Billy the Kid: The War for Lincoln County
Ryan Coleman’s innovative look at Henry McCarty aka Henry Antrim aka William Bonney aka Billy the Kid, centers on Billy’s part in the war for Lincoln County, New Mexico. This is a complicated, multi-player story beginning with a disputed insurance policy and boiling down to unchecked corruption and greed in a lawless time. In 1877, we meet 17-year-old Billy, as he hooks up briefly with Jesse Evans’s cattle rustling gang, who are in the pay of crooked businessman Lawrence Murphy. John Tunstall, a young rancher from England, arrives in Lincoln to purchase land and cattle. Furthermore, he builds a store in competition with Murphy. Tunstall is an honorable man of unwavering integrity, a man in whom Billy finds newfound family of sorts, and he is temporarily on the right side of the law, even though he is wanted for jailbreak and murder. The challenge to Murphy’s authority is brief, however; Tunstall is shot in cold blood, and Billy and the newly founded Regulators seek revenge for his death, which ends in a shoot-out between opposing factions in July 1878.
Told in short vignettes, the novel is a breathless read, moving rapidly between various parties, up until the long-drawn-out showdown in Lincoln, but connection with the characters eluded me for the most part, and there are far too many secondary characters to keep track of unless you are fully conversant with historical events. I wanted to feel moved by the denouement even with foreknowledge of young Billy’s fate but was not shown much of Billy or who he truly was. Since the novel skips to an epilogue chapter set in 1881, I felt a bit short-changed. However, I warmly recommend this to readers of western frontier fiction for its wealth of detail, and perhaps a more sensitive relaying of the facts which precede the legend.
