LUCKY BILLY

A compelling image of the legendary outlaw’s flawed, fascinating character gradually takes shape in this latest from veteran historical novelist Vernon (Creative Writing/Binghamton Univ.; The Last Canyon, 2001, etc.).

Beginning with a description of the famous “tintype” illustration of teenaged William Bonney (who sometimes toted his hated stepfather’s surname: Antrim), Vernon zeroes in on several key years and episodes in Billy the Kid’s life. We see him first in 1881, when likewise-legendary Sheriff Pat Garrett has captured and jailed the Kid and his fellow mercenaries, who had fought during the New Mexico territory’s notorious Lincoln County War on the side of honorable English landowner John Tunstall against Irish-American cattle barons led by murderous rancher James Dolan. It sounds a mite complicated—and is, for some pages, as the narrative whipsaws backward and forward. The well-meaning Tunstall’s story unfolds in letters to his parents and financial backers; Billy’s quick conversion to crime and violence provides an escape from inhibiting memories of his unhappy boyhood and his beloved mother’s early death; then Billy’s final days take center stage. Vernon’s mastery of period detail and cowboy culture is rich and convincing; for example, we learn that the word “rustler” is a corruption of “wrestler.” But the time shifts create confusion as well as propulsive narrative energy, and it’s a chore sorting out imperfectly differentiated sidekicks, gunslingers and passing strangers. Fortunately, the novel’s shapely arc efficiently establishes Billy’s exigent and defensive morality: “Forget good, I’m after justice…Alls I ever did was shoot a few people.” And there’s real pathos in the working out of his destiny, perfectly encapsulated in the hired gun’s foreknowledge that “his [own] bullet would follow him all his life, taking every turn he took.”

Don’t believe the critical canard that the Wild West tale is dead—this novel proves again that it ain’t even seriously wounded.