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

Fourth Estate, Australia, 2003. Faded spine, otherwise good secondhand condition.

Elmer McCurdy was a hobo and a drunk who, in 1911, after a spree of failed robberies, held up the wrong train and rode away with a haul described as `one of the smallest in the history of train robbery.' Days later a sheriff caught up with him and shot him dead. In death, however, McCurdy accidentally found fame. For the next 66 years his unclaimed body was continuously reinvented for a purient American public. From the sideshows of the Great Patterson Carnival of the 1920s, through to the Laff in the Dark ghost ride of the 1970s, McCurdy's cadaver became big business...