Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw

New York, New York, U.S.A.: Basic Books - A Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2002. First Edition First Printing Stated . Hard Back. Near Fine/Very Good. 5 1/2" x 8 1/2. 312 Pages Indexed. Brown boards with red quarter spine and gold spine lettering. Minor dust jacket edge wear and an unclipped price $25.00. In life Elmer McCurdy was a plumber-cum-miner who jumped a train and drifted west across America on the back of an infectious, turn-of-the-century optimism. He was a drunk too and, soon enough, a failed outlaw. In 1911, after a short spree of failed robberies, he held up the wrong train and rode away with a haul that was described by papers as one of the smallest in the history of train robbery. It wasn't long before a sheriff and his posse caught up with him and shot him dead. At this point McCurdy, like us all, should have slipped into the earth and quietly, from memory. But, in death, he accidentally found fame. From the Joseph Johnson Funeral Home, where the owner propped up McCurdy's preserved corpse and charged a nickel-a-Iook, to the sideshows of the Great Patterson Carnival where he was exhibited as a felled outlaw, McCurdy became big business. In 1928 he was the star attraction in a carnival that accompanied an extraordinary transcontinental running race from Los Angeles to New York. In the thirties and forties, he was reinvented as a prop for a series of Hollywood exploitation films like Dwain (Reefer Madness) Esper's film Narcotic, before winding up painted day-glo orange and hanging by his neck in the Laff in the Dark ghost tunnel in Long Beach, California. It was here, in 1976, during the filming of an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, that Elmer was rescued from his strange journey, a forgotten corpse as light as tinderwood. In his mouth the coroner discovered a green, corroded 1925 penny and a ticket stub that read Louis Sonney's Museum of Crime.