Anything for Billy by Larry McMurtry (1988, Hardcover)

Anything for Billy
by Larry McMurtry
Publisher:  Simon and Schuster
Copyright 1988
Book Club Edition

"The first time I met Billy he came walking out of a cloud.  He had a pistol in each hand and a scared look on his rough face.  The cloud drifted in from the plains earlier in the morning and stopped over the Hidden Mountains, in the country of the Messy Apaches . . . ."

So begins Larry McMurtry's novel about the life and times of Billy Bone, better known as Billy the Kid, legendary outlaw and gunman, who makes his first appearance here as a seventeen-year-old in a dirty black coat, with a reputation for violence that far exceeds his actual ferocity and a charm that may be a more potent weapon than his Colt -- with which he is, to put it mildly, an indifferent marksman . . . .

Billy the Kid's puzzled, erratic and purposeless journey through the real West into Western myth -- Billy kills, when he does, mostly because he or the other fellow is in the wrong place at the wrong time and because Billy can't think of anything else to do -- is the subject of a novel as rich, as firmly centered in time and place, as exciting as McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove.

Surrounding Billy is a cast of characters as real and colorful as anything in Larry McMurtry's fiction:

-- Ben Sippy, a Wetern dime-novel writer who has fled his comfortable home in Philadelphia to try his hand at train robbery -- and who's becomes Billy's companion and the maker of his myth . . . .

-- Joe Lovelady, Billy's friend and a member of his gang, a cowboy and train robber who is everything Billy would like to be and isn't . . . .

-- Katie Garza, Isinglass's beautiful, sharp-shooting daughter, who leads her own gang -- and falls in love with Billy . . . .

-- Mesty-Woolah, a seven-foot-tall, turbaned African, Isinglass's devoted servant, who rides a racing camel and kills with a precision and ferocious enthusiasm that strikes fear in the hearts of the toughest gunmen . . . .

-- Lady Cecily Snow, English aristocrat, ice goddess, botanical artist of genius, polished seductress, sensualist and dead shot . . . .

All these people, and more, are drawn into Billy's brief struggle to make a name for himself as a desperado, their lives touched, changed or ended by Billy the Kid, who will become only in death the mythic figure he aspires to be.

Anything for Billy is Larry McMurtry at his best -- using the material that only he can make fresh, real and utterly convincing:  the violent heart of the American Dream, the familiar national legend of cowboys, Indians, and gunmen, brought back to life and literature.

Condition:  Used.  Hardcover.  Dust cover.  Pages are tanning from age.  Previous owner's "ex-libris" sticker is on the front endpaper.  Dust cover flaps are tanning from age.  Dust cover shows a little edge wear.

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