Wanted Man: The Forgotten Story of an American Outlaw

by Tamsin Spargo

Overview

One September night in 1891 the Wild West went east. A masked man boarded the American Express Special train as it sped through New York State and single-handedly stole a fortune. His name was Oliver Curtis Perry, and he instantly became the country's most wanted man.
While detectives searched in vain, the public and press couldn't get enough of the handsome, charismatic young robber whose physical daring was matched by stories of a troubled childhood and romantic life. Women adored him, boys worshipped him: America was falling in love. Five months later he defied belief by robbing the same train again. This time, after one of the most extraordinary chases in history, he was caught and sentenced to forty-nine years hard labor.
But if the authorities believed they had beaten this celebrity criminal they were badly mistaken. Perry's prison life proved as remarkable as his robberies as he turned escape artist, protestor, hunger-striker, and finally poet in his determination to win his freedom. In Wanted Man, Tamsin Spargo brings this extraordinary portrait of a forgotten man to life once more as she tells his story of adventure and tragedy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781596919099
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	12/15/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Tamsin Spargo was born and raised in Cornwall, England. She is reader in Cultural History and director of the School of Media, Critical and Creative Arts at Liverpool John Moores University. Her previous books include The Writing of John Bunyan and Reading the Past: Literature and History.

Editorial Reviews

An obscure desperado emerges from the dungeon in a lively work of pop history. On September 29, 1891, the American Express Special, bound from Albany, New York, was robbed Wild West style: as the train neared Utica, a gunman removed a door panel, squeezed through, fired a shot, and relieved a surprised clerk of money and jewelry. He then "wriggled, one foot at a time, back through the floor and . . . disappeared without a trace." Suitably annoyed, American Express and the railroad called out the gendarmes, writes British historian Spargo (Liverpool John Moores University), and William Pinkerton himself joined the chase. Yet it was only more than four months later that his pursuers caught up with badman Oliver Curtis Perry-after he tried to rob the same train again. "Why had he done it?" Spargo wonders, and though she never quite answers that question, she paints a thorough portrait of a man who was both quite brilliant-he conducted his own defense at his trial, "playing word-games and chopping logic with the witnesses just like a real lawyer," and was a voracious reader-and quite troubled and troubling, as a succession of wardens and fellow inmates would discover. After years of captivity, Perry blinded himself with a pair of nails, perhaps as a bid to be released from prison. "Far from winning the Governor's sympathy," writes Spargo, "his act condemned him as hopelessly insane." Indeed, and it didn't work. Spargo sometimes lays it on a little thick, as when she recalls pondering whether to swipe a worn image of Perry from the Library of Congress: "Because he was an outlaw and I was an academic, stealing his photograph would have somehow connected us. Leaving it in the folder felt like abetrayal, a confirmation that we were separated by more than time."But that wannabe Etta Place episode and a few other lapses aside: an impressive bit of scholarly detective work, and good fun for true-crime buffs.

Kirkus Reviews