Edmund Reid

ut presents the facts and theories and leaves you to decide for yourself. Mind you, as Morgan says, ‘piecing together
information about Thelma Todd’s death is like putting together a five-thousandpiece jigsaw puzzle of the sky at night…’
One things seems fairly certain, she didn’t die accidentally. She committed suicide or she was murdered.
The book is well served by notes, bibliography and index. There’s a good but unexciting selection of images. Overall,
I thoroughly enjoyed Michelle Morgan’s book. Thelma Todd was a star who doesn’t twinkle in the Hollywood firmament
as brightly as it did in the early days of the talkies, but the manner of her death is a real mystery. Highly recommended.
reasonable nine.
The Life and Death of Kid Curry:
Tiger of the Wild Bunch
Gary A. Wilson
Roman and Littlefield, 2015
www.rowman.com
ISBN: 9781442247390
Softcover/ebook; 230pp; biblio; index
Softcover £12.95, Ebook £11.67
“He has not one single redeeming feature. He is the only criminal I know of who does not have
one single good point.” So said William Pinkerton of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. He was talking
about Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan, one of the most vicious outlaws in the American West. Logan was
credited with fifteen killings. Some people say he killed twice that number. Others say it was a more
Back in the early 1970s there was a television series I was fond of called Alias Smith and Jones, which wasn’t the last
western series but feels like it. In case you didn’t see it or haven’t caught the re-runs, it was about two outlaws who
were granted an amnesty, but only if they could go straight for a year. The hitch or catch was that nobody could know
about the deal, which meant that the boys still had a reward on their heads and that sheriffs and bounty hunters would
still be after them. One of the outlaws was called Hannibal Hayes. The other was Jed “Kid” Curry and he was very fast
with a gun, but he was very reluctant to draw.
There never was a Hannibal Hayes, but Kid Curry was real enough. His real name was Harvey Logan and like the TV
character he was fast with his gun, but had no reluctance about pulling the trigger. He was a cold-blooded killer, possibly
the most feared fugitive in America.
From 1894 to 1904 he robbed banks and trains and eluded the posses that rode after him. He rode with his own
gang, with such famed outlaws as Thomas “Black Jack” Ketchum and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In a famous
photograph known as the “Fort Worth Five” of the Wild Bunch in their Sunday best, he stands on the right, his hand
resting on Butch Cassidy’s shoulder.
He was the third son of William Logan and Eliza (nee Johnson). His brothers were James, Henry (Hank), John, and
Lorenzo (Lonie). He also had a sister named Arda. When their mother died all the children (except the eldest boy) went
to live with an aunt in Dodson, Missouri . He moved around a bit and it was when breaking horses on a ranch in Texas
that he met George “Flat Nose” Curry, whose surname he and his brothers adopted. Harvey Logan was a hard worker,
mild-mannered, likable, and loyal, but when he had sufficient money in his pocket he liked to indulge in prostitutes and
alcohol. He wasn’t particularly likeable when drunk.
It was in 1894 that Curry ran across Powell “Pike” Landusky in Jake Harris’s saloon in Chouteau County, Montana.
Landusky drew his gun and fired, but the gun jammed. Curry’s borrowed gun fired and Landusky died. Curry didn’t
believe he’d get a fair trial, so he fled and in due course joined up with Thomas “Black Jack” Ketchum. His life from
then on consisted of riding the outlaw trail, a glamorous adventure in these declining years of the wild west, but which
in reality was a succession of robberies, some killings here and there, and eating a lot of dust as the gang fled posses.
The Life and Death of Kid Curry isn’t the first book to chronicle the career of Kid Curry, but it can probably lay claim
to being the most meticulously researched. It isn’t particularly well-written and there are some typos here and there,
but Wilson manages to hold your interest as he recounts the succession of crimes and escapes. What one really wants
to get to is Curry’s death.
Ripperologist 147 December 2015 66