The Chivalry of Crime - Softcover

"A good friend of mine claims the first cannon fired in the American Civil War was made in Merthyr Tydfil, the town where I was born, once iron and coal capital of the world but now a rust town. My father worked on the assembly line at a local factory and my mother as a book-keeper in a local store. I'm 100% working class. We got our first television when I was six years old and I sat in my favorite place, under the huge dining table, to watch Wagon Train, Rawhide and Gunsmoke. The first movie I ever saw in a cinema was The Left Handed Gun, with Paul Newman playing Billy the Kid. Growing up in Merthyr was my Wild West. Friday and Saturday nights, bar-fights would break out and spill out onto the streets. A friend of mine was shot to death in a fight with his neighbor and another died in a police chase after stealing a Kawasaki motorcycle. The Wild Bunch. I saw every Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone movie. I was pretty bright in school so I got into University College London. Since then, I've worked in a Feminist Library and taught English in Italy. I met my wife in Italy and moved to America. Here, I've worked in construction as a laborer and as a book keeper, then I got into the MFA writing program at Columbia. Now, for four months of every year I coordinate English and Computer courses in Tibet. Whatever else I do to engage with the world, I always write."

An ambitious debut re-creating the life and career of postCivil War outlaw Jesse James and asking some serious questions about violence and the American West. There are in fact two narratives here: one about Joshua Beynon, an adolescent who dreams of becoming a ``shootist,'' the other tracing the career of Jesse James. Joshua falls in with Bob Ford, the natty, notorious assassin of James who makes a living by gambling. When Joshua is arrested for the accidental death of his father, Ford helps get him acquitted, and Joshua goes to work as Ford's bodyguard, often carrying out his shady schemes (like doping a favored racehorse so Ford can make a killing by betting against him). The would-be shootist discovers how truly difficult it is to kill a man when he fails to protect Ford from a shotgun-wielding assassin. The core of the story, though, is a careful, vivid, energetic retelling of Jesse James's career as bank- and train-robber. Having served as a Confederate guerrilla and deeply galled by the southern defeat, Jamess ``aching and turbulent soul'' is attracted to crime as a means both to avenge the South and to recapture the exhilaration he felt in action. Barry does a deft job of capturing the courtliness that won James admiration as well as his pathological appetite for violence: he killed often, with zest, and for little cause. Joshua, who begins by believing that men of action have a natural nobility, discovers in his research into James's career (spurred by his own failure as a gunman) that in fact they feel truly alive only when courting extinction. The legends of the gunmen that have fed his imagination turn out to be little more than efforts to excuse the disturbed, amoral behavior of twisted, desperate men. Barry's language has believable period tang, his re-creation of events is precise and convincing, and his perceptionswhile not surprisingare served up with vigor. A gripping narrative and impressive debut. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.