(Photo by Katie Burkhart on Unsplash)
It began, as it often does, with a newspaper article. In 2010 a collector found a photograph that he believed showed Billy the Kid playing croquet with members of his gang. If true (and the jury is still out, I think) this would have been only the second authenticated photograph of The Kid. Even if it’s not him, I was struck by the fact that this game, which I’d always thought was only played by English people on immaculate lawns, was also popular in nineteenth-century America.
It’s these kinds of unexpected juxtapositions that often spark stories for me. I knew very little about Billy, and even less about American croquet, and I’d also never written a piece of historical fiction before, but I couldn’t get the image out of my head.
So I did some research. There’s not much historical information about croquet in America but it seems it was a reasonably popular game in the 1870s, including among poorer households and Native Americans. I found an interview with an artist who painted images of that period, including one of a Native American holding a croquet mallet. One thing I did discover was that Americans call the croquet hoops ‘wickets’.
There is of course a lot of information about Billy the Kid. His story has been told so many times already, including in the Young Guns film, that I wanted to try and find a different angle. I discovered that he had a younger brother called Joe, and I became interested in that dynamic – what did Joe think of his elder brother? If Billy was ‘the Kid’, what did that make his kid brother?
The story was beginning to come together, but it wasn’t until I found out that Billy had been employed by an English ranch owner that the final piece of the puzzle was in place. It was the murder of this Englishman by a rival gang that precipitated the sequence of bloody events that made Billy infamous (and led to his own death), so what if I set my story before all that kicked off, in the lull before that storm? And how would this upper-middle-class Englishman react to the notion of croquet being played by poor farmers in New Mexico, without a manicured lawn in sight?
It’s Joe’s story, really. It’s about the real kid and his mixed feelings regarding his elder brother, who has already killed a man. What does Joe want to do with his life? Does he want to stay and milk cows on a farm, or go off and lead a potentially much more exhilarating, but risky existence with his brother? This dilemma became the heart of the story.
You can read ‘The Kid’ here.
Ian Critchley 