JESSE JAMES: The Best Writings on the Notorious Outlaw and His Gang.

Edited by Harold Dellinger. The Globe Pequot Press, Guilford, CT., 2007. 258pp. Illustrations. Appendices. Soft-cover. ISBN-13: 978-0-7627-4479-4. $16.95. 

After months of waiting in anticipation of this book, utter disappointment was the first reaction on looking through the list of contents. The book consists, in the main, of extracts from other books, including novels, and, whenever this is done, one can argue about the choices made, be it the books themselves or the chosen extracts. Ideally, such selections should be ‘new’ to most readers but the problem with this compilation is that the majority of people interested in Jesse James will already have many of these books in their collection.

There are, for example, selections from Settle’s classic, Jesse James Was His Name; Jesse James: My Father by Jesse’s son; Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War by T. J. Stiles; Frank and Jesse James: The Story behind the Legend by Ted P. Yeatman; and The Jesse James Northfield Raid: Confessions of the Ninth Man by John Koblas. There are also selections from less reliable books, such as Kit Dalton, Homer Croy, Frank Triplett and Robertus Love.

Similar compilations have been very successful, though Battles and Leaders of the Civil War and Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars were much fatter and ran into multiple volumes. That being said, the selection from Stiles, for example, is not a very good account of the Liberty bank robbery of 1866, omitting, as it does, comments by Stiles on who the perpetrators might have been.