that claimed him and longed to return home – something he finally did late in life, buying up real estate in Archer City and filling it with used books, to the mingled pride and dismay of the hardscrabble neighbours he had been brought up with. He befriended countercultural icons, most notably Ken Kesey, whose widow, Norma ‘Faye’ Haxby, he later married – but he never really fitted in with them.

Daugherty tells a good anecdote about a nude woman, tripping on LSD, running out of the Merry Pranksters’ bus and into McMurtry’s yard, where she embraced his toddler, mistaking him for her own child. ‘Ma’am, would you please let go?’ McMurtry pleaded. ‘The boy is crying, ma’am.’ Although he was devoted to his son – who became the celebrated singer-songwriter James McMurtry – Larry’s first marriage, to Jo Ballard Scott, was rocky, with multiple affairs on both sides. Still, I don’t think I’ve heard of a person on better terms with his exes; to read of McMurtry’s affairs is to behold a man who thinks of sex primarily as a means of forging lifelong friendships.

The love affairs also suggest that, among the characters who populate the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove (1985), its sequel and its two prequels, McMurtry may have identified most powerfully with Augustus McCrae, the books’ good-humoured and perpetually horny co-protagonist. Then again, in his unwillingness to telegraph his intentions and his solitary single-mindedness, McMurtry also resembles McCrae’s opposite, Woodrow F. Call. ‘McMurtry saw this grim tenacity in his father and in his father’s brothers,’ Daugherty writes, ‘and he felt it growing in him.’ The idea that Gus and Call might reflect conflicting – yet complementary – sides of their author makes reading this quartet of novels more fun, especially when considered alongside Daugherty’s biography.

In these new reprints, the novels comprise about 2500 pages. Lined up beside one another they are about as wide as they are tall. Picador seems to want you to read them in order of narrative chronology, not publication order, and after spending a month in the company of this hefty cube of prose, I agree. Though the two prequels aren’t as good as Lonesome Dove, they serve as emotional and historical ballast for the longer, funnier and more profound original. Taking the four books together offers a reset to readers returning to works they might not remember clearly, or a new start for the uninitiated. The order the books were published in didn’t serve them well: Streets of Laredo (1993), a sequel to Lonesome Dove, must have cast a shadow over the two prequels that arrived fast on its heels, deep within McMurtry’s career phase of rehashing old material. But Dead Man’s Walk (1995) and Comanche Moon (1997) are entertaining and at times excellent, and deserve reassessment. You can feel, in Streets of Laredo, McMurtry having to talk himself into returning to the well, and finally discovering, with those prequels, his old spark.

Gus and Call are introduced in Dead Man’s Walk as adventure-seeking teenagers who join the Texas Rangers, a then nascent, loosely organised armed enforcement agency dedicated to protecting white settlers in the Republic of Texas from Mexican and Native American attacks. A glance at a map from this era – context tells us it’s the 1840s – reveals a United States occupying less than half of its present-day territory, with much of the west consisting of Texas (on the brink of statehood), Mexico and a broad range of Native American tribes. That all this territory would be seized and its occupants conquered within half a century provides a dark subtext to the novel’s tone of winking picaresque, as our bumbling protagonists stagger from one failure to another – soldiers of misfortune. After an initial botched outing in which we are introduced to the prequels’ primary foe, the Comanche chief Buffalo Hump, the two boys fall under the command of ‘Colonel’ Caleb Cobb, a mercenary and former pirate, and are led on a mission, not unlike the historical Texan Santa Fe Expedition, to annex part of Mexico. This second section of the book also introduces us to two important figures in the series: Maggie Tilton, a sex worker (in the parlance of these novels, a ‘whore’) who will later give birth to Call’s son, Newt, and Clara Forsythe, a wisecracking general-store clerk who will serve as Gus’s unrequited love for the next two novels.

Readers who started with Lonesome Dove will be startled by the Gus of Dead Man’s Walk. The wise, good-humoured philosopher of the later book is nowhere to be found: this Gus cares only about getting laid and serves mainly as comic relief. New to the series, I found him insufferable and groaned when I learned, from the back flap of Lonesome Dove, that I’d be with him for many pages to come. Conversely, Call seemed hugely appealing as a young man, a model of self-control and integrity, perpetually annoyed by Gus. Over the course of the books, however, McMurtry slowly develops the friendship between the two, shifting the balance between the characters in the reader’s estimation. Gus is allowed to mature; he learns from his mistakes, and through his sexual exploits comes to appreciate the unfairness of women’s role in the lawless world the characters inhabit. But Call proves rigid and self-denying; his only visit to Maggie will result in the child he will never acknowledge, and the longer he goes without marrying her the less we like him.

