Ron Hansen

Don’t be fooled by the title. This isn’t just a fictional retelling of a murder, of one of the most infamous celebrity assassinations in United States history. This is the story of two lives that once-upon-a-time intersected, and were forever changed, each by the other, for better or worse. Jesse James: train robber, thief, husband, father, ex-bushwacker and hero to many, at the long and lonely end of his ‘night riding’ ways. Bob Ford: young, impressionable, and desperate to be like show more his childhood hero, the one beloved by so very many, the one and only, Jesse James. Hansen captures a truth in these pages – heroes are human; humans are flawed; and flaws are sometimes as hard to live with as they are hard to live without because, they make us who we are. It’s a poetic journey that will thrust you back into a time when the Civil War was still a fresh wound on the American memory, and justice was often dealt out from a Colt revolver by the man who could draw the quickest. Highly recommended. show less

This is kind of a return by Ron Hansen to what first drew me to his writing, in his historical fiction about Jesse James (The Assassination of Jesse James) and about the Dalton Gang (Desperadoes). I was really happy to see this one in the upcoming fiction lists.

Billy the Kid is mythological, like other old west figures. Hansen doesn’t completely de-mythologize him, but he does bring him down to earth a bit. This kind of fiction does that, maybe a bit ironically, given that it is fiction, show more taking the image and reducing it down to a human scale.

Hansen’s book taught me new things about Billy’s life, and also provoked some thoughts about what makes an outlaw an outlaw.

Billy the Kid’s life was only 21 years long, but he was making his own way very early. He came from an almost cliche broken family. He was born Henry McCarty in 1859, and his father, Michael McCarty, died in the Civil War just a few years after Billy’s birth. His widowed mother Catherine married a man named William Antrim, who became Henry’s stepfather but left the family for a life of a prospecting. In Hansen’s portrayal, Henry seeks out his stepfather after his mother’s death (when he was 15), but Antrim wanted nothing to do with his stepson. Henry wasn’t yet Billy the Kid, and he genuinely seemed to be searching for an identity and a fatherly connection. He didn’t find it with his stepfather.

So at 15, Henry, soon to become “Kid Antrim” or William Bonney or Billy the Kid, was on his own. He was somewhat educated and even considered traditional occupations. But opportunities for hustling a way of life were closer to hand. He seems to have been a natural at gambling and stealing.

He was still a “kid”, especially in appearance — small, even a bit feminine. But he had daring, and he began to develop the kind of charisma that feeds mythology.

Both his charisma and his small stature played into his first killing, a blacksmith named Windy Cahill. What could have been just edgy bantering about prostitutes turned wrong, Cahill asking Billy, “Was it your momma who taught you how to pimp?” A classic over-the-edge attack against a man’s mother, and it got under Billy’s skin. Cahill was much bigger and stronger than Billy, and he bullied him. Billy’s response turned from bravado to weakness (“Stop it! You’re hurting me!”). But Billy got to his gun and shot Windy in the gut.

That one killing got Billy a reputation, but it was the Lincoln County War that looks to have been the point of no return, making “Billy the Kid” an outlaw forever.

John Tunstall was a New Mexico rancher. Billy had stolen horses from Tunstall, and he’d been caught and jailed. Tunstall came to see him, giving him what amounted to a job interview, and hired him to protect his ranch. Along with his ranch, Tunstall owned a mercantile store that had begun to eat into the business of L.G. Murphy & Co, known as “The House.”

The resulting battle, known as the Lincoln County War, pitted Tunstall’s side against the established powers of New Mexico. For Billy, the die seemed to be cast from then on. It’s not so much that he acted any differently than others, on either side. It was a matter of who won the war — the winning side got to exact “justice” and Billy was on the wrong side. From then on he was an outlaw.

The story that Hansen tells doesn’t make Billy bigger than life, but he does show what made him the outlaw that everyone remembers. Billy was not the “worst of the worst” — some of his own gang, especially “Dirty Dave” Rudabaugh, seemed much more brutal. But Billy was the one people listened to and noticed. He had charisma, he had a way with women, and he was smart enough and successful enough that other outlaws, like Rudabaugh, fell in behind him.

A book like this should be a fun read, as well as a book you actually learn something from. I think Hansen accomplishes both. He’s done his homework on Billy the Kid’s life, and he’s filled in the blanks — the thoughts in Billy’s head, the atmosphere of an outlaw’s life in the New Mexico territory of Billy’s time, and he even adds a light touch of dialect to his writing to make the reader feel just a little bit more present in the scene. Good stuff. show less

If I could be a writer I'd want to be Ron Hansen. It's not about the action with him. It's about what events and actions mean in the lives of his characters. It's about significance.

This book is a collection of Hansen's short stories, some republished from an earlier collection, Nebraska, and some newly published. Although I had read Nebraska years ago, I didn't mind at all re-reading those republished stories. Hansen is a writer who bears reading over and over. One in particular, show more Wickedness, is a story that still haunts me with its depictions of lives lost in a sudden freeze during a Nebraska winter. The depictions have the feel of reality, so much so that I left the story believing, rightly or wrongly, that it wasn't fiction -- if fiction, it's the kind of fiction that merits the over-used "truer than fact" label.

Some of these stories strike what to me is a different tone for Hansen -- a farcical tone I haven't appreciated in him before. The title story, She Loves Me Not, is an example, with characters and events spiraling away at a right angle from anything "normal".

I think what makes these stories, and Hansen's writing in general, so engrossing is his ability to disclose the depth of every human life in them. It's as if every character is experienced in the first person. He is telling the autobiographies of each character, and the story is their intersection.

If you haven't read any of Hansen's novels or short stories, this is not a bad place to start. It contains some samples of his historical fiction, in the tough portrayals of life in Nebraska, drawn out in larger form in novels like Desperadoes and The Assassination of Jesse James. It also contains those character studies of desperate or doomed characters, as in A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion. If you read these stories, you'll want to move on to those longer, fuller novels as well. show less

Ron Hansen writes historical novels. This one might be his best. It depicts a famous murder case from 1927, the murder of Albert Snyder by his wife, Ruth, and her lover, Judd Gray. Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray seem like affairs just waiting to happen, both still young but years into marriages that don't make them happy. Their unhappiness is less a matter of failures, I think, than a reflection of both of their unsettledness, a simple need for something different than anything they have.

The show more story is told with its conclusion in hand -- the book begins with the aftermath of the murder and then recounts everything that led up to it. There is no mystery, except the mystery of how two people could put themselves on such a hellbent course to self-destruction. The murder itself is artless, and there is little or no question that they will be caught and convicted. It's as if, for them, the murder itself was the goal, and trying to get away with it a minor detail.

As their relationship develops, Ruth begins to mention the idea of killing her husband, Albert. It's almost an explicit test of love and manhood for Judd -- does he love her enough and is he man enough to kill her husband? But Ruth does seem to fall for Judd, and the more she falls for Judd, the more she despises Albert. Judd, a traveling lingerie salesman, makes his relationship with Ruth a seemingly permanent part of his life, establishing her identity as "Mrs. Gray" at the hotels along his route. They don't have so much plans as dreamlike visions of eliminating Albert and being together.

The murder has been dramatized before, most notably in the movie, Double Indemnity, although the story was changed considerably for that movie. Here what Hansen did was take what was known and fill in the thoughts and conversations of its characters. There's nothing sensational about them -- it's not about wild sex or over-the-top craziness. It's more a matter of falling inexorably and tragically into a course of action that just can't be good for anybody. show less