‘One Ranger Returns’

Shirley Jackson was on the phone outside her home.

It was a call about her husband. She’d gotten these types of calls before, usually from enthusiasts. The wind whistled in the phone and rattled the wind chimes on her porch. She was in Alpine, definitely windy West Texas.

She talked about her husband, Joaquin, and his new book “One Ranger Returns,” a sequel to “One Ranger,” which was his successful memoir.

“We’d have people call,” Shirley Jackson said, recounting what happened after the first book came out. “ ‘I just felt like I needed to call you,’ they said. … It’s just amazing. … They’d send things.”

Things like paintings. Or honey. Molasses came from Arkansas. A Virginia man sent his wife’s homemade moon pies.

And thousands of letters sent one request: More.

More stories. The page count — 299 pages in all — wasn’t enough. Too short, the letters said.

More tales from the bygone outlaws and the smoky-voiced, 6-foot-5 lawman whose life plays out in sepia tone.

So Joaquin Jackson obliged, writing a sequel due out in February.

Joaquin Jackson, 72, retired from the Texas Rangers in 1993 after 36 years in law enforcement and 27 with the elite Rangers. He retired with casework boxes full of lawman tales of bootleggers, murderers, thieves and horseback chases.

He had more stories.

He details the Texas Rangers’ role in the 1966 United Farm Workers strike. He puts the reader on the trail of notorious serial killers Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Elwood Toole. He honors other Texas Rangers who died before him.

“I’d rather talk about other Rangers than myself,” he said. “I tell a pretty good story about other Rangers.”

He tells a pretty good story about himself, too. “One Ranger” is in its ninth printing after all, and his wife called it magical.

Joaquin’s something like John Wayne, Shirley Jackson said, always going to do right and always going to win.

“Yes, it is the darndest thing you ever saw,” she said. “When people go out to book signings, and they want their picture taken — they’re thrilled to meet Joaquin. It’s like we all know one another.”

Teamed up with ghostwriter James L. Haley, the sequel is more in Joaquin’s voice, Haley said. It also has a chapter written by Shirley Jackson and another chapter written by his sons, Don Joaquin and Lance Sterling.

“He’s a natural storyteller,” Haley said. “He would tell some things he wanted to write about. Six months later and he’d tell me the stories again with the very same words and very same pauses. I knew that he had this certain way to get stories told.”