The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones

Hendry Jones isn’t quite Billy the Kid, but he’s “the Kid” all the same, and like Billy’s his story doesn’t take long to tell. He’ll do a fair amount of killing, be done in by an old friend, then get turned into a myth before his body is cold. Years later, one of the Kid’s last living partners in crime, “Doc” Baker—old and less than sober—tries to set the record straight: who killed who and why, and how none of that old craziness is worth swooning over or rehashing. Except that Doc is a bit of a poet despite himself, and in drawing together what he knows and remembers about the Kid’s last days, he winds up saying just about everything that needs to be said about the American West, about kids playing with guns, about boys playing at being men out on the frontier, where they thought no one was watching.

As Will Oldham—whose moniker as a musician, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, was partly inspired by Billy the Kid—notes in his introduction, Hendry Jones served as fodder for a field of artists grappling with masculinity and violence in the West: Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks, Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian are all impossible to imagine without Neider’s Kid having first blazed the trail. A concise and brutal modern masterpiece, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones is one of the few Western novels worthy of the name.

“Charles Neider, you know, spent two and a half years in New Mexico to get the true story of Billy the Kid. And finally he gave it up, went to Monterey and in six weeks wrote what he called The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones. It’s a great book. It should be read.”

—Sam Peckinpah

“Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and films like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven might never have been made without Charles Neider’s unfairly obscure novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones . . . [Neider’s] prose, like Twain’s, takes great joy in the American vernacular. The laconic conversations of his hardened criminals will appeal to fans of Elmore Leonard . . . As in Charles Portis’s True Grit, Neider’s narrator is alternately comic and chilling in his matter-of-factness . . . The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones is neither a kind nor a comforting book, but it is a good one, wry, caustic and wise about the young, doomed American male.”

—Matthew Keeley, The Washington Post

“When Neider’s unsentimental, elegiac tale of a legendary gunslinger’s final days came out in 1956, the then-ubiquitous Western genre was ripe for demythologizing, or for what Will Oldham describes in his excellent foreword as ‘masculinity and violence approached with subtlety and gentility’ . . . Neider’s timeless novel sneaks up on readers with a kind of elliptical genius that simultaneously celebrates and subverts its mythos, anticipating and surpassing many of the revisionist Westerns that were to follow.”

—David Wright, Library Journal, Starred Review

“Neider’s book is better than any other book on the subject of men, horses, and death, except Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry. Not a far-fetched comparison when you consider that Neider—though American-raised—was Odessa-born.”

—Clive Sinclair, The Independent

“Great Westerns are both mythic and defiantly down to earth, as is this powerful ballet of menace.”

—Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

“A tremendous book. It belongs to that massive reassessment you find in mid-century noir, intended for readers who . . . had been force-fed the same myths about who we are and what we were bound to become. Americans, in other words, bloodied victors, who were told they had to act like winners even though victory often doesn’t taste or feel like we think it’s going to. Neider begins to gently and gentlemanly pull apart ways of looking at our Western stories.”

—Will Oldham, from the Foreword

Charles Neider was born in Odessa, in what was then Russia, in 1915. His family emigrated to the United States when he was five years old, moving to Richmond, Virginia. In addition to being a novelist, Neider was an essayist, nature writer, and leading Mark Twain scholar. Over the course of his career, he published numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, edited collections of the work of Twain, Tolstoy, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Washington Irving, and made several trips to the Antarctic. He died in 2001.  

Will Oldham has released more than twenty studio albums, along with EPs, singles, and music for film and television, performing, variously, as himself, Palace Brothers, or Bonnie “Prince” Billy. He is a longtime denizen of Louisville, Kentucky.

The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones • Paperback ISBN: 9781946022905

Aug 5, 2025 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 42

5" x 8.5" • 216 pages • $19.00

eBook ISBN: 9781946022936