Desmond Barry: The Chivalry of Crime

By JOHN CONNOR*

In April 1882, according to legend, Jesse James, who was living under the assumed name of Tom Howard, was straightening a picture of his mother on the wall of his family home when Bob Ford, a treacherous member of the James Gang, shot him in the back of the head.

Well, maybe the legend is wrong.

The Chivalry of Crime finds Bob Ford 10 years later in Weaver, a ramshackle, riotous, frontier mining town. He befriends Joshua Beynon, a 15-year-old who idolises Jesse James and the men who rode with him.

When Joshua is wrongfully accused of murder Bob Ford visits him in jail and tells him his version of the Jesse James legend.

Naturally it's biased, but in this brilliant novel Desmond Barry tells it so well that the legend disappears and is replaced by a much better story. Jesse James still has heroic qualities: a rebel against established authority, he is young, handsome, courageous, bold and a natural leader.

In his black hat, spurred boots and long duster coat, he was - and continues to epitomise - the classic Western outlaw: six-gun blazing as he and his men burst out of the bank, mount their rearing horses and gallop out of town in a cloud of dust and a hail of bullets.

There is enough action of this kind in Barry's account to keep any Wild West fan happy. There is, however, another side to the story.

Jesse James learned his trade at the end of the Civil War in the guerrilla band of Bloody Bill Anderson who killed and scalped anyone who even looked like a Yankee. When the war ended, Jesse, denied an amnesty, kept on fighting with the same cold-blooded ruthlessness. He cared nothing for the innocent people maimed and killed during his daring exploits. They were Yankees and in his opinion deserved no sympathy.

Barry's description of the brutal emptiness of Jesse James' life - constantly on the run, unable to trust anyone, death always a gunshot away - takes all the romance out of it. Jesse's end, when and how it came, was inevitable, at least according to Bob Ford.

The Chivalry of Crime creates a world much closer to the truth than the legend. The legend, however, is too powerful. Jesse James will always be the daring hero and Bob Ford, for all Desmond Barry's sympathy and brilliance will always be "the dirty little coward who shot Mr Howard."

Vintage

$26.95

* John Connor is an Auckland writer.