Billy the Kid by Ryan C. Coleman

Published by Blackstone Publishing on October 15, 2024

Was Billy the Kid a people’s revolutionary hero or a murderer? Billy the Kid, a fictionalized account of his life, suggests that he was both.

The novel begins in 1877 when Henry “Kid” Antrium is seventeen. He has already learned a lesson that will govern his life: “No matter a man’s size, or lack thereof, there was one great equalizer: the gun.” Although Henry has mastered the art of shooting, he had been “making his living through thievery, relocating horses from the soldiers at nearby Fort Grant.”

Henry gets on the wrong side of Frank Cahill by breaking out of jail and having the arrogance to stay in Arizona. He saves himself from a lethal beating with his pistol, but Cahill’s death motivates a change of name and location.

In New Mexico, Henry has his first of many confrontations with Buck Morton. That encounter leads him to the Jesse Evans gang. Henry uses his credentials as a horse thief and killer to earn a position with the gang. He announces himself to the world as William H. “Billy” Bonney.

Much of the story takes place in Lincoln County, New Mexico. To the extent that the territory is governed at all, the government is corrupt. L.G. Murphy has made a nice living by selling and renting worthless land that he doesn’t actually own. Murphy enjoys the protection of the territorial governor, a presidential appointee who is under the thumb of Boss Catron, whose bank who holds mortgages on most of the property in New Mexico.

The Evans gang sells stolen horses to Murphy, who then sells them to a nearby Army post. Murphy knows the business is about to fall apart, but he keeps that fact from the partners who buy him out. His underhanded dealings lead to conflicts that become important to Billy’s story. Also important is Billy’s alliance with Alexander and Susan McSween, Murphy’s “sworn enemies.” The disparate power factions will inspire Billy to side with the underdog and kill anyone who seems unfit for a decent life, but what does that say about Billy’s decency?

Billy is clearly on the road to a shootout. The violence that ensues touches the good and bad about equally, although separating the good from the bad is challenging in a lawless territory, where the libertarian principles “might makes right” and “greed is good” control behavior.

We learn biographical details about Billy’s adoptive parents, his separation from his brother and their distant relationship, and a transgression that led to his first jail break and horse theft. These are presumably historically accurate and provide fodder for the way Ryan Coleman shapes Billy’s personality. Billy is motivated to gain wealth so he can give his brother a better life, but he evolves into a killer who has a fearless belief in immortality that inevitably dooms gunslingers.

Billy doesn’t appreciate the local press siding with the powerful forces that control New Mexico, but he’s hardly a paragon of nuanced thought. He occasionally frets about moral issues — particularly the exploitation of Indians, Mexicans, and working people by the wealthy and powerful — but gunslingers are shallow philosophers. Coleman probably gives Billy about as much personality as he actually had, which isn’t much. This isn’t the novel to read if you are looking for deep insights into the life of a gunfighter, although Billy’s life might not have been one that leads to deep insights.

Billy the Kid isn’t a literary achievement — it doesn’t rival Mary Doria Russell’s brilliant retelling of Doc Holliday’s legendary life — but it is nevertheless a fun tale.

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Buckskin by Robert Knott

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on May 7, 2019

More Cole/Hitch westerns have been written by Robert Knott than by Robert B. Parker, who originated the characters. Parker is long dead but his name still appears more prominently on the cover of Buckskin than Knott’s. Go figure. The full title of the novel is Robert B. Parker’s Buckskin, but it really isn’t Robert B. Parker’s. In any event, I don’t know that Parker would be happy to have his name attached to Buckskin.

A dispute between the McCormick brothers and the Baptiste Group over gold mining rights brings Marshal Virgil Cole and Deputy Marshal Everett Hitch to the hills outside of Appaloosa. The McCormicks bought land from Baptiste and discovered gold, leading to the suspicion that the McCormicks knew about the gold before they bought the land. Baptiste finds gold on his adjacent land and both sides are working claims when a hand hired by the McCormicks disappears. Cole investigates but he’s more interested in keeping the lid on a potential feud than in the fate of expendable workers.

Eventually someone with money dies and Cole and Hitch become involved in a murder mystery, a task for which they are not well suited. The story is heavy on dialog along the lines of “You don’t scare me none” and “I aim to make things right.” Some of the dialog, like “Do not make a move or I will drop you,” is stilted; most of it is just clichéd. Quite a bit of the dialog is unimportant drivel that stretches out the story without adding substance to it. None of it leaves the impression that Cole and Hitch have enough collective brainpower to light a candle, much less solve a murder.

