The Kid: a Novel

Starred review from August 22, 2016
Hansen’s (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) fictional treatment of Billy the Kid, the Old West killer, is entertaining and lively, a portrayal of swift and deadly frontier justice in the early 1880s of New Mexico. This is a fictionalized biography of Billy (1859–1881), but Hansen is no apologist for Billy’s cattle rustling, horse stealing, and murderous ways; instead, revealing Billy the Kid for what he really was—a handsome, likable, cold-blooded gunman. Much of the story covers the Lincoln County War between two rival business and political factions, the Murphy-Dolan bunch of owlhoots and the Tunstall-McSween partnership favored by Billy and his unwashed gang of vigilante Regulators. When Tunstall is murdered by a Murphy-Dolan posse, Billy and his saddle pals vow bloody revenge, and start bumping off Murphy-Dolan men, including the crooked county sheriff. When the Kid is not gunning down baddies and others who just get in the way, he is flirting, singing, and dancing with Mexican beauties, and courting Sallie Chisum, the niece of a real-life cattle baron, John Chisum. Both gangs get whittled down by soaking up too much lead, until Billy is convicted of murder, escapes jail after killing his two jailers, and is pursued by tenacious lawman Pat Garrett. Hansen’s colorful description of the New Mexico Territory as a lawless land of lying politicians and thieving businessmen is historically accurate, resulting in an excellent, transportive read. Agent: Peter Matson, Sterling Lord Literistic.

A portrait of the world-famous, short-lived outlaw and the milieu that created his myth.For veteran novelist Hansen (She Loves Me Not: New and Selected Stories, 2012, etc.), Billy the Kid was one part angry gunslinger, one part victim of circumstance: the late-19th-century New Mexico territory was so ill-governed, he argues, that the Kid was no more lawless in many ways than the ostensible lawmen. Indeed, he wasn't born violent: his preferred crime early on was horse thievery, his chief talent was wily escapes, and his first killing was arguably self-defense. But he soon fell in with a gang of fellow thieves and became entangled in the Lincoln County War, in which rival businesses' scrabbling for authority devolved into gunplay. "It was a collective thing, but only Kid Bonney got accused of the murders," the unnamed narrator explains after one gunfight ended, typical of his mythos. The Kid's perceived criminality was a function of who was in charge; the territory's governor, Lew Wallace, promised the Kid a pardon but was too distracted by the epic Christian novel he was writing, Ben-Hur, to protect him from Pat Garrett, another outlaw who wound up wearing a sheriff's badge. Hansen has done his research, which is often to the novel's detriment--the Lincoln County War involved a raft of characters, and he doesn't always do much to color them. The Kid, too, is often a disappointingly vague figure, a handsome scrapper talented at escapes and charming with women but hard to get a bead on. The novel's strength is its understanding of the fluidity of authority in "a West where judgments of legality go to the highest bidder or at the insistence of a gun." By the end of the novel (and Billy's brief life) it's clear he hasn't gotten an entirely fair shake. But the novel reveals more of the territory's character than its occupants'. A somber and surprisingly dry Wild West tale. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.