The most striking thing about Dead Man’s Walk is the clarity of its view of American conquest and expansion. Every adventure is undertaken by stunted men who consider cruelty and hardship ends in themselves. McMurtry expertly plays on the reader’s sense of dread whenever the Rangers embark on another doomed errand. Authority is situational here, rather than bound by laws or regulations; Caleb Cobb, a self-aggrandising brute with no official military rank, calls himself a colonel, and so is one. Eventually the Rangers and their hangers-on are whittled down to a skeleton crew of ten, who, captured by the Mexican army, are forced to draw black and white beans from a jar to determine which half of them will live and which half will be executed. (The scene is inspired by the historical Black Bean Episode of 1843, in which one in ten members of the failed Texan Mier expedition were chosen for execution by a Mexican colonel.) Gus and Call survive.

Sometimes Dead Man’s Walk suffers from authorial overreach: its bawdy humour wears out its welcome; its third-person point of view ricochets from character to character; it traffics in racial stereotypes and intense depictions of torture; scenes often unfold with redundant detail or pointlessly protracted exchanges of dialogue. For all that, however, it is wildly compelling. By granting Buffalo Hump a point of view, a political morality and a complex family history, McMurtry seems to be responding to complaints that the Native American characters in Lonesome Dove were portrayed as generically brutal warriors. We also get the origin story of Lonesome Dove’s Blue Duck, introduced here as Buffalo Hump’s wayward child, and the extraordinarily talented horse thief Kicking Wolf. McMurtry’s painterly portrayal of the landscape captures the wild emptiness of the American West. In one memorable scene the Rangers encounter ‘thousands of buffalo, browner than the brown water’ and cross the herd in a funny analogue of the novel’s perilous river crossings.

Comanche Moon is everything Dead Man’s Walk is, but more so: its drama is intense, its descriptive prowess magnified, its characters more detailed. But it’s also more redundant, more silly, more brutal and far too long. This time the Rangers are sent by the governor of Texas to capture Kicking Wolf and are put under the command of Captain Inish Scull, a pampered eccentric in possession of a legendarily large horse, Hector. For the first hundred pages or so, Scull’s pomposity is hugely overplayed: he is a figure of fun. When Kicking Wolf steals Hector, however, Scull comes into his own, setting out after his quarry on foot and leaving Gus and Call in charge of the now diverted expedition. Eventually Scull tracks Kicking Wolf to Ahumado, the cruel Mexican bandit who has captured him. Scull frees his nemesis, ends up imprisoned himself and is tortured by Ahumado for the next three hundred pages. He escapes with his life intact but his eyelids cut off. I hate these passages, but I love Scull, who serves as a mouthpiece for many of the series’s themes, particularly the self-justifying nature of war. ‘It’s the quality of the opponent that makes soldiering a thing worth doing,’ he says early in the novel. ‘It ain’t the cause you fight for.’ By the story’s end, afflicted by parched eyes that can never look away from anything, Scull refuses military orders and chooses to write his memoir instead:

‘See this page of paper? It’s blank,’ Scull said. ‘That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir – this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it’s harder than fighting Lee. Why, it’s harder than fighting Napoleon. It requires unremitting attention, which is why I can’t oblige the President, or the generals who sent you here.’

There’s no indication in Daugherty’s biography that McMurtry found writing particularly difficult: one of the biography’s weaknesses, in fact, is that it doesn’t say much about writing at all. You would hope for more detail, perhaps from McMurtry’s notes or correspondence, about the intentions behind these prequels, or about their research and composition. But the two books barely get a mention. Instead there are many pages about the film adaptations of McMurtry’s work and a bewildering amount of information about Peter Bogdanovich’s affair with Cybill Shepherd. I don’t object in principle to knowing all this – the same goes for the biography’s long diversion about Kesey, the Merry Pranksters and 1960s counterculture – but it has been well documented elsewhere. What I wanted was a sense of McMurtry’s process – what he was doing on the most frightening battlefield in the world. Daugherty’s book doesn’t provide it.

Comanche Moon delivers what it needs to. Gus and Call continue to evolve into the canonical characters we encounter in Lonesome Dove. Native American influence over the American West begins to wane. ‘The buffalo won’t return,’ Buffalo Hump tells Kicking Wolf, ‘because they are dead. The whites have killed them. When you go north you will only find their bones.’ Gus is frustrated by ‘the diminished status of the Rangers. For years the Rangers had provided what protection the frontier families had; it was hard, now, to find themselves treated as no better than local constables.’ Blue Duck kills his father; Maggie dies and leaves Call’s son an orphan; Clara marries a dullard. The stage is set at last for Lonesome Dove.

