No Country for Old Men is a 2005 novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, who had originally written the story as a screenplay.

[1] The story occurs in the vicinity of the Mexico–United States border in 1980 and concerns an illegal drug deal gone awry in the Texas desert back country.

[2] The plot follows the paths of the three characters set in motion by events related to a drug deal gone bad near the Mexican–American border in Terrell County in Texas.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell investigates the crime while trying to protect Moss and his wife, with the aid of other law enforcement agents.

Moss is approached by Wells, who offers to give him protection in exchange for the satchel and tells him his location and number.

Moss remains defiant and calls Carla Jean and tells her that he will meet up with her at a motel in El Paso.

[7] In the July 24, 2005, issue of The New York Times Book Review, the critic and fiction writer Walter Kirn suggests that the novel's plot is "sinister high hokum", but writes admiringly of the prose, describing the author as "a whiz with the joystick, a master-level gamer who changes screens and situations every few pages".

[8] In contrast, literary critic Harold Bloom did not count himself among the admirers of No Country for Old Men, stating that it lacked the quality of McCarthy's best works, particularly Blood Meridian, and compared it to William Faulkner's A Fable.

[10] The novel has received a significant amount of critical attention, for example, Lynnea Chapman King, Rick Wallach and Jim Welsh's edited collection No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film[11] or Raymond Malewitz's "Anything Can Be an Instrument: Misuse Value and Rugged Consumerism in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men.

"[12] In 2007, Joel and Ethan Coen adapted the book into a film, also titled No Country for Old Men, which was met with critical acclaim and box office success.

On January 27, 2008, the film won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.