Son of the Old West
An epic narrative of
the Old West told through the vivid, outsized life of cowboy, detective,
and chronicler Charlie Siringo
No figure in the Old West lived or
shaped its history more fully than Charlie Siringo, as Nathan Ward reveals in his colorful portrait of this epic era and one of its primary protagonists.
Born in Matagorda, Texas
in 1855, Charlie went on his first cattle drive at age twelve and spent two decades
living his boyhood dream as a cowboy. As the dangerous, lucrative "beeves"
business boomed, Siringo drove longhorn steers north to the burgeoning Midwest
Plains states' cattle and railroad towns, inevitably crossing paths with such
legendary figures as Billy the Kid, Bat Masterson, and Shanghai Pierce. In his
early thirties he joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency's Denver office, using
a variety of aliases to investigate violent labor disputes and infiltrate
outlaw gangs such as Butch Cassidy's train robbing Wild Bunch. As brave as he
was clever, he was often saved by his cowboy training as he traveled to places
the law had not yet reached.
Siringo's
bestselling, landmark 1885 autobiography, A Texas Cowboy, helped
make the lowly cowboy a heroic symbol of the American West. His later
memoir, A Cowboy Detective, influenced early hard-boiled crime
novelists for whom the detective story was really the cowboy story in an urban
setting. Sadly sued into debt by the Pinkertons determined to prevent their
sources and methods from being revealed, Siringo eventually sold his beloved New Mexico
ranch and moved to Los Angeles, where he advised Hollywood filmmakers, and
especially actor William S. Hart, on their early 1920s Westerns, watching the
frontier history he had known first-hand turned into romantic legend on the
screen.
In old age,
Charlie Siringo was called "Ulysses of the Wild West" for the long journey he
took across the western frontier. Son of the Old West brings
him and his legendary world vividly to life.
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"Nathan Ward skillfully brings to life the enigmatic Charlie Siringo, a gypsy-footed cowboy, manhunter, and writer, who helped merge the Wild West of reality with the Wild West of myth."--Michael Wallis, author of Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride
Praise for The Lost Detective:
"As a devoted Hammett aficionado, I've read most books about him and published his daughter's memoir, but learned so much in this captivating examination of the great author's life that I feel compelled to reread his complete works with far deeper understanding than ever before."―Otto Penzler, Editor, The Best American Noir of the Century"The Lost Detective is full of stimulating insight into how the novice writer shaped real-life experience into vital fiction."―The Wall Street Journal"Ward's focus on the origins of Hammett's writing style and his connecting the events of the author's background to the fiction are the highlights of this brief, accessible biography . . . Highly recommended."―Library Journal"As brisk and conversational as a magazine feature, The Lost Detective invites readers not just to explore Hammett's early years in more detail and consider how those formative experiences helped shape his writing career, but also . . . to look at how the Hammett persona was created. And as we Hammett fans know, there are few personas, few writers in 20th-century literature period, more interesting to read about."―Washington Post"A gritty portrait of the 20th century's great pulp poet Dashiell Hammett, who turned his days gumshoeing for the Pinkerton Detective Agency into bawdy and muscular American classics."―O, the Oprah Magazine"Highly entertaining . . . Captures what it feels like to read Hammett's early work and, as Ward says, 'watch a sickly ex-detective in his late twenties, with an eighth-grade education, gradually, improbably, teach himself to write.'"―Boston Globe"Nathan Ward shows that Hammett's innovative style did not, as it may have seemed, spring fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus . . . With deft investigative work, Ward shows how much of Hammett's fiction owed to Pinkerton reports . . . A lively, witty account of how Hammett came to be Hammett--a portrait of the artist, if you will, as a cynical man."―Chicago Tribune"Nathan Ward's book shines a detective's flashlight on Hammett's early development."―Buffalo News"Hardboiled crime novel fans will find Ward's research into what it meant to Hammett to be an actual detective before he wrote about them quite fascinating."―Shelf Awareness"With its sharp focus and strong hook, The Lost Detective is a fascinating read [that] casts Hammett in a new and intriguing light."―Herald Scotland"Beguiling . . . The Lost Detective is a dazzling display of literary detection."―Sydney Morning Herald