Lonesome Dove​ , of course, is a bittersweet elegy – for the old Western way of life, for the era of American expansion, for the cowboy. It’s also, perhaps too subtly, a critique of those things, and this implied criticism is what saves the book from the sentimentality I long assumed it embraced. The overarching plot is about leaving Texas for Montana, the last frontier; it doesn’t escape the characters’ notice that this retreat from encroaching civilisation has a familiar ring. ‘We’ll be the Indians, if we last another twenty years,’ Gus tells Call during a dispiriting visit to San Antonio, where the Rangers are greeted not as heroes but as scofflaws. ‘The way this place is settling up it’ll be nothing but churches and dry-goods stores before you know it. Next thing you know they’ll have to round up us old rowdies and stick us on a reservation to keep us from scaring the ladies.’ Call isn’t having any of it – it’s a flaw in his character that he can’t see which way the wind is blowing.

This elegiac quality is intensified if you read the prequels first; their other primary effect is to make you pre-emptively angry at Call. We’ve jumped ahead a decade or so; Newt is a teenager, raised near the village of Lonesome Dove, the sleepy border town where the middle-aged Gus and Call have founded the Hat Creek Cattle Company, a small outfit comprising the survivors of Comanche Moon. Newt still hasn’t learned that Call is his father. Into this uneasy idyll rides Jake Spoon, another ex-Ranger, now on the run from a sheriff whose brother he accidentally shot and killed in Arkansas. Spoon has heard tales of fertile land in Montana, and wanderlust infects Call; he wants to round up a herd and drive them north, to found the first cattle ranch north of Yellowstone. Gus, reluctant at first, realises they could stop on the way to visit Clara, who has settled with her husband in Nebraska. Who knows – maybe he’s dead. While the Hat Creek outfit heads to Mexico to rustle up a herd of a couple of thousand cattle, Spoon gets cosy with Lorena, a sex worker who lives above the saloon. Abused, tired and looking for escape, she persuades him to deliver her to San Francisco, after heading north with the rest of the team.

The rustling operation goes off without a hitch – an ominous sign for anyone who has read the prequels – and the Montana journey officially begins a couple of hundred pages in. Meanwhile, July Johnson, the Arkansas sheriff pursuing Spoon, saddles up for his manhunt. The moment he leaves, his unhappy wife, Elmira, heads to the river and jumps on a whiskey boat in search of her ex. The novel alternates between these quests, encountering the usual complement of human violence and the perils of the natural world. Eventually Spoon tires of Lorena and heads to Austin to gamble; she is kidnapped by Blue Duck and endures days of sexual assault and torture before being rescued by Gus and returned to the fold.

Native American writers and scholars have criticised McMurtry’s portrayal of the Comanches in general and Blue Duck in particular. After the comparatively nuanced characters of the prequels – though they themselves are hardly representative of the full spectrum of Indigenous life – contemporary readers will be startled by how little humanity these characters are granted. Blue Duck is more a force of nature than man, a bloodthirsty psychopath, and the sections concerning him are among the least engaging in the book. But this plot turn also provides Lonesome Dove’s most moving storyline: Gus’s efforts to protect Lorena and give her the time and space to heal. The two separate from the rest of the outfit – Lorena can’t bear to be around the other men, some of whom were once her customers – and develop a bond. She comes to love him, but with a desperate intensity inextricable from her unresolved trauma; Gus’s awareness of this holds him back from romantic attachment, even as he comes to love Lorena too. She dreads their eventual visit to Clara, not only because she is a rival for Gus’s affection, but because she can’t bear the thought of ending up alone, exposed, doomed to return to the only profession she knows.

Meanwhile Spoon has joined a band of horse thieves and ends up as an accessory to several grisly murders; when the Hat Creek outfit finds him, they’re forced to hang him. The novel’s plots, and all the surviving characters, join up at Clara’s homestead in Nebraska. As it happens, her husband has been kicked in the head by a horse and is an invalid. There’s some suspense about which of his great loves Gus will choose, but of course he chooses neither, instead accompanying Call on the drive to Montana, while July Johnson stays behind. I’ll avoid spoilers, but suffice it to say the protagonists remain their truest, most vexing selves to the end.

And what about Streets of Laredo? It reads like an afterthought – an entertaining but generic adventure that any characters could have been plugged into. There’s too much expository dialogue, too much pointless backfilling intended to transform this book into a suitable successor to Lonesome Dove. And McMurtry casually kills off two beloved characters in the opening chapter, for no reason other than to have them out of the way. It’s a perfectly fine crime story if you aren’t fully Dove-pilled, but you have my blessing to skip it.