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My pick this week for Patti Abbott\'s Forgotten Books is another by pulp writer Frank Gruber, a western this time. OUTLAW, published in 1959, is a retelling of the Jesse James story in so many ways.

Jim Chapman had joined “Bloody” Bill Anderson in 1863 at sixteen, then joined Shelby for the rest of the war, following him to Mexico and fighting in that war for Maximilian’s forces until the man was executed. Now, at twenty, he was headed home to Missouri to see his family and resume the life of a farmer.

On the ride in, he throws an abusive drunk, George Pike, and his friends who were bothering a young woman, off the train. That single event shapes the rest of his life in a number of ways. He’s offered a job, by a man named Alan Vickers, with his detective agency at the new office in Kansas City, which he turns down.

It’s 1867 and the wounds are still fresh. The carpetbaggers from the North are out in full force and control everything, including public offices. Young Jim wants to “surrender” and get his “official” pardon, which he does. Then on the ride out of town, his friend, Clarence Walker, and he are attacked by a Union troop, led by George Pike. Clarence is killed and he’s wounded.

Suddenly he’s an outlaw on the run.

Hooking up with a number of friends, he begins his career as an outlaw and the building of a legend. The first man to rob a bank in broad daylight, the first man to rob a train, he begins a ten year long battle with the Alan Vickers Agency, a man nearly bankrupt by Chapman’s forays against the railroads.

Chapman takes a wife, is pursued from New York City to Chicago to Deadwood, where he meets Wild Bill and Wyatt Earp, and every place in between. Every attempt to settle down is thwarted. Every job is vigorously pursued. Seven men against the hundreds employed by Vickers.

And the legend grows.

He becomes the hero of dime novels. One newspaper even theorizes that there is no such person as Jim Chapman. No pictures of him exist. He robs a bank in Chicago, one in St. Louis the next day, kills a man in Texas the same day. If Chapman did everything attributed to him, he’d have to be a hundred years old.

Such a story can’t end well.

Another fine story by Frank Gruber, one of my favorite authors. You can always depend on a well told tale, whether it be western or mystery, only two of the fields in which he excels.