Edmund Reid

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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
Scholars of the wild west seem agreed that Kid Curry was one of three men who robbed a train near Parachute, Colorado, and were pursued by a posse that one newspaper said numbered 100 men. One of the cowboys shot and wounded one of the robbers, who fell from his horse. Accounts differ as to what happened next. One is that the wounded robber stood up from behind some rocks and was seen to shoot himself through the head, the other is that his body was discovered behind some rocks, it being clear that he’d shot himself through the head. Either way, the robber was dead by his own hand. Furthermore, in due course the body was identified as that of Kid Curry. The date was 9 June 1904. But all is not quite that clear cut. Doubts that it was Kid Curry began to mount until it was decided to exhume the body. Curry had scars on the right wrist and arm and one newspaper reported that these were not visible on the corpse, but another newspaper reported that the body was so badly decomposed that identification was impossible. The Pinkertons were happy to declare that the body was that of Kid Curry. There are quite a lot of reported sightings of Kid Curry by friends and others in the years that followed. It was even claimed that Curry had never been involved in the robbing of that train near Parachute, but that he’d joined Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Argentina. The truth will probably never be known. As said, this book isn’t particularly wellwritten and it was sometimes difficult to sort out who was who and where was where, but I thoroughly enjoyed Gary A Wilson’s account of the life and criminal career of Kid Curry. It is the result of a decades research by Mr Wilson and some of the information here is apparently published for the first time, and Wilson should be congratulated for the final result. All reviews by Paul Begg WANT US TO REVIEW YOUR BOOK? Ripperologist magazine has a circulation list of over 900 readers, each with an interest in Jack the Ripper, Victorian crime and London’s East End. If you are an author or publisher of a forthcoming book and would like to reach our readers, please get in touch at contact@ripperologist.biz Ripperologist 147 December 2015 67
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No. 147 December 2015 Edmund Reid N
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The Anniversary Waltz EDITORIAL by
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So you never obtained a description
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poor mutilated woman turned his bra
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As in other interviews given by Rei
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Edmund Reid at Hampton-on-Sea makin
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This sounds similar to Yuri Gagarin
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just touched to guide-rope expected
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Page 63 and 64: London Fog: A Memoir Christine L Co
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Edmund Reid

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