A parallel story tells of a murderous young man who is on his way to Appaloosa to find his mother. Along the way he encounters a woman whose husband doesn’t mind her interest in sleeping with him. That story has a vaguely supernatural feel (the woman apparently sees things that other people don’t, including things that have not yet happened) and she gets the young man high on various mind-altering drugs so she can steer him on a journey that will serve her purposes. Since the subplot’s destination is not apparent from the beginning, it holds more interest than the main plot, which essentially has Cole and Hitch shooting bad guys until they shoot the right one.

Hitch and Cole might be the two most boring heroes in the history of westerns. One of them comments about something obvious and the other one invariably agrees. A book that consists largely of dull conversations isn’t what fans expect from westerns. The reveal of the murderer is less than surprising. While the story of the young killer in search of his mother and his manipulation by the woman who drugs him is more interesting, its ending is predictable. Neither story creates tension, a flaw that is deadly in a western.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Give-a-Damn Jones by Bill Pronzini

Published by Tor/Forge Books on May 8, 2018

As much as I love the lyrical descriptions of setting and the complex characterizations found in literary fiction, there is a special place in my heart for storytellers who confront memorable characters with compelling conflicts and resolve their plots without placing an unnecessary word on the page. Not many storytellers have that gift, but the prolific Bill Pronzini is one of them. While Pronzini primarily writes crime fiction, he’s authored a number of westerns, including his most recent, Give-a-Damn Jones.

Owen Hazard, who narrates the first and last chapters in Give-a-Damn Jones, meets Artemas Jones in Butte, where Hazard hopes to find temporary employment as a typesetter before resuming his roaming. Hazard is awestruck; Jones is something of a legend among itinerant typesetters.

When Jones moves on to Box Elder, the story moves with him. Various chapters are narrated by: a ramrod who works for a cantankerous rancher named Elijah Greathouse; the town’s newspaper owner and his son; the town marshal and his deputy; a farmer; a bartender; a saddle maker who is waiting to die at the hand of a newly released prisoner who vowed to kill him; the released prisoner, who is innocent of the crime for which he served time; a painless dentist who sells an elixir and has his own version of a traveling medicine show; and the dentist’s banjo-playing sidekick. And then there’s Greathouse’s daughter, who loves the released prisoner, despite Greathouse’s efforts to keep them apart. Greathouse — who wants to keep all the ranch land in eastern Montana for himself and is trying to drive off settlers and itinerant farmers who have every right to be there — is the novel’s primary villain, although the saddle maker is a close second.

With so many characters, the plot zigs and zags to interesting places before it settles on an ending. Part of the story addresses the conflict between Greathouse and the released prisoner while another involves the conflict between the released prisoner and the saddle maker. Greathouse schemes against the newspaper owner, whose animosity toward Greathouse is evident in frequent editorials. Still another subplot introduces a conflict between the painless dentist and a mean-spirit blacksmith who doesn’t think his tooth extraction was as painless as advertised. Jones stays in the background for much of the story, although he wanders into the plot at opportune moments.

Prozinski doesn’t use his carefully chosen words to describe the big Montana sky or how characters feel about their childhood, but he crafts easily visualized settings and gives each character a distinct personality. Most of his workmanlike prose is used to move the story along its winding path. I always enjoy Prozinski’s novels for exactly that reason: he puts the story first, without neglecting characterization or atmosphere.

Traditional westerns are known for confronting issues of justice and injustice in stark terms, for separating the white hats from the black hats, and Prozinksi furthers that tradition here. While Give-a-Damn Jones isn’t a story of moral ambiguity, and while Jones has the classic humility of a western loner hero, the novel has elements of realism (Greathouse’s daughter isn’t chaste; Jones carouses in bordellos and hates riding horses) that distinguish it from the Westerns of the 1950s. In the end, Give-a-Damn Jones gets my recommendation because Pronzini, as he always does, tells a good story.

RECOMMENDED

The Ballad of Black Bart by Loren D. Estleman

Published by Macmillan/Forge Books on November 14, 2017

The Ballad of Black Bart is based on the celebrated stagecoach robber of the 1870s to 1880s. The novel includes some biographical detail that I presume to be accurate, although Loren Estleman admits to taking “small liberties with fact.” Still, the story is very much an imagined life, placing thoughts in the bandit’s head and recreating a personality that may or may not hew to his actual life. The novel is a literary look at an outlaw who captured the public’s imagination on the strength of two poems and good bit of audacity, the sort of thing that keeps journalists in business, particularly the yellow journalists of the time.

