Desperate Men: The James Gang and the Wild Bunch, by James D. Horan (Bison Books, £17. 95 in UK)
It is no secret that the glamour of the Wild West was largely put there by Zane Grey and Owen Lister and that the reality was grim and tawdry. Jesse James and his brother Frank were not strictly Westerners, but they and their gang were typical of the flotsam left over by the Civil War and its often vicious guerrilla fighters. From Confederate raiders they soon descended into train robbers and bandits with a taste for killing, until whole states lived in fear of them. The shooting (from behind) of Jesse by the brothers Bob and Charley Ford, who did it partly to save their own skins and partly for the reward, finished the power of the gang, though some of its lesser members lived on for years. The Wild Bunch, another much-feared outfit, included Butch Cassidy and the so-called Sundance Kid, Harry Longbaugh, and the Pinkerton Detective Agency played a big role in hunting them down. Such Men as Billy the Kid, by Noel Jacobsen (Bison Books, £13.95 in UK), is an account of the Lincoln County War in the Far West in the 1870s, the deeds (or misdeeds) of the heavily mythologised Billy the Kid, aka William Bonney, aka Henry McCarthy, and his eventual shooting by Sheriff Pat Garrett. Brian Fallon