Some called him a Texas hero. Some called him the Devil himself. But on
one point they all agreed. While he was alive, John Wesley Hardin was
the deadliest man in Texas.
A novel of uncompromising depth and power from western master James
Carlos Blake, called "one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical
American outlaw life" by Entertainment Weekly, The Pistoleer
narrates the life of John Wesley Hardin, exposing the many different
sides of a man who became a legend.
For his forty-two years on this earth, Hardin's name was synonymous with
outlaw. A killer at fifteen, in the next few years he became skilled
enough with his pistols to back down Wild Bill Hickock in the street. By
the time the law caught up with Hardin when he was twenty-five, he had
killed as many as forty men and been shot so many times that, it was
said, he carried a pound of lead in his flesh. In jail he became a
scholar, studying law books until he won himself freedom, and afterwards
he tried to lead an upright life. It was not to be. By the time he was
killed in 1895, Hardin was an anachronism--the last true gunfighter of
the Old West. With each chapter told from a different character's
perspective, The Pistoleer is a reading experience not to be missed.