Black Bart was the British-born Charles Boles, although he used the pen name Charles Bolton. The novel follows Bolton to Iowa, where he marries and makes an unsuccessful attempt to live an ordinary life as a farmer, husband, and father. From there Bolton chased the gold rush to California, arriving too late to stake any serious claims. But most of the story addresses Bolton’s alter-ego as Black Bart, the nonviolent (his shotgun was never loaded, or so the novel says) stagecoach robber, who makes his way on aching feet from one robbery to another.

Apart from twice leaving behind a verse for the Wells, Fargo police to find (establishing himself as a po8 in the public imagination), Black Bart was known for his gentlemanly politeness during robberies, and for escaping on foot, leaving behind no trail to follow. As Charles Bolton, he banked his ill-gotten proceeds at Wells, Fargo (where else?) and enjoyed the comforts of fine dining, fine living, and the occasional paid company of women whose fineness the book does not describe.

Bart’s nemesis in the novel is Jim Hume, head of the Wells, Fargo police, who is also described in biographical detail, calling attention to the similarities between the two men. As with Bart, the details are carefully winnowed to explain the shape of Hume’s life without bogging down the narrative. Hume is more a meticulous detective than a gun-slinging lawman, making him a perfect fit to lead Wells, Fargo’s private police department and to track down its most elusiver robber.

The Ballad of Black Bart naturally describes some stagecoach robberies, but the descriptions are brief. The novel is less a western than it is a pair of convincing character sketches. The story is relatively brief and not as meaty as my favorite biographical western, Mary Doria Russell’s Doc, a literary examination of Doc Holliday. But while this book is comparatively slender, Estleman’s decision to trim out all but the essential details assures the vitality of those that remain. My favorite chapter follows Bart as he walks back to the Iowa town where he lived before abandoning his wife and daughters. Bart’s thoughts and actions in a few pages speak volumes about the man he became (as least as imagined by Estleman).

If you’re looking for shootouts between white and black hats, Bart’s empty gun robs the story of traditional western content. If you can be satisfied with a fictionalized examination of an acclaimed bandit and the man who tracked him, told with literary flair, The Ballad of Black Bart is a good choice.

RECOMMENDED

The Hell Bent Kid by Charles O. Locke

First published in 1957; published digitally by Open Road Media on July 7, 2015

The Western Writers of America put The Hell Bent Kid on its list of the 25 best westerns ever written. I’m not sure whether I’ve read 25 westerns in my entire life, so I’m in no position to judge. The Ox-Bow Incident and Pale Horse, Pale Rider remain my favorites, but The Hell Bent Kid is a worthy addition to that list. It is a story of what passes for justice in the Old West, but it focuses upon the changes a young man undergoes as he encounters unremitting violence. I suppose it is a kind of coming of age story, but the young man seems destined to see very little of his adulthood.

Tot Lohman, only 18, is released from custody to work on a ranch. Lohman killed Shorty Boyd in self-defense, but he expects the Boyds to seek revenge and he wants to get it over with so he gets the rancher’s permission to leave. He plans to find his father, a former lawman who is now cooking for some cattle rustlers, but encounters obstacles during that quest, most of them involving the Boyds. From conversations Lohman has along the way, we learn quite a bit about his family, although few of his kin are still alive. It is a harsh land Lohman roams.

Lohman isn’t a typical western hero. His mother was a Quaker and Lohman has inherited her nonviolent nature. Still, he lives in a violent world, he has great skill with a rifle, and he isn’t unwilling to defend himself. He is a simple man doing his best to understand a complex life. What he comes to understand haunts him. Lohman is “pulled this way and that” as he comes to terms with his destiny.

Much of the story is told in Lohman’s sparse voice. Some of the story is revealed in letters or statements composed by other characters. The landscape and the hardscrabble lives of the people who populate it are vividly drawn. Horses have more value than people, reputation is more important than reality. Dialog and strong characterizations, like the setting, are the novel’s strengths. The change in Lohman’s personality -- he is more confident but less innocent in the novel’s final chapters -- is convincing.

Westerns are often tales of morality. Justice is usually the dominant theme. The characters in The Hell Bent Kid debate law-and-order, some believing that justice (in the form of vengeance) should be meted out by those who are wronged, others advocating the more civilized belief that nothing is less just than inflicting punishment without a trial. “But it’s a tough country, big and tough” one of the characters observes, and toughness is not the best environment for nurturing morality.

Still, there are good and decent people in the novel, the kind who understand the true meaning of law-and-order, the kind who strive to bring moral order to a big and tough country. Unfortunately, the good and decent are always at risk; the powerful too often prevail. All of those realities of life are encapsulated in this brief, stirring novel.

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