Elmer Kelton's The Familiar Stranger

Its place in Hewey Calloway

Elmer Kelton's The Familiar Stranger is book 5 in the Hewey Calloway series. It follows Elmer Kelton's The Unlikely Lawman. It is followed by Elmer Kelton's The Blessing. See the full Hewey Calloway reading order.

Hewey Calloway is a footloose, endearingly unambitious cowboy in early-1900s West Texas -- happier drifting from ranch to ranch and outfit to outfit than settling down, in gentle, comic tension with his more responsible younger brother Walter, who wants to marry and farm. Elmer Kelton wrote the first three books over nearly three decades (The Good Old Boys, 1978; The Smiling Country, 1998; Six Bits a Day, 2005), returning to the character intermittently across his career; The Good Old Boys was adapted into a 1995…