Desperadoes

by Ron Hansen

Book Overview

At age 65, Emmett Dalton, the sole survivor of the infamous Dalton gang makes a living by selling his outrageous adventure stories to Hollywood. Desperadoes details his memories of the murders, bootlegging and thievery he and his posse committed. The grit and excitement of these violent times are expertly evoked by the sharp pen and authentic voice of HarperCollins' bestselling author Ron Hansen.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060976985
• ISBN13: 9780060976989
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Unusually realistic fare

A rough and tumble ride through the last period of the Old West with the Dalton Gang. Most especially poignant is the ending. Life as a bank and train robber was tough, but their deaths were even tougher. Hansen’s realism transports his readers to the streets and allies of Coffeeville so long ago. It all was a wild ride, much better to read of than to have lived through. An early work of a fine novelist.

Hansen's Prose Sparkles

I don't think there's a better writer anywhere than Ron Hansen. His prose is beautiful and compelling. Mariette in Ecstasy was a breathtaking read and this novel is no less a work of art. It's interesting that one reviewer compared this to Lonesome Dove and found it lacking. I read both books for a comparison on fictionalized accounts of the West in graduate school and found Hansen's novel much more compelling. Yes, the characters are cold, cruel. There is almost a sort of wall between them and the reader. That is how Hansen intended to portray them. He did extensive research on geography, history and character and the result is an unromanticized view of who these people were, how they lived and the hurts they inflicted on the world around them. They were not sympathetic. This is not meant to be a sweeping fictional saga of the Wild West that in fact existed for a very brief time however it dominates the public imagination. In terms of pure literary achievement, I think this stands way above anything I've read on that period. Whether you are a history of the West buff or not, I'd recommend this novel just as a study in of creative writing. It's an example of what great writers can achieve.

Vivid and Authentic but Not Fully Engaging

Vivid in sweep and detail, fresh in style and voice, this tale of the Dalton Gang's rise, exploits and final fall, told from the perspective of the lone survivor some forty or so years later, still leaves one feeling a little let down at the end. It's hard to root for the guys who are wantonly killing otherwise innocent folk while rampaging and whoring through the countryside, rustling horses, stealing cattle, and robbing trains and banks. The final shoot out, which puts all but the youngest member of the original Dalton gang down for the count, is exciting and, perhaps, the best part of the book which otherwise tends to drag in some of the earlier sections. But it's not enough to offset the sense of nihilistic aimlessness that pervades much of the story. Though extremely well written (I loved Jansen's capacity to capture the rich detail of this imagined frontier world) the characters simply failed to win me over because of their rather cold heartlessness and often mindless cruelty. I was also a little put off by the first person narration which, we're told, is enriched by what our narrator heard from others after the fact, thus enabling him to be able to recount the most intimate details regarding events he had no part in. But even given this sort of second hand information, it's hard to credit his knowledge of some of the events he recounts. This part of the tale just didn't ring true enough to sustain the illusion of veracity a novel requires. All of this said, the voice perfectly captures its era, or so it seemed to me. One reads this book with the sense that one is seeing the old West (or this part of it, anyway) as it really was and not through some romanticized patina or otherwise distorted lense. Still, it wasn't fully satisfying and, as an effort to give us a demythologized picture of the Western mythos, it's less powerful, less moving than a book like Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove: A Novel (Lonesome Dove). Bob Dalton, Grat Dalton, Emmett and Bill all seem rather thin characters, hard to care about in the way we come to care about Gus MaCrae, Captain Woodrow Call and their assorted hangers-on in McMurtry's book. Even Miss Eugenia Moore, Bob Dalton's risque girlfriend and the real brains of the gang, is only mildly interesting and comes across as a somewhat distant and rather stereotypical Western gun moll type. It's their displaced romanticism, we're told, their near childish love of adventure for its own sake, combined with a lack of underlying moral scruples, that drives the bunch of them into this rather dissolute and pointless life. Or, rather, that's what drives Bob and Eugenia and Emmett. Big, dumb Grat just unites a lack of scruples with pure cussedness while Bill, who seems an intelligent up-and-comer when we first meet him, with grand and admirable ambitions, turns out to lack even the most basic of sentiments in a culture like this, kin loyalty. That the brothers get their start as lawmen (one older brother, Frank, is kill

Cinematic, smell-the-horses writing style

Desperadoes is a fictionalized account of the exploits of the Dalton gang, but it reads like the truth. Ron Hansen breathes life into these characters. Hansen's cinematic style put me in the moment. I could smell the nervous horses as Grat crept among them at night, culling a rancher's string of ponies. I could feel the cold trickle down my neck as Bob tipped back his rain-soaked stetson during a stakeout. Although the Daltons' story is overshadowed by their dreams of greedy glory and instances of thoughtless brutality, as Hansen tells it, they still displayed the occasional burst of honor or gallantry. Emmett, Bob and Grat Dalton became real for me.