Every Version of No Country for Old Men

The story that crossed one great desert

Cormac McCarthy published No Country for Old Men in 2005, though he reportedly wrote it in the 1980s as a screenplay before reconceiving it as prose fiction. It is the only novel in his career that began as a screen idea, which may explain why its sentences carry an almost unnerving cinematic economy: action on the page, dialogue stripped to bone, the interior voice of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell providing the only shelter from the violence outside.

The story is set in 1980 along the Texas-Mexico border. A welder named Llewelyn Moss stumbles onto the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong and takes the cash. A killer named Anton Chigurh follows the money with absolute patience and a philosophy of predetermination that turns murder into something close to liturgy. Bell, an aging lawman, tries to understand what he is witnessing and whether he has the tools to stop it.

McCarthy had already spent a decade as one of America's most serious novelists (Blood Meridian, the Border Trilogy) but No Country reached a wider audience, in part because it arrived alongside the Coen Brothers' film adaptation in 2007. That film won four Academy Awards including Best Picture, and its version of Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, became one of the most discussed screen villains of the century. The novel and the film are in close conversation: the Coens adapted the book with unusual fidelity, and readers moving between the two find two works that sharpen each other rather than compete.

Beyond the novel and the film, the story has not spawned sequels, prequels, remakes, or television spin-offs. There is no graphic novel adaptation, no authorized stage version in wide circulation, no video game. What we have is two versions of the same story, one in prose and one on screen, both very good, and then silence.