Growing up in the 1950s, I spent a lot of evenings watching Westerns on the black-and-white television and then playing cowboy and Indians the next day. It was all a game with no connection to reality. Then when I was ten years old, Mom and Dad took my brother and me to the mountains around Ruidoso, New Mexico.
During the trip, we visited Lincoln where Billy the Kid escaped in legend. We walked the streets of the historic frontier town, then visited the Lincoln County Courthouse where the young man made his famous escape. I could not believe I was walking the stairsteps that Billy himself had trod. In the wall at the base of the staircase was the bullet hole said to have been made when he shot Deputy Bell during his last escape. I was wide-eyed and slack-jawed.
The courthouse and the museum artifacts, including one that haunts me to this day (but that’s another story for another day), stoked me interest in Billy the Kid, and after that I read everything I could on the Lincoln County War. Once I started publishing Westerns, I knew I wanted to write a Billy the Kid book one day.
Finally, I got the chance when Bantam approached me about doing a series of three comic Westerns. The Demise of Billy the Kid was published in 1994, the first of what over the ensuing years became eight volumes in The Memoirs of H.H. Lomax. The first four books in that series are now available for $2.99 in Wolfpack Publishing’s re-issue of the Kindle omnibus edition of Bluster’s Last Stand.
Here’s how Demise starts off: “Of all the fellows I met during my years wandering about, not one was more likable than Billy the Kid. Something about the Kid—maybe his squirrel-toothed grin, his big ears, his infectious laugh—won you over. That’s why I’m glad I didn’t kill him when I had the chance. Maybe I should have because he had threatened me, but it was nothing personal, just that we had both taken a fancy to the same señorita.
“I never intended to ride into New Mexico Territory, but I didn’t intend to get hanged, either, and that’s what would’ve happened had I stayed around Leadville, Colorado, after the killing. It seems a lawyer up there, who was no more than a polecat in a fancy suit, took a shotgun blast to the back. He didn’t take it well because he just up and died. But like all skunks his killing raised a stink, and folks figured I was the man who had performed this valuable public service. These folks, a lot of good and decent people when they were sober, decided to throw a necktie party in my honor, but I declined the invitation, thanks to a little help from a friend and a mule I called Flash.”
Demise was the first of four books I did on Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War and a fifth has been percolating in my mind for the last 20 years. Demise was my best work up to that time and my lone disappointment was the book did not receive any kind of writing award, the only book in the series that did not receive recognition from Western Writers of America or the Will Rogers Medallion Awards. Even so, it remains one of my favorite books because of my childhood memories.
Check out the Amazon link if you are interested in my take on Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War at https://www.amazon.com/Blusters-Last-Stand-Complete-Tales-ebook/dp/B082T117PP/
