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, 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.