Retired attorney and former ecologist, journal editor, professor, speechwriter, and park ranger Dennis McCarthy chatted with Lynn Moorer about his debut novel about “the most famous outlaw in the world,” The Gospel According to Billy the Kid. McCarthy explains how he chose to divide Billy’s persona into at least two characters—one who is killed by Pat Garrett at the end of the Lincoln County War and one who survives, escapes west, assumes a new identity, and recounts his adventures thirty-three years later in an El Paso bar to a former U.S. Army scout who happens to be the brother of a monk who helped Billy recover from dire illness. In McCarthy’s tale, Billy grows up from being a good-hearted, hot-headed kid to a good-hearted, level-headed adult who eventually looks up Pat Garrett to ask him, among several things, about how he came up with so many untruths in his book, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, which McCarthy characterizes as “a book of fiction.”
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