The True Death of Billy the Kid
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- 5,99 €
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- 5,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
One of the great folk legends of the Wild West, William H. Bonney went from cowboy and rancher's gunslinger to a pure outlaw, forever dodging justice in New Mexico before it was even a state. On the one hand, he was charming, fun-loving, often present at social events, quite appealing to the ladies. Also conversant in Spanish, "Billito" was popular with the Spanish speaking crowd. On the other hand, he had no compunction to coldly kill a man, a sheriff, a deputy—anyone who got in the way of his rustling cattle or horses for an illicit living. He also proved hard to keep in jail once he was caught. It is probably his daring escapes from jails that made him most famous, and this is the main subject of this biography, which traces his story up through his death by a gunshot in the pitch darkness, fired by lawmen obsessed with getting rid of him.
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Geary adds another solid volume to his reliably good A Treasury of Murder series of graphic true crime histories with this chronicle of the blood-soaked final adventure of Henry McCarty, aka William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid. After a brief biography, the story opens with the Kid, age 21, in jail. He wastes no time breaking out and goes on the lam for two months, hiding out with sympathetic friends, tracked all the while by tireless sheriff Pat Garrett. It's the raw stuff of classic Westerns, but Geary approaches it as a detective story, filling his pages with forensic details, theories, maps, and cutaway diagrams. Geary's unmistakable rounded, hatch-marked art evokes an antique look without coming off as stiff; instead, the characters and settings are gently softened and cartoonified. "Now folks will see what it is to be a bad man," the Kid reportedly crowed during his escape, but Geary coaxes out the human side of the larger-than-life figure: the troubled criminal, the angry young man, the charismatic antihero loved by the locals (including local women). While the Kid has been treated to ample renderings in film, television, and prose, Geary makes his story feel fresh